Mornings in Czarist Russia

–A Short Play in One Act by Samantha Mozart

Leo Tolstoy:  I’ve run away into these fields and woods to be alone.  Zounds!  What are you all doing out here?!

Ivan Turgenev (back from the dead):  Isn’t it beautiful?  The golden fields, the little wooden church deep in the copse, the bells …

Nikolai Gogol (another dead soul):  It’s chilly; where’s my overcoat?

Anton Chekhov:  I’ve come out here to have a word with the Black Monk.

Me:  Alexander Scriabin has taken my hand and run off with me through his music into this mystical space.

Vladimir Horowitz:  He was crazy, you know.

Sergei Rachmaninoff:  Well, we went to school together.  Anyway, Volodya, here, plays his stuff and plays my third piano concerto better than I.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (also back from the dead):  You idiots; a sanatorium is the only place for a saint.