Avid gardener Eve Hayford's life is turned upside down when she suffers a brain aneurysm and ends up with Locked-In Syndrome. Now, her eyes are her only way of communicating with her sister Dawn and her carer Nicole.
Unable to attend to her garden, her will to live slowly begins to fade. She eventually finds solace in teaching Dawn and Nicole to appreciate the beauty of her beloved garden and restore it to its former glory.
Type: Full-length play
Genre: Drama, Medical
Cast: 5F, 1M, 1 male voice-over.
Age of Actors: mid-30s to mid-40s.
Suitable for: Adults to watch and perform
Length: approximately 90 minutes with interval.
Set: Scenes with multiple settings - mainly garden and bedroom. See script for more details.
Special notes: The actor playing Eve will need to be physically fit in order to perform the role convincingly as she undergoes several medical emergencies over the course of her condition including aspiration pneumonia, PTSD and hypothermia.
Staging: The production is best set on a rotating platform as the bedroom and the garden are both pivotal in the story. This provides easy transition of scenes without the need to move the placement of objects within the scenes themselves.
Sound: Once Eve is “locked-in” much of her dialogue is presented in voice-over. There are two distinctive passages of dialogue which will need to be distinguished from each other – Eve’s inner thoughts (marked in bold within the script) and her conversational dialogue. How these will be presented will be prerogative of the production’s sound designer.