The X-Factor - A Play in Two Acts
Act One - Scene One
The play takes place shortly after the turn of the millennium, on a weekday evening in mid-August of 2002, at the Ukrania, a former ethnic restaurant, now much like any typical, contemporary, Greek-American greasy-spoon. It's located on a busy thoroughfare in Manhattan's East Village/Lower Eastside. The stage shows a cross- section of the front of the restaurant, with the entranceway and a small part of the street to the left. The main focus is on a group of tables that, as characters enter, will be pushed together to form one long table.
It's ten o'clock in the evening when the first act opens. Dory, a lone elderly woman (a local, born-and-bred, Lower-Eastsider, a hard-of-hearing "Uke" in her mid-seventies: she's wearing clean, baggy, blue slacks; a heavy red sweater and a green knit hat she has a shopping cart brimming with miscellaneous stuff by her side which, when on the street, she uses somewhat as a walker. She's an unschooled artist, and having finished eating, she is seen continuously making crude, yet somewhat-appealing, naive, garish drawings of ornately clothed female figures (often with geometric backgrounds) on pasteboard panels (up to about 2' x 1'), using large, colored-ink markers. They can be seen propped up on a table next to her (the manager allows her to sell them to his customers which she does, at five to ten dollars each, depending on size).
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