Joan - Mid-to-late 30s. Intelligent. Left a tenure track job teaching ethnography at Berkeley to follow her husband to New York. Her behavior sometimes hides the pain she feels inside. She is more vulnerable than she wants you to believe.

Voices
(Roles that appear as voice overs. The characters are pictured as photos and video fragments in projections.)

William - Joan's husband. A teacher at Stanford before he left his position to work for a hedge fund in New York. He is a mathematical genius who has miscalculated in his plans for the future.

Billy - Joan's four-year-old son. Active and a little rambunctious. A bit of a daredevil. Sweet kid.

Female Professor - Middle-aged anthropology professor at Columbia University. She is a supermom.

Ashley - Late 40s to early 50s. Wealthy, well-connected wife of a hedge fund manager. Mother of Cyrus. Homes on Central Park, East Hampton, and somewhere outside of Jackson Hole. William works for her husband.

Cyrus - Ashley's four-year-old son. Sensitive, awkward, with eyes that seem to see through you. Something about him makes you want to protect him from the world.

Britney - A composite of three wealthy young mothers who live on the Upper East Side. Friends of Ashley - because of the connections she can provide.

Gracia - Cyrus's nannie. Late 20s. Undocumented worker. Fled Guatemala after gangs killed her father and brother. Alone in the world, she has few places to turn.

Man - Wealthy, arrogant, loud blowhard who has a habit of mansplaining to attractive young women during social engagements.

Little Girl - One of the Britney's daughters.

Joan's mind – Places from her memories of the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York and East Hampton. But it is set mostly in the place that haunts Joan the most - the East 72nd Street Playground in Central Park.

Now. In Joan's memory. It will always haunt her. It won't go away.

This is a one-woman show. The Voices should be presented as audio voice-overs that Joan hears in her mind. Other sound effects that support the setting and action of the play would also be effective in taking audiences into the action as Joan recounts what has happened.

The projections that can be seen behind Joan contain photos and videos of the settings and the secondary characters. A few of the videos help to support the action. The projections are what Joan sees in her mind. They don't have to be fancy. They might resemble the quality of the Google Slides presentations she makes for her college students.

Dialogue in Italics indicates the actual dialogue in a scene as Joan remembers it and should take the audience directly into the action of the scene. Roman dialogue indicates Joan's narration and the remarks she addresses to the audience.

In many plays there is a direct correlation between the number of pages in a script and the number of minutes it will take to perform - usually a one-to-one correlation. Because The Playground is a one-character play with lines of extended narration, this will not be the case. The playwright has included paragraph breaks to lighten the text on the page and to indicate thought processes. But the playwright anticipates that The Playground will run about 90 minutes in performance. It is a full evening of theatre.

This full-length, one-person drama draws on a tradition of similar plays.

These include: "I Am My Own Wife" by Doug Wright, "Thom Pain, Based On Nothing" by Will Eno, "Grounded" by George Brant, "Krapp's Last Tape" by Samuel Beckett, "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Wolf, "The Vagina Monologues" by Eve Ensler, "Shirley Valentine" by Willy Russell, "The Year of Magic Thinking" by Joan Didion, "The Bell of Amherst" by William Luce, "Sea Wall" by Simon Stephens, "A Life" by Nick Payne, etc.