EVERYTHING SHE TRANSLATED ~ A Play in Three Acts
By B Otto Will and Brrd Roots
---
CHARACTERS
FROANSIOS - 30s-60s (ages throughout). The transformer. Contains swan, tiger, salamander, whale, owl, cat. Translator of the untranslatable.
THE NARRATOR - Any age. Froansios's witness, biographer, failed chronicler. Trying to capture water in words.
THE STARLING - A puppet/actor. Speaks seventeen pre-human languages. Froansios's familiar and oracle.
GA HOLLY SEE OH - 20s-40s. Performance artist living in a heart-shaped shipping container. Paints impossible things.
YAN SEGAL - 30s-40s. Flood survivor carrying his drowned partner's absence like weather.
ANYA - 40s-50s. Refugee who moves like winter. Carries holy water and pressed roses.
KAI - 20s. Meteorologist who forecasts emotional weather. Hair defies physics.
MARCUS - Yan's drowned partner. Appears in water, in memory, in objects.
THE THREE CHILDREN - Froansios's offspring. Can be played by same actors at different ages.
THE COUNCIL - Town officials. Can be puppets or chorus.
THE WORKSHOP CHORUS - The inherited tools, the walls, the sawdust. Everything that remembers.
---
SETTING
A fluid space that transforms with Froansios. Multiple levels and areas:
CENTER: The workshop/kitchen—table that breathes, chairs that float
UPPER LEVEL: The apartment above the bakery, herbs turning toward movement
STAGE LEFT: The council chamber/public space
STAGE RIGHT: Ga Holly's heart-container studio
DOWNSTAGE: The highway, the flood zone, the spaces between
Time: Thirty-seven years collapsed into evening. Past and present occur simultaneously.
---
ACT ONE: THE TRANSLATIONS BEGIN
Scene 1: The Bird's Dictionary
(Lights up on FROANSIOS, young, in the workshop. THE STARLING perches on her shoulder. THE NARRATOR watches from shadows.)
NARRATOR: (To audience) I should have written this down sooner. Before the words started changing shape. Before I understood that some stories can only be told backwards, or sideways, or in languages that don't use sound.
STARLING: (In clicks and whistles)
FROANSIOS: (Nodding, translating) He says the wood remembers the storm that bent the tree. This plank here—(touches lumber)—hurricane of 1987. The tree spent three days horizontal, then decided to grow sideways. That's why the grain spirals.
NARRATOR: How do you understand him?
FROANSIOS: I don't understand. I translate. Different thing entirely. Understanding requires distance. Translation requires becoming.
(The STARLING whispers. FROANSIOS's expression changes.)
FROANSIOS: He remembers being a dinosaur. Says mammals are just a phase the earth is going through.
NARRATOR: That's impossible.
FROANSIOS: (Working wood while talking) So is democracy. So is love lasting. So is yeast knowing how to make bread rise. Yet here we are, eating impossible sandwiches in an impossible democracy, impossibly loving people who'll impossibly leave.
(The workshop tools begin humming—a low resonance.)
WORKSHOP CHORUS: We remember your father's hands
We remember your grandfather's grandfather's hands
Each nail holds a decision
Each board, a future that won't happen now
FROANSIOS: (To the tools) Not yet. We're just beginning.
---
Scene 2: The Swan's Kitchen
(The space transforms. Apartment above bakery. Morning. The smell of bread (actual bread baking if possible). FROANSIOS moves like water.)
FROANSIOS: (Kneading dough) Descartes was an idiot. "I think therefore I am?"
(Each fold of dough punctuates her argument)
FROANSIOS: Fold: My cells replace themselves without asking permission. Fold: My dreams reorganize my memories while I sleep. Fold: My heart beats seventy times a minute without consulting my consciousness. Fold: I transform, therefore I continue.
NARRATOR: The herbs on your windowsill—
FROANSIOS: Turn toward me, yes. Everything does, if you move correctly. Not dominance—recognition. They see the green in me.
