A CHATEAU IN HESSMER
A COLLECTION OF SHORT PLAYS
by
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DILETTE: My parents lived in a 2-bedroom shack with wooden floors and no air-conditioning. CHARLES: Mine, too. But that’s not what we have now, and that’s not what our kids will have, either. They’ll live in a château, a real one. They’ll go to the best, most expensive private schools in the country and marry into old money families like the Howards or the Hirondelles. DILETTE: Why? CHARLES: So we can be part of the landed gentry, too, the old money of the state that always sends their kids to Eastern Ivy League schools and who sit on corporate boards and start big charitable foundations. DILETTE: We’re from the East, too. CHARLES: (Laughs derisively.) Yeah, Eastern Avoyelles Parish! DILETTE: And what’s wrong with that? Your family and my family, both came to Louisiana as penniless French immigrants and bought their land, that’s still in the family. That makes us landed gentry, too, doesn’t it? CHARLES: (Laughs.) You gotta be kidding. What are a few acres along Bayou des Glaises compared to owning hundreds of thousands of acres scattered across the whole center of the state, and all the trees covering it and all the oil and gas under it. That’s landed gentry. That’s real wealth, real generational wealth. DILETTE: We have real wealth, too. CHARLES: Yes, finally. And look at us now! We could buy all of Hessmer and Cottonport and Mansura and have a lot left over, too. DILETTE: Who would want it? Who would want to buy Mansura? Where would the people go? I don’t want to own Mansura. I’d rather go out and eat cochon-de-lait and cracklings at the festival and listen to the music and watch the people on the carnival rides. CHARLES: Dilette, Chèrie, you can eat caviar on toast while you sip Veuve Cliquot champagne, not Abita Beer. Forget the cracklings. Forget your humble roots. Move up the social ladder let’s take our place in the sun, thanks to big oil, big trucks and big hospitals. (Grabs DILETTE. Spins her around in a waltz step.) We can two-step to valses musettes in Paris instead of Mansura. The sky’s the limit and we need to let everyone know we have made it into the big time. That’s what building this château is all about. DILETTE: So everyone can hate us? So the Hirondelles and the Howards can look down their noses at us because we’re the “nou-veau riche.” (Pauses.) If the poor people hate us because we’re rich and the rich people disdain us because we’re just the newly wealthy, where would we be exactly? CHARLES: We’d be in the biggest, grandest, damnedest house in this parish, that’s where we’ll be. DILETTE: And when our children move away because they’ve been educated in fancy Eastern schools with other children from rich families, will they come back to Avoyelles Parish? Will they? CHARLES: Why would we care? We can fly anywhere in the world, anytime we want. Let our kids live in New York, or Boston, or Paris. Who cares where they want to live. We can visit them there. DILLETTE: I care! (Pauses.) I care because they’ll grow up and have children and I will not be there to put a bandage on their skinned knees, or cradle them in my arms when the thunder rolls, or make them chocolate chip cookies when they come home from school.
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About the Book
“A Chateau in Hessmer” contains a collection of short plays by Dr. David J. Holcombe. Lengths vary from ten-minute sketches, to more developed one-acts lasting an hour or so. Subject matter runs the gamut from penile implants to Christmas wreaths, with lots in-between. This collection compliments Dr. Holcombe’s previous theatrical works, “Beauty and the Botox” and “Old South, New South, No South.” Not for the faint of heart, the characters and situations reflect the best and worst our society has to offer with stomach-wrenching precision. While sometimes appearing familiar, the characters are, of course, imaginary, reflecting the best practices of confidentiality and good taste. Intrepid directors, teachers and students will find the diversity and depth of the subject matter worth exploring. Come and share a unique, if sometimes disturbing, vision of our contemporary society, played out on the stage as in life. Much as the monk, Gregor Mendel, worked in isolation in Moravia to develop the foundations of modern genetics, Dr. Holcombe has labored in Central Louisiana to create a body of work that he hopes will resist the ravages of time by incorporating universal elements. You, the reader, must be the judge if he succeeds or not.
About the Author
Dr. David Holcombe was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After attending the University of California at Davis and the University of Florida in Gainesville, he left the United States and attended medical school at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium. While teaching folk dancing classes there to earn some income, he met his future wife, Nicole Catherine. After returning to the United States in 1983, Dr. Holcombe did a residency in internal Medicine at a Johns-Hopkins affiliated clinic in Baltimore. He and his wife and first son, Renaud, settled in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1986, where they have remained and raised three other children, Tanguy, Joffroi and Thibault. Dr. Holcombe remains a prolific, if unrecognized, author. A dozen of his short plays have been produced in the context of Spectral Sisters Productions in Alexandria, Louisiana, over the last decade. There is a disturbing incisiveness in his works that sometimes evokes discomfort in readers and viewers alike, but which reflects the depth of his vision. His medical career has always offered a unique window into the extraordinary complexity of human behavior, sometimes admirable and sometimes appalling. Writing and medicine have co-existed somewhat uneasily over the years in Dr. Holcombe’s life. Much like Thomas Mann’s character, Tonio Kruger, Dr. Holcombe has found himself caught between the scientific and literary worlds, too much in both to be completely in one or the other. This life-long tension produces some of the most unique and vibrant literary works of our troubled times, a kaleidoscope of personalities and issues. The creative spirit continues to flourish in him, however, with or without recognition, in a most unlikely location.