A short play by Andrea Fleck Clardy
ALPHA
Earth has always been my favorite.
OMEGA
Yeah. Totally.
ALPHA
Once we got the creature process started, they took off!
OMEGA
The bees and the ants and the wolves and the fish, even the trees. They all understood collaboration and collective wisdom.
ALPHA
But the people. . .
OMEGA
Ah, the people.
ALPHA
Competition, capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy. . . and so on.
OMEGA
Scrambling to win, disrespecting everyone, squandering resources, destroying the climate. Hopeless.
ALPHA
Maybe not. Suppose we shut the planet down for a few months. Get rid of a few million people. Keep the rest in little boxes to quiet them down. Give them one last chance to start over and get it right.
OMEGA
We could do that.
ALPHA
How exactly?
OMEGA
With the tiny clever ones.
ALPHA
Good idea. We’ll send Covid to save humanity.
Andrea Fleck Clardy worked in small press publishing and wrote all kinds of things, including a newspaper column, a children’s book, and a calendar about remarkable American women until she moved to Boston twenty years ago. Then she started writing plays. Her short plays have been widely produced and anthologized. Longer plays include one now in revision about young climate activists. She is hunkered down in Jamaica Plain with one husband, one granddaughter, and two cats.