(GA HOLLY SEE OH enters, covered in paint that shifts color in the light.)
GA HOLLY: I dreamed you as a tiger last night. You were eating the city council.
FROANSIOS: Only metaphorically. They'd taste like disappointment and mothballs.
GA HOLLY: I need to paint you. Today. Before you change again.
FROANSIOS: I'm always changing. That's the point. Paint the changing.
GA HOLLY: (Setting up easel) Hold still.
FROANSIOS: I don't know how.
(She continues kneading. GA HOLLY begins painting. The STARLING watches.)
NARRATOR: (To audience) This is before. Before the floods, the sickness, the council fights. When transformation was still theoretical. When we thought becoming was a choice rather than a requirement.
---
Scene 3: The Tiger Emerges
(City council chamber. FROANSIOS enters. Her posture literally changes in the doorway—spine elongating. THE COUNCIL cowers.)
COUNCIL MEMBER 1: Ms. Volkov, you don't have the floor—
FROANSIOS: (Voice cutting glass) The floor has me. The floor remembers every lie told in this room. Want to hear them?
(She stamps. The floor responds with echoes of old promises.)
FLOOR/WORKSHOP CHORUS: New schools new schools new schools
Living wages living wages living
Affordable housing affordable
All lies all lies all echo echo echo
COUNCIL MEMBER 2: That's... that's just acoustics.
FROANSIOS: Everything's just something until you translate it correctly. You're planning to demolish the low-income housing. I'm translating that into: you're planning to eat the poor.
COUNCIL MEMBER 1: That's inflammatory—
FROANSIOS: (Striding forward, tiger-like) Fire is just fast oxygen. Inflammation is just the body saying no. I'm saying no with my whole body. Watch.
(She begins to growl—low, building. The lights flicker. Windows rattle.)
COUNCIL MEMBER 2: Someone call security—
FROANSIOS: I am security. I'm securing the future from your small thinking. Your cages made of fear and Roberts Rules of Order.
(She produces chains, begins locking herself to the podium.)
FROANSIOS: I'll stay here until you remember you're human. However long that takes.
---
Scene 4: The Salamander Highway
(Highway 49. Night. FROANSIOS lies on cooling asphalt, translucent, damp. YAN SEGAL enters, carrying waterlogged photo albums.)
YAN: (To the albums) I saved you. Marcus, I saved them.
MARCUS'S VOICE: (From the water damage) You let me drown for paper.
YAN: They were our memories—
MARCUS'S VOICE: I was your present.
(FROANSIOS stirs, salamander-slow.)
FROANSIOS: The asphalt remembers every car that thought it was going somewhere important.
YAN: (Startled) I thought you were roadkill.
FROANSIOS: I am. Killed by the road to progress. Resurrecting as something smaller, damper, closer to the earth. (She moves amphibiously) You smell like flood.
YAN: Everything does now. Three counties of water. Our house is in Kentucky. And Ohio. And Indiana. Pieces of kitchen everywhere.
FROANSIOS: (Touching the albums) These photos are drowning still. Listen.
(They hold the albums to their ears.)
MARCUS'S VOICE: (Gurgling) Yan... Yan... why the albums... I can't swim in paper...
YAN: (Dropping them) He won't stop drowning.
FROANSIOS: The dead don't. They just get quieter. Come. I know someone.
---
Scene 5: The Refugee's Medicine
(ANYA's space—filled with bottles of water, pressed roses, books in unreadable languages.)
ANYA: (To Froansios and Yan) Drink.
YAN: What is it?
ANYA: Water that remembers being ice, being cloud, being the sea where life started. Blessed by a saint whose name only the dying can pronounce.
(They drink. The stage fills with the sound of water—all water, everywhere.)
FROANSIOS: (Gasping) I can taste the flood.
YAN: I can taste Marcus.
