Lucy, “Pink”
Lucy is the only character in this very short monologue. Well, that’s not entirely true: she is the only character on stage. Well, that’s not exactly entire true either. Lucy is a ten year old white girl whose monologue is actually one-half a conversation with her African Zulu nurse named Nellie. Nellie cannot speak, however, because she is lying dead in a coffin on stage having been shot to death while taking part in a protest march for civil rights.
Alan, “The Crackwalker”
The Crackwalker is a five-character full-length play, but arguably the central character is Alan. Or, at the very least, the central character as he relates to the title of this anthology and is Alan. The other side of the dark is expressed through Alan’s short monologue in which he asks the pertinent question “Did you ever start thinkin’ somethin’, and it’s like ugly?” and then goes to ask the even more pertinent follow-up about how once you start thinking these thoughts you can’t for them out of your head? This what the other side of the dark is really all about: that darkness that is even darker. What is being discussed here is the Freudian theory of repression and those thoughts too ugly to confront consciously but which the subconscious keeps beating away at.
Rose, “Tornado”
The equivalent of Alan in the radio drama Tornado is Rose. Alan sometimes acts as if he has been stricken physically with a mental breakdown whereas for Rose the physical breakdown of an epileptic seizure become a symbolic incarnation of the other side of the dark. The darkest dark is the abyss which is always present and felt as a vague menacing threat capable of destroying the carefully constructed façade of normalcy that we come to believe is our one and true identity.
Dee, “I am Yours”
The very first words that Dee speaks is this play infused with meaning as a result of the repetition of paranoia: “There is nothing behind the wall. There is nothing behind the wall.” Dee joins the other central characters of these four literary works as the representative of I am Yours that is dealing most tangibly and viscerally with the other side of the dark. Not that she is alone in that regard, but her fears are expressed the most explicitly with her terror of the animal behind the wall which has, at the point in her life which the play covers, gotten “Out of the wall, and inside me.”
