How astonishin'! You must be color blind...

How astonishin'! You must be color blind. And I guess we're the first party. I was in Bill Joseph's grocery store, one day last November, when in she comes—Mrs Patrick, from New York. 'I've come to take the old life-saving station', says she. 'I'm going to sleep over there tonight!' Huh! Bill is used to queer ways—he deals with summer folks, but that got him. November—an empty house, a buried house, you might say, off here on the outside shore—way across the sand from man or beast. He got it out of her, not by what she said, but by the way she looked at what he said, that her husband had died, and she was runnin' off to hide herself, I guess. A person'd feel sorry for her if she weren't so stand-offish, and so dog-gon mean. But mean folks have got minds of their own. She slept here that night. Bill had men hauling things till after dark—bed, stove, coal. And then she wanted somebody to work for her. 'Somebody', says she, 'that doesn't say an unnecessary word!' Well, then Bill come to the back of the store, I said, 'Looks to me as if Allie Mayo was the party she's lookin' for.' Allie Mayo has got a prejudice against words. Or maybe she likes 'em so well she's savin' of 'em. She's not spoke an unnecessary word for twenty years. She's got her reasons. Women whose men go to sea ain't always talkative.

For full extended monologue, please refer to clips or the script edition cited here: Susan Glaspell, The Outside, Public domain, 1917.

Full Text

Full Text

Wikipedia

Provincetown Playhouse

United States Life-Saving Service