To Wear The Rose Lightly – Google Docs
To Wear The Rose Lightly
Description: A dramatic play, in three acts. The plot is relatively straightforward: the protagonist (Randall Lee) is an unhappily-married businessman who begins a doomed affair with a soldier half his age (Octavia Adams) after he meets her at a party hosted by his rival Arthur Wolfe. Naturally, Arthur himself is having an affair with Randall’s wife Elizabeth, and it takes about three acts for everybody to end up being miserable, alone, and ready to start the whole thing over, with different people. The play draws very deeply on flower-based symbolism; roses in particular are used as visual shorthand of love. Randall is told by Octavia in the final scene (as she is about to ship off again to a carefully-undefined ‘war zone’) that he ‘wears the rose lightly;’ i.e., that he refuses to do anything to sustain the love that he demands from others, and it ends with him holding the rose after she leaves — then dropping it, casually, as the lights fade.