ANYA: We all drink the same water eventually. It cycles through bodies, clouds, rivers, tea, tears. This bottle has been through seventeen countries. Carried by people who needed to remember water could be safe.
STARLING: (Translating through Froansios) The bird says water has no nationality but remembers every border it's crossed.
ANYA: In my country, before it stopped being my country, we said: the wounded heal the wounded best. They know where not to touch.
(She doesn't touch them. They sit in healing distance.)
---
ACT TWO: THE GREAT BECOMING
Scene 1: The Whale's Patience
(FROANSIOS's bedroom. She's enormous with illness, breathing oceanically. KAI sets up weather equipment.)
KAI: (Cheerfully) Today's internal forecast: High pressure system in your spine, causing localized suffering with a chance of enlightenment.
FROANSIOS: (Whalelike, slow) My bones are turning to coral. I can feel the small fish of my thoughts swimming through them.
NARRATOR: (Singing grandmother's songs)
Sleep now, dream now
The peas are shelled
The summer's held
In mason jars in the basement
FROANSIOS: Whale hearts are the size of small cars. All that space for blood. For love. For failure.
KAI: (Checking instruments) Your barometric pressure is impossible. You're creating weather that doesn't exist yet.
FROANSIOS: I'm practicing being ocean. Oceans don't feel pain—they become it, then become something else.
(The stage fills with whale song—subsonic, felt more than heard.)
THE THREE CHILDREN: (Entering at different ages)
CHILD 1: Mama, why are you so big?
CHILD 2: She's containing us.
CHILD 3: Even though we're outside her now.
FROANSIOS: I'm growing a heart large enough to let you leave.
---
Scene 2: Milking the Stars
(Flashback/present simultaneously. Young FROANSIOS in a field that's part memory, part dream.)
YOUNG FROANSIOS: (Making pulling motions at the sky) Come on, Polaris. Don't be stingy.
(Silver liquid appears in her hands.)
NARRATOR: (To audience) She insists this is real. That stars give different milk.
YOUNG FROANSIOS: Polaris—thick like cream. Good for when you're lost. But too much and you can't change direction.
(Pull. Gold liquid.)
Venus—sweet, thin, spoils quickly. Love milk. Has to be used immediately or it curdles into resentment.
(Pull. Blue liquid.)
The Pleiades—community milk. Must milk all seven sisters at once or it becomes loneliness.
CURRENT FROANSIOS: (From her sickbed) I saved jars of it. In my parents' basement. For the lean years.
KAI: Did it work?
FROANSIOS: I'm still here, aren't I? Still transforming. That's what star-milk does—keeps you changing when everything wants you to solidify.
---
Scene 3: The Performance of Dissolution
(GA HOLLY's studio. Canvases everywhere showing FROANSIOS in every form.)
GA HOLLY: (Painting frantically) You're dissolving faster than I can document.
FROANSIOS: (Now owl-like, nocturnal) Document the dissolution then.
GA HOLLY: I am. Look.
(Reveals a painting: FROANSIOS as every animal simultaneously.)
FROANSIOS: That's impossible.
GA HOLLY: So are you. Yet here you are, impossibly existing. I mixed the paint with your molted skins, your lost hair, the water you coughed up when you were whale.
FROANSIOS: You're painting with my discarded selves.
GA HOLLY: What else would I use? Oil paint is just dead plants. Everything's made of something that was something else.
YAN: (Entering) The flood's returning.
NARRATOR: That's impossible. Floods don't return.
YAN: This one does. Every night. In my lungs. Marcus comes back, asks why paper was worth more than breathing.
FROANSIOS: (Owl-wise) Women must remain partially unfaithful to their children. Men must remain partially unfaithful to their ghosts. Otherwise we become the thing we're faithful to.
---
Scene 4: The Council's Destruction
(The council chamber. FROANSIOS enters in full tiger form. The COUNCIL has become actual puppets.)
