Why So All At Once At Home? (2007)

A monologue for eight voices

- I want to go back.
- We can’t go back.
- Why can’t we go back?
- Because we’re still there.
- But he isn’t there.
- No, he isn’t there.

Why so all at once at home? is a monologue for eight voices about home, memory and dislocation. A family has been uprooted, displaced, deported, but no one can say exactly where they are or how they got there. Their movement through space and time is dreamlike: a sequence of discontinuous events, half remembered and half imagined. It is not impossible, they gradually realise, that they have never really been away from home at all. It also grows apparent that a single voice may be speaking for and through them. Where does this voice come from. and whose past is it that continues to haunt the family? Someone would know for sure, but that someone is no longer there. And so the family remains, speaking to the dead, trying to make do with the memories it never had.