Complete is a fast-paced comedy in which two obsessive linguists, a nine-year-old zealot, and a magnetic seminar leader meet head-on in a time-splitting wrangle over the power and perversion of language.
83 pages
4 actors

EVE:
A linguistics graduate student. Secretly ridicules other people’s grammar.
Mid-to-late 20s.

MICAH:
A linguistics graduate student. Faints when speaking in front of groups.
Mid-to-late 20s.
Also plays VOICE.

JACK:
A trainer for The Training. A leader for The Program. His tough love is genuinely loving.
40s – 60s.
Also plays VICTOR VEGA, a linguist.
Also plays MAN.

EVIE:
EVE at age nine. A great speller.
Played by a child actress.

Detailed Synopsis
Complete is a comedy that examines the power of language, the perversion of language, and our American fixation on individualism and self-making. Eve and Micah, young linguistics graduate students, can analyze jargon, deconstruct syntax, and dissect every utterance they encounter, yet find it impossible to communicate how they feel about each other. The play opens with Eve coming apart at the seams after Micah has uttered a phrase of jargon that reveals his involvement in a new incarnation of the cult-like “large group awareness training” that torqued Eve’s childhood lexicon. With only 45 minutes to go before their presentation at the most prestigious linguistics conference in the country, Micah and Eve are locked in a battle outside the hotel conference hall where they’re scheduled to speak. Hell-bent on forcing Micah to renounce “The Program” and all that it stands for, Eve begins to destroy the handouts for their presentation – handouts that are precious to Micah as he has an acute fear of public speaking and is depending on the handouts to get him through the talk without fainting.

In a series of seamless shifts between present and past, Eve is catapulted into a confrontation with the voice of Jack, her childhood “trainer,” as he insists that she stop “blaming her fear” on her violent father. In flashbacks to “The Program,” Micah is likewise confronted by Jack about both his “undelivered communication” to Eve about his feelings for her, and his need to “get complete.” In still more flashbacks, nine-year-old Evie emerges to reveal what was so seductive about “The Training” in the first place.

Meanwhile, back in the present, Eve and Micah wrestle (literally) over not only the last intact handout, but the power of language to construct our world. Pushed to the brink as Micah lets more jargon slip, Eve destroys the last handout. Buoyed by her own momentum, she finally stands down Jack – and The Training’s teachings that all individuals, including children, create every experience they encounter. Left with no handouts and a mass of shredded paper in the corridor outside the conference hall, Eve finally recognizes the effect of her destructive actions on Micah and their impending presentation.

The past interrupts again when, in a final confrontation in The Program, Jack dogs Micah about his failure to fulfill his “commitment” to “get complete” with Eve. On the spot in front of a crowd of 250 fellow Program participants, struggling to hold himself upright, and his resources dwindling, Micah faints. Time jerks to the present. Suddenly realizing it’s time for their talk, and still unable to communicate with one another, Micah and Eve burst into the conference hall and head to the podium. As Micah nearly faints at the sight of the conference audience, nine-year-old Evie pokes through time to insist, training-style, that Micah and Eve deliver their undelivered communications about their feelings for one another. Stunned by little Evie and her reminder, Micah and Eve consider her words. Then, at the front of the room, before their whole discipline, Micah says to Eve, “I have something I’d like to tell you. Is now a good time to talk?”