Two Small Bodies

by Neal Bell

Estranged from her husband, and working as a cocktail waitress, Eileen has perhaps neglected her two small children whose disappearance has brought about a visit by the tough-talking Lt. Brann. Obviously suspicious, the detective plays a cat-and-mouse game with Eileen, suggesting that the children may have been kidnapped; or perhaps gruesomely murdered; or perhaps are safely with their father; or may have become victims of the dissolute life style which he attributes to Eileen. Comprised of a series of contiguous, interconnected scenes, the play pursues the growing love/hate relationship which begins to build ominously between the tired, conservative-minded police officer, and the voluptuous woman who both intrigues and repels him. He drops by at odd hours of the day and night; he is sometimes sympathetic and confiding; sometimes hard and abrasive; until, at last, he drives her to confess. Then, in a startling turnabout, the detective tells Eileen that the bodies of the children have been found and the vagrant who killed them arrested but his revelation only underscores the grief which the mother, for all her worldliness, will carry with her always, and the sexual confusion which their encounter has aroused in the hard-driving, relentlessly moral police officer.

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Neal Bell is an American playwright and screenwriter. Bell has written such plays as the thriller Two Small Bodies, as well as co-writing the screenplay for the Two Small Bodies film adaptation.

Bell has written other plays such as On the Bum, Somewhere in the Pacific, Monster, Operation Midnight Climax, Therese Raquin and Spatter Pattern (Or, How I Got Away With It).