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Absolutely, John. Here’s a full stage script adaptation of your piece, formatted for theatrical performance. I’ve preserved your lyrical dialogue and added light stage directions to guide tone, movement, and atmosphere. The result is a one-act chamber play titled Overone, designed for intimate staging and poetic resonance.

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🎭 Overone

A Chamber Play in One Act
By John Battle

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Characters

• THEA OVERONE – Mother, philosopher, muse
• WILL OVERONE – Son, 15, poetic, queer, precocious
• (Optional voice of TWAIN OVERONE, offstage)

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Setting

A modest home in early spring. A breakfast table, a window with morning light slanting in, a bed or couch where Will reclines beside Thea. The atmosphere is quiet, intimate, and poetic.

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ACT I: The Slant of Spring

Lights up. WILL lies on THEA’s bosom, curled sideways. Morning light filters through the window. A rooster crows faintly in the distance.

THEA
Did you enjoy practice-driving this morning?

WILL
Here is the thing, Mother: Do you remember the concrete carrier that took the left lane—off, some distance in front of us?

THEA
Yes.

WILL
He raised a rooster-tail of water spray when he drove briefly on the rumble-strip, where water was left from an earlier rain.

THEA
Did it make a rainbow?

WILL
No, just a rooster tail, a large one; it went far up into the air, which was all the more striking because the weather was pleasant and sunny, and the road was dry.

THEA
So. What?

WILL
I thought I saw time-eternal, and I was in it.

THEA
Is eternity past or present?

WILL
You have posed a false dichotomy: Eternity is all of time.

THEA
Until it ends.

WILL
Until it ends, as it might end—for part of the world, but not all of the world.

THEA
That is true: Part of the world will never end. You know, people live their lives badly within false dichotomies: They may say, “Shall I have cake or pudding for dessert?”

WILL
The difference between them is minuscule, yet people may think they have answered one of life’s eternal questions.

THEA
What is nothing?

WILL
Who am I?

THEA
Overone.

WILL
That is my name.

THEA
It is who you are.

WILL
Let’s do our three-line poems now. Describe something in two lines, and I will say what it is—more or less—for the third.

They sit up slightly. A ritual begins.

THEA
Corn stalks quiver in the breeze
The air is so clear

WILL
After the storm

THEA
A thin ripple of clouds
Spread low across the western sky

WILL
Vermilion lined with gold, in autumn

THEA
Suddenly, street sounds fall
Through the open window

WILL
It is spring

THEA
The poplar grove that edges into sumac
There on the rise where the sun sets most of the time

WILL
Makes a crazed crackle on the edge of the world

THEA
The furrowed field
Turns to mounds and dimples under snow

WILL
When winter comes

THEA
The wind gust that lifted the morning haze
Spread yellow leaves out over the road

WILL
A thousand confetti

THEA
Now, do your new one.

WILL
Crickets go krii-ket
Frogs go rib-bet
What do I do?

THEA
The idylls of the gods were not lost on you.

WILL
When we command the very forces of the world, how can we not know what it is?

THEA
The beauty of it.

She plays with his hair, stringing it out at the sides with her fingertips.

WILL
Life is one good meal at a time—and a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine—or two.

He lifts himself from her side, turns toward her.

WILL
Sometimes you try to make me look like a clown.

THEA
You are poking me in the knee with your thing. Be careful.

He lies back down.

WILL
Sorry, I forgot—I am at that age.

THEA
Your eyes are puffy; your face is swollen; your skin is oily; your hormones are flaring—you are the definition of awkward. In a year-and-a-half, you will be a man; you will get over this. Technically, you will be a man, but still my child for a while.

WILL
Handsome as ever?

THEA
More so.
I get great pleasure from poetry. Do you?

WILL
Number two on my list.

THEA
Number one is Onan?

WILL
Yes.

THEA
Get away from me!

WILL
No. Understand me!

They change the subject.

WILL
“To thine own self be true.” “All’s well that ends well.” I can recite the wisdom of the world; yet I am not wise.

THEA
You are Willie Shake-a-spore.

WILL
I think you have named a fern, Mother, or the sex organ of a bee. William Shakespeare.

THEA
Him too. Make your wisdom. Do it now. I will start you off with a stimulus.

WILL
I shall try.

THEA
The beginning of a poem by Emily Dickinson:
“There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons.”

WILL
In the spring, there is a certain slant of light that puts sunshine on our breakfast table. I shall call this next thing a dalliance: You might laugh.

THEA
I won’t laugh.

WILL
I have a beautiful dalliance in my mind: ham and eggs and toast, or oatmeal with butter and brown sugar?

THEA
Ha ha.

WILL
Traitor. The rolling hills where we live have just turned green. There are pastures, other people’s pastures. Chilled, moist air fills the landscape. If you walk into the breeze, it drives the chill into you. I am happy for the moisture come back to the air: The dry air of winter cracked my skin. Sometimes, in the spring and early summer, roiling clouds cross over here in a hell of a hurry. I am dazzled and dazed and a little afraid: the tall clouds change shapes rapidly; the top parts grow and shrink and threaten to drop their rain; they move across a blue sky, and the clouds are both glowing at the edges and shadowy within. This storm of wind and clouds that moves across the meadow beyond our home belongs to me; it is mine, as a son, a daughter, a mother, a father of humankind—forget divinity. It is mine. It is the dynamic force of the world. Own it. Smell the ozone on the wind; hold the rain in your hand: It is yours.

WILL (softly)
There is a slant of light in spring that puts the sun on our breakfast table. Flowers push through the ground around our house and the outlying sheds and under the boxelder trees that cover the property. The honeysuckle, wild olive, and Juneberry bushes bud, and, at the wet edges of the land, pussy-willows send out their yellow anthers.

THEA
What breakfast has your father made for you, short-order-cook that he is?

WILL
Ham and eggs and toast and a cup of black coffee.

THEA
We sit with you and enjoy the same.

WILL
Yes. The exquisite beauty of the moment: It’s all there is; it’s all there ever was!

THEA (claps her hands)
Bravo! I am Thea Overone. Have you ever thought about that?

WILL
Leave out the “a” and what have you got?

THEA
Your father is Twain Overone.

WILL
Ranking below you and me in the cosmos. Trinity upon trinity. Whaaaat? The mysteries of life unfold. Gee willikers, Mommy. However, this does not conform to the guidelines of the Magisterium.

THEA
The teaching authority of Christendom. They know what they know: They don’t know what they don’t know.

WILL
Enough said. I am Will Overone—read id, the Freudian id. No wonder the world is messed up.

THEA
You have been through death and transfiguration, and you still have a sense of humor.

WILL
That—is an undiscovered country.

THEA
Which you don’t fully understand yet, because you are only beginning to understand who you are.

WILL
I am older than Methuselah.

THEA
You are older and wiser than most of us.