Small Worlds

by Jonathan Levy

This collection contains ten short concert pieces for eight solos, one duet and a trio, with mimes. They are set, in time, from the fifteenth century to the day before yesterday and the speakers differ in nationality, social class and formality of language. What they have in common is that each piece is an entrée into a particular world at a turning point, or at some revelatory point in the speaker’s life—a single moment which implies or reveals the unspoken, often unrealized, complexities of that life.These ten pieces were written to be performed as chamber music and the actors who perform them should, like any performers of chamber music, pay close attention to tempo, detail and aim, in their overall effect, to be theatrical without being stagey. The pieces are, as their title indicates, “Small Worlds”. They are meant to provide a small opening for a short time through which a character reveals more of his life than he intended, or, indeed, that he often knows himself.

39 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 25, 2012