PUPPET COUNCIL: (In unison) Order. Order. Order.
FROANSIOS: Disorder. Chaos. Change.
PUPPET COUNCIL: You're out of order.
FROANSIOS: I'm out of everything. Out of patience, time, human form. Watch me become what you fear most—someone who doesn't need your permission.
(She roars. The puppets fall apart, revealing frightened humans inside.)
COUNCIL MEMBER 1: (Human now) Please—we're just trying to maintain—
FROANSIOS: Maintain what? The lie that things don't change? That we're not all flooding, drying, dying, being born? I translate your maintaining into death.
GA HOLLY: (Entering with a massive canvas) I painted tomorrow's council meeting.
(The painting shows empty chairs, vines growing through them.)
COUNCIL MEMBER 2: That won't happen.
FROANSIOS: It's already happening. The vines are in your basement. Growing up through the foundation. By spring, this building will be forest.
WORKSHOP CHORUS: We remember when we were trees
Before the cutting
Before the shaping
We're returning returning returning
---
Scene 5: The Mother's Teaching
(FROANSIOS with her THREE CHILDREN, teaching them to transform.)
FROANSIOS: First, you must understand you're not one thing.
CHILD 1: But I have one name.
FROANSIOS: Names are conveniences. Like clothes. You change them when they don't fit.
CHILD 2: What if we don't want to change?
FROANSIOS: Then you're already dead. Everything living changes. Watch.
(She transforms slowly—swan to tiger to salamander.)
CHILD 3: Does it hurt?
FROANSIOS: Like birth. Like death. Like falling in love. Like waking up. Yes. It hurts like becoming costs.
THE THREE CHILDREN: Teach us.
FROANSIOS: I can't. I can only show you it's possible. Your transformations will be different. You might become wind, or Wednesday, or the space between words. Don't become me. Become what I couldn't imagine.
---
ACT THREE: EVERYTHING TRANSLATED
Scene 1: The Great Flood Returns
(The stage floods with actual water if possible, or projection. YAN stands in it. MARCUS appears.)
MARCUS: You let me drown.
YAN: I've been drowning since.
MARCUS: Good. Now we're even.
YAN: The water won't leave. It's in everything. Coffee tastes like flood. Bread tastes like your last breath.
MARCUS: I'm in the water cycle now. You'll drink me eventually. Breathe me in as rain.
FROANSIOS: (Entering as salamander) The water's rising.
YAN: It never stopped.
FROANSIOS: Then we become aquatic. Look—gills.
(She shows gill slits forming.)
YAN: That's impossible.
FROANSIOS: So was the flood. So was losing everything. Yet here we are, impossibly swimming in our own living rooms.
(ANYA enters with her bottles.)
ANYA: This water remembers being holy. Before the flood. When it was just rain.
(She pours it into the flood. The water clears.)
MARCUS: (Fading) Yan... let go...
YAN: (Finally) Go, go, go away. Make room for what comes next.
(MARCUS disappears. The water recedes.)
---
Scene 2: The Star-Milk Inheritance
(FROANSIOS's children discover the mason jars in the basement.)
CHILD 1: They're glowing.
CHILD 2: Blue. Like deep water. Like dreams.
CHILD 3: Should we drink it?
FROANSIOS: (Entering, aged, owl-formed) That's star-milk. From when I was young and believed in saving things.
CHILD 1: Does it work?
FROANSIOS: Open one.
(They open a jar. Light pours out—constellation patterns on the walls.)
CHILD 2: It's warm.
CHILD 3: It tastes like... like...
FROANSIOS: Like possibility. That's Polaris milk. Direction. Drink carefully—too much and you can't change course.
THE THREE CHILDREN: (Drinking) We can see... everything...
FROANSIOS: That's the gift and curse. Seeing all possibilities. Now choose one. But know you can choose again tomorrow.
