A monologue from the play by Leonid Andreyev (Adapted by Walter Wykes)
NOTE: This monologue is reprinted with the author’s permission. All inquiries should be directed to the author at: sandmaster@aol.com
WOMAN
Something like this happens once in what—a hundred years? A thousand? Do you really expect me to stay here and change diapers?
Yes! I want to come with you! [Pause.] Don’t be angry. Please. But tonight … when the sounds began … when the hammers and the axes began to fall …
you were still asleep … and I suddenly understood that my husband, my children—all these things are temporary….
I love you very much … [She clasps his hand.] … but can’t you hear how they are hammering out there?!
They are pounding away, and something seems to be falling, breaking apart, some kind of wall seems to be coming down—
the earth is changing—and it is so spacious and wide and free! It’s night now, but it seems to me the sun is shining!
I’m thirty years old and already I’m like an old woman, I know it, you can see it in my face. And yet … tonight I feel like I’m only seventeen,
and that I’ve fallen in love for the first time—a great, boundless love that lights up the sky! They’re pounding,
and it sounds to me like music, like singing of which I’ve always dreamt—all my life—and I didn’t know who it was that I loved with such a boundless love,
which made me feel like crying and laughing and singing! This is freedom! Don’t deny me my place—let me die with those who are working out there,
who are calling in the future so bravely and rousing the dead past from its grave!
