HIGH DIVE

by Ayvazian, Leslie

An American woman about to turn fifty is standing on a high dive at a pool in a hotel in Greece. She is on vacation with her husband and eleven-year-old son. Her son has requested that she jump off the board. She, being terrified of heights, has managed to climb to the platform and now clings to the railings as she tries to will herself to leap into the blue Greek air and down into the water of the pool. As she stands on the board, she considers her life. She begins with the experience of her vacations themselves. At this point, she and her family are in Greece exactly at the moment that CNN has announced Athens as the hottest city in the world, one degree hotter than Cairo. Other vacations have included cold snaps in Florida that caused the fish to freeze in the ocean; the honeymoon in Hawaii during a hurricane season; waking up in Mexico to an 8.1 earthquake and so on. She includes other adventures as well: time spent in VISTA; work in dinner theatre with Dorothy Lamour and Mickey Rooney; an appearance on the $25,000 Pyramid show with Peter Lawford as her partner; the walk across a rope bridge in the French Alps at dusk, etc. The key ingredient to this one-woman show, is that it begins in the lobby at half hour. The performer invites audience members (35 people) to participate in the show by reading lines from the script (sides). The lines are delivered from their seats and range from one word to several pages of dialogue. The show then begins with a conversation with the audience about the participation. The involvement of the audience provides the opportunity for them to experience the point of the play: the willingness to take risks and jump in. This is a one-woman show with a very large cast.