Overview
In the year 1874, Ada looks over the rail of a boat in Narragansett Bay and tries to make sense of her life, obsessively returning in her mind to her experiences twenty years earlier, when she was governess for the children of Nathaniel Hawthorne on a trip to Italy. Memories of her love for their beautiful but doomed daughter Una, their demonic son Julian, and of a monstrous hairy creature like a huge badger that keeps crawling in her window at night, mix with eerie recollections of the ruins of Rome as she attempts to prepare herself for the cold water beneath her. A haunting monologue about the sadness of time, the mixed joy and horror of desire and memory, and the relationship of love to death. A powerful piece for a skilled actress.