In 1980, boxer Johnny Owen traveled from the small mining town of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, to Los Angeles to challenge Lupe Pintor for the world bantamweight championship. Forty men from the town accompanied Owen to watch the fight at ringside. Fighting Words focuses on sisters Peg and Nia, and their landlady Mrs. Davies. It is the story of the women who watched the fight on television back in Wales. As they bake cake, readying for the gathering of women at the gym, Peg, Nia and Mrs. Davies support and ridicule each other as they reveal their secrets and dreams. Nia has been giving Johnny speech lessons so that he will be less shy in front of the American press. She longs to get a radio job so that she can move away from her confining life. Peg is crazy about boxing. No one will spar with her but Johnny, and she believes he will marry her. Mrs. Davies, the midwife who delivered Johnny, frets that her husband can't live without her for a few days in America, but it becomes clear she can't live without him. As the cake rises in the kitchen so do the tempers as the women fight about who knows Johnny best, then about which one of them he loves more. Anger and jealousy split the women and by fight night, Peg is sitting at ringside in Los Angeles with the men. Suddenly Johnny is down and their dreams are shattered! Weeks later, Peg sits at the kitchen table as if in a coma, as Nia delivers the heartbreaking news of Johnny's death from his injuries. Mrs. Davies then bravely, vacantly, chatters on, pretending that the world is as it has always been—a place for us to endure life's pain.
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contains scenes between sisters
2001, Factory Theatre, Toronto
2003
Dramatic Publishing
9781583421857
Realistic
Series of Monologues based on the lives and times of real women who are incarcerated : women waiting for bail, for mail, for the latest word concerning children, money, from her man, next visit from her sister, her mother or the word from her lawyer. Based on the question: is there a way to retrieve the lives of our sisters and their families?
Stylized
The story is kept largely the same as Everyman with a few exceptions. Fellowship, Kindred, Goods, Discretion, Five Wits, and Knowledge are renamed Friendship, Kinship, Stuff, Mind, Five Senses, and Understanding respectively. The scene where Everyman must whip himself for Confession is changed to a scene where they are instructed by the drill seargant-esque Love to strip naked and shout about existential dread. Instead of Good Deeds following Everyman/Everybody to the grave, in this play that role is filled by Love. The story is also interspersed with pre-recorded voiceover scenes done fully in the dark, depicting four of Everybody's friends comforting them at their deathbed and through a misunderstanding eventually turns into a discussion on racism.
