Reading Response to "The Pain of Pink Evenings" by Rosemary Moore

     I really enjoyed reading this play. Moore uses interesting details and lots of specificity to breathe life into the story of a timid, mousey woman in her forties.  Tracy was emotionally paralyzed and unable to move on since her husband's death ten years ago.  He comes to her in a dream and tells her what to do to move on with her life.  She reluctantly begins the process by finally selecting a pretty white sweater with pearl buttons to dispose of as a symbol for moving on.
     The dream served as a catalyst to propel Tracy to move out of her depression.  The fact that she made her bed on the morning she got the sweater out suggests that her energy was beginning to return.  When she laid it on the bed, she felt that it glowed with radioactivity.  When she tried it on, she felt a pain in her chest, and a button just fell off.
     As she dealt with the sweater, she felt her father's presence and allowed herself to remember her evenings with him before he died.  That she sat there folding, unfolding, and refolding her napkin as he talked revealed that she was even timid around her own father.
     Before going down to the Potomac, she lay on the ground in the median in a futile attempt to contact Henry again.  Her strange behavior attracted a Japanese couple who wanted to photograph her.  This interruption served to let her know that she was the star of her life and that it was time for the action to begin.  She finally got up, tore the bag open, and threw the beloved old sweater into the Potomac River.  She watched as it slowly sank.  Hopefully, now she will begin to move on with her own life.