THE SET-UP
Eleanor and Ephram, sister and brother, are both getting married on the same day. And they’re each getting married to a man. With protesters, policemen and a TV news crew outside the church, inside the couples are split over what their day and their ceremony should mean, to themselves or anyone else.
Patrick, Ephram’s groom, agrees with Eleanor that they all need to make a statement by getting married. But Roland, Eleanor’s groom, and Ephram both just want a simple ceremony and a quiet day.
The Duchess, the female minister who will be performing the ceremony, makes her first appearance with this speech.
The decision that cost her the ministry of her church, referred to here and revealed later in greater detail, was to undertake gender reassignment surgery to live her life as a woman.
Discussing her identity as a transgender woman and the meaning of this wedding day with the policeman Duke can also be found here online in a scene under the title:
When Did the World Become So Complicated?
“I don’t blame my congregation. It’s not easy to understand why I did what I did. What I had to do.”
(The DUCHESS – a woman in her late 40s/early 50s – standing alone, donning a minister’s white ceremonial robes as she speaks.
She might be speaking to the audience, but it’s just as likely she’s talking to God.)
DUCHESS
I don’t miss my old life.
Not all of it.
Parts of it.
I miss my church.
Not the building.
The community.
The day to day.
The weekly gathering together.
That mystic, sweet communion.*
The births.
The sickness.
The joy.
The funerals.
The arguments.
The food.
I felt like I had a family again.
Mostly I miss the weddings.
Nothing tests a person like a wedding.
The best ones are happy days, to be sure. But it is so easy to get lost.
Who you choose to invite, who you ask to witness your commitment.
And who you don’t.
Who stands with you.
And who can’t, who won’t.
It’s a brave and foolish thing to promise to love one other person for the rest of your life in front of God and witnesses, both of whom will hold you to it, and will be more than happy to remind you if you don’t.
But it’s one of the nicest reckless things you can do to and with another person.
If you find someone who inspires that kind of daring in you – well, then you’re extremely fortunate.
Being asked to preside over such an act, those are the times I feel most fortunate of all.
Calling the gown out of retirement and me in it – out of the closet, if you’ll pardon the expression.
(The DUCHESS finishes by placing a rainbow-colored stole around her neck.)
DUCHESS (cont’d)
I don’t blame my congregation. It’s not easy to understand why I did what I did. What I had to do.
There are days even I don’t fully understand it.
But I’m better off.
I like to think the world is better off, too.
(She prepares to go.)
DUCHESS (cont’d)
I miss the weddings.
And the possibility of my own.
When they find out.
And sooner or later, they all find out. They have to.
(photo: Erica Fields as The Duchess in the 2012 Minneapolis co-production of “But Not For Love” from The Flower Shop Project and Workhouse Theatre)
*this is a phrase from the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation”
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