Three Viewings Response

Three Viewings is not like any play I have encountered before because it only deals with three characters who do no interact at all. Each spends a very long time on stage and their stories all revolve around the dead, but they never actually see one another. One hidden common point of reference in each of the three monologues is in the coffin. In the first monologue, Tell- Tale, Emil shares his experience reaching into the coffin of Terri. He describes, " I smooth the crow's feet around her eyes. I do...what we do...to her yes, her lips. What we do is...we seal them". The second monologue, The Thief of Tears, also shares this point of reference, in the coffin. Mac describes in detail about how she goes to console the deceased person just to steal their jewelry. She describes, " I close my eyes, bite my lips, and the tears well up. I bend over to kiss Miriam good-bye...two pecks on the corpse on either side of the face." She takes the audience right into the coffin with her, just like Emil did. The last monologue, Thirteen Things about Ed Carpolotti, Virginia takes us into the same location, into her husband's, Ed's, coffin. She expresses while observing her deceased husband, " He's dead wearing bifocals and a hairpiece....the cufflinks shaped like bulldozers...All of his hair on these little white heads." All three characters share this common point of reference in the location of a coffin. It is not something one would easily pick up on in the script, but if you really look into it, you can see this location a commonality in all three monologues.