From our Archives: The Cashew by Mary Ruefle
Associate Editor Heath Joseph Wooten on today’s “From our Archives” Bonus Content: I first heard Mary Ruefle read in 2018 in small chapel in Oxford, Mississippi. With absolute authority, she read little poems and reflections written on—did I invent this?—napkins and receipts and the moment itself, and from there, I’m quite sure neither of us bothered looking back. Here, in “The Cashew,” we enter into a scene already begun: a play—any play—, in which we are asked to reconcile the typical with the extraordinary, and the extraordinary with the compulsory. Reading Ruefle—here and always—, I see a vision of the world as at once small and endlessly, breathlessly complicated. (Issue 40, 2019)
the cashew
Throughout the play, a man or woman is sleeping on a divan set to the side of the stage (where it will not interfere with the comings and goings of the actors). Ideally, the sleeper is curled in the shape of a cashew. At no particular moment, but once during each act, the sleeper half-rises and, as if from a window of lucidity, says “I’m only trying to stay calm. This “character,: whoever he is (a stranger thrust into the circumstances Unfolding around him? the playwright? Shakespeare? Brecht?) then resumes his peaceful sleep.
These stage directions may be introduced into any play, but if they are introduced into all plays, it is certain or doubtful that the course of theatre has been changed?
Keep your essay to a minimum of five hundred words.
Mary Ruefle is the author of My Private Property (Wave Books 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (2006). She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
