LIFE
February 24th, 2021
Starring: Martina (female, late 30’s), Trevor (male, late 30’s)
An Airbnb rental cottage. A quaint little living area, with a TV next to a table and two chairs. Trevor stands looking through the home’s DVD collection, on a shelf behind the chairs. Martina squats down and opens the cabinet of the TV stand:
MARTINA
Found some games!
TREVOR
Nice. What do they have?
MARTINA
Looks like…
Jenga
Cranium
Chess
Clue
Monopoly Spongebob Edition
LIFE
…
Any of those sound appealing?
TREVOR
Uh
Most of them aren’t two player. And the ones we can I don’t know how.
...
Isn’t LIFE a magazine?
MARTINA
It was. It’s a game too.
TREVOR
Never heard of it.
MARTINA
It’s pretty well known.
TREVOR
You’ve played it?
MARTINA
As a kid.
TREVOR
What do you do?
MARTINA
Uh...you just kind of live life.
Trevor, confused, slides out the game and opens it on the table, looking at the board, the cards, the pieces:
TREVOR
Oh
So you like actually live life.
MARTINA
Yeah. You spin and you move the little car and follow the—
TREVOR
What are those little pegs?
MARTINA
Those go on the car. For when you get married and have kids.
TREVOR
You have to?
MARTINA
Pretty sure...
TREVOR
And the boys are in blue and the girls are in pink?
MARTINA
Yeah.
TREVOR
So how do you win?
MARTINA
By having the most money at the end. I think.
TREVOR
Wow.
A lot of messed up messaging in there.
MARTINA
It’s dated for sure.
TREVOR
How could people play this? It’s like...the least accurate depiction of life ever.
MARTINA
Well but I mean it’s—it’s sort of the American dream.
TREVOR
American dream? This is a lie! Where’s the work? The sweat, the trauma?
If this really was “life,” there should be cards like
“Spouse dies in a mass shooting, move back eight spaces.”
“You get your third miscarriage, pay 30 grand for in-vitro.”
“Recession terminates your job, drive Lyft to keep your kids fed.”
Isn’t that life? Isn’t that what people should be playing?
MARTINA
No. The reason people play games is to forget the truth. Noone with a shitty life wants to play a game about how shitty life is.
TREVOR
So everybody has to jump in the car and get married and have a blue boy and a pink girl and move into some cozy cottage like this and live happily ever after?
MARTINA
Some people want that.
TREVOR
But we don’t.
MARTINA
Right. So why does it have to be one or the other?
Our life can exist. That LIFE can exist. We just don’t have to play it.
Martina boxes up the game and slides it back on the shelf. She sees something else in the back of the cabinet and reaches to pull it out. It’s a set of Chinese Checkers:
MARTINA
Oh look!
TREVOR
There we go! Are you ready to lose?
MARTINA
Are you?
TREVOR
Not gonna.
They go to the table and set up the board:
TREVOR
You know this didn’t come from China, right?
It’s—
MARTINA
German.
Yeah, I know.
They finish setup and start to play.