---
Scene 3: The Cat's Nine Hundred Lives
(FROANSIOS is dying. Everyone gathers. She transforms rapidly through all forms.)
NARRATOR: She's cycling through everything.
GA HOLLY: (Painting frantically) I can't keep up.
KAI: (Reading instruments) She's creating impossible weather. It's raining upward. Snowing fire. The barometric pressure says she's becoming everything at once.
FROANSIOS: (All forms simultaneously) I was... I am... I will be...
STARLING: (Translating) She says she's been a cat all along. Nine hundred lives. This is just one ending.
ANYA: In my country, we say death is translation into a language only the dead speak.
YAN: What language?
ANYA: Silence. But the kind that's full, not empty.
(FROANSIOS purrs—a sound that fills the theater.)
FROANSIOS: (To NARRATOR) Write this down. Finally. Write it all down.
NARRATOR: I don't know how.
FROANSIOS: Wrong. Wrongly. Backwards. In languages that don't exist. Just... translate what you can't understand.
(She dies. Becomes light particles that drift over audience.)
---
Scene 4: The Workshop Remembers
(The workshop. THE THREE CHILDREN, now adults, running it.)
ADULT CHILD 1: (Making protest furniture) She taught us wood remembers.
ADULT CHILD 2: (Building tiny homes) She taught us shelter is shelter, size is perspective.
ADULT CHILD 3: (Writing) She taught us memory is the only inheritance that matters.
WORKSHOP CHORUS: We remember her hands
Her father's hands
The tree's rings
The storm's bending
Everything remembers
GA HOLLY: (Entering with final painting) I painted her last form.
(Reveals empty canvas.)
YAN: It's blank.
GA HOLLY: No. She's became the space between visible and invisible. The translation between being and not being. Look closer.
(They look. Slowly, shapes appear—all animals, all forms, all possibilities.)
NARRATOR: (To audience) I'm still writing her down. Getting it wrong. Which might be the only way to get it right.
---
Scene 5: Everything Continues
(Full cast on stage. THE STARLING speaks directly to audience for the first time.)
STARLING: (In human language) She translated me. Now I translate her. She was swan in kitchen, tiger in public, salamander in suffering, whale in patience, owl in wisdom, cat in death. She was the space between species. The moment when transformation happens. The impossible possibility of being everything.
ALL: (Except NARRATOR) Go, go, go away. Make room for what comes next.
NARRATOR: What comes next?
FROANSIOS'S VOICE: (From everywhere) Everything. Nothing. The space between. Translation.
(Lights fade on NARRATOR writing, still trying to capture water.)
END
---
PRODUCTION NOTES
Transformations
- Use physical theater, masks, puppetry, and projection
- Transformations should feel visceral, not magical—biology as poetry
- The animal forms are both literal and emotional states
Water
- The flood should feel present throughout—dripping, pooling, rising
- Marcus appears in water reflections, steam, any moisture
The Workshop Chorus
- The tools and walls speak as witnesses—use live voice or prerecorded soundscape
- They remember everything—every project, every hand that held them
Star-Milk
- Use phosphorescent liquids, projection, or lights
- Each star's milk should have distinct color and consistency
The Starling
- Can be puppet, actor in costume, or projection
- Its languages should be musical, clicking, impossible
- Only Froansios understands until the end
Time
- Past and present occur simultaneously
- Use lighting to show memory vs. present
- Characters age and de-age fluidly
Final Image
- Froansios's dissolution into light particles should encompass the entire theater
- The audience should feel they're inside the transformation
- End with the sound of pencil on paper—the narrator still writing
---
"Everything She Translated" premiered at [Theater] on [Date]. The production included a pre-show where audience members could write their own transformations on cards that became part of the set. Runtime: 2 hours 30 minutes with one intermission.
Note: This play requires a theater willing to flood, burn (safely), and transform along with the characters. The space itself is a character. Treat it accordingly.
