In this haunted monologue, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, a character from Russian fairy tales, speaks to her rival, a girl who has given up everything for her stone carver lover, who has disappeared into the forest, presumably to the realm of the mysterious goddess who lives there, beautiful and strange, part lizard, who understands that everything, including the stone, is alive. When the lover returns, he is strange, not the same, and when the girl goes to the forest to kill the Mistress, the goddess reveals to her the secret that is already buried in the girl's soul: that the girl is the real artist, the real stone carver, and that in fact she herself has been the goddess all along. Part of Nigro's ongoing cycle of Russian plays which includes Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, An Angler In The Lake Of Darkness, Emotion Memory, A Russian Play, Rasputin, Nights At The Stray Dog Café, Mandelstam, Marina, Maya and others.
Published in the collection The Chaplin Plays and Others