Ragtime with a Touch of Brecht
(Or: "Bleach on the Bayou" — An Absurdist Southern Farce in Five Tableaux)
by Benjamin Gavarre
bengavarre@gmail.com
RAGTIME WITH A TOUCH OF BRECHT © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
THE CAST OF MISFITS:
- Clementine (28): The exhausted Cajun heroine. She irons mounds of rich people's laundry with a ten-pound cast-iron skillet-iron. Her weapon: a heavy alligator-skin purse.
- Ma Maw (55): Her mother. A raging obsessive-compulsive germaphobe armed with a pump-action tin sprayer of pure lye and carbolic acid, plus a wire scrub brush.
- Big Daddy Beauregard (60): The father. A fake "Swamp King" and self-proclaimed alligator wrestler. Wears tasseled boots and a rusty Bowie knife. Lazy, lecherous, and deeply cowardly.
- The Swamp Brats (10 & 12): Two feral, pig-tailed Cajun little girls who look like cherubs and steal like dockside pirates.
- Enzo "Bugatti" (30): A Sicilian immigrant confidence man. Arrives in a cardboard suit promising to build an automotive empire in the swamp.
- The Vulture Twins (Beaumont & Belmont): Wealthy, inbred Uptown cousins. Pioneers of French Quarter gentrification. Wear matching white linen suits and hold perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses.
- Jean-Luc LeBlanc (Formerly "Billy Bob"): The absent poet brother who moved to Paris, France, to write existentialist trash and disowned his swamp-rat family. (Only his purple-gloved hand appears).
- Blind Papa Brecht: The bridge character and live Foley artist. Dressed like an immaculate, mythic riverboat gambler. Plays a battered resonator banjo and a foot-operated washboard/kazoo rig. Sings only three times; otherwise, he provides cartoon sound effects.
TABLEAU I: The Summer of the Murderous Lint
(The stage is pitch black. A single amber spotlight hits BLIND PAPA BRECHT perched on an overturned whiskey barrel downstage right. He stomps his boot, scrapes his washboard, and rips into a fast, cynical Delta Blues rag).
BLIND PAPA BRECHT: (Singing)
Oh, the poor folks sweat in the New Orleans mud,
Sweatin' out gravy and sweatin' out blood!
The sun's like a skillet, the air's like a soup,
And the roaches arebigger than hens in the coop!
Yeah, the Crescent City is a mighty fine town,
If you ain't at the bottom drownin' way down!
Where the pious get rich and the sinners get fat,
And the rest of us iron the millionaire's hat!
(Papa Brecht slaps his banjo strings dead. BAM! Full blinding yellow light hits a rotting courtyard in the Lower Ninth Ward. Peeling Spanish moss, rusted corrugated tin. CLEMENTINE is furiously ironing a shirt that is already scorched through. MA MAW is on all fours, stalking an invisible speck of dust with a pair of blacksmith tongs. BIG DADDY snores loudly in a broken rocking chair. Papa Brecht accompanies Ma Maw's crab-walk with short, high-pitched banjo plucks: Plink! Plink! Plink!).
MA MAW: (Snapping the tongs at the empty air) Gotcha, you yellow-fever bastard! You ain't bringin' no dockside cholera into my Christian courtyard! (Dunks the tongs into a bucket of boiling bleach).
CLEMENTINE: (Slamming the iron down; steam hisses) Ma Maw, quit huntin' ghosts! It's a hundred and ten degrees in the shade, the doorknob is melting, and you're wrestling invisible midges! Wake up that stuffed possum you call a husband and tell him to go tote barges on the Mississippi!
MA MAW: Don't you holler at me, girl! When you open your mouth, you stir up the airborne protozoa!
BIG DADDY: (Snorting awake, adjusting his rusty Bowie knife with macho bravado) Barge-totin'?! A man of my Cajun bloodline don't tote no boxes! I am the descendant of Jean Lafitte! I was born to wrestle twelve-foot gators barehanded in the Atchafalaya Basin!
CLEMENTINE: You couldn't wrestle a boiled shrimp out of a teacup, old man! Yesterday you threw your back out tryin' to kick a three-legged stray cat! Get a job, we ain't got enough cornmeal to make a hushpuppy!
🔊 AUDIO CUE: Deafening sound of SWAMP CICADAS & BULLFROGS (BZZZZZ-CROOOAK!). Every single actor freezes with wide, saucer-like "plate faces", staring blankly at the ceiling as if an alien spaceship just landed. Three full seconds of awkward silence. The sound cuts out mid-croak. Action resumes instantly.
(THE SWAMP BRATS skip in, twirling a dead water-moccasin like a jump rope. Big Daddy licks his lips, puffs out his gut, and waddles toward them).
BIG DADDY: Well, hello there, little crawfish... Come sit on Big Daddy's knee and let him show you how the swamp wolf howls...
THE SWAMP BRATS: (Stopping dead, speaking in eerie unison) Give us a silver dime right now or we tell Ma Maw you were sniffing the neighbor lady's bloomers on the clothesline.
BIG DADDY: (Sweating bullets) You little voodoo devils! I was only checking the fabric quality!
(Brat 1 stomps on his gouty toe —Papa Brecht hits a low, sour trombonish slide on the banjo— while Brat 2 picks his pocket, steals his chewing tobacco and his belt, causing his trousers to drop around his ankles. They bolt offstage laughing —accompanied by a frantic washboard roll—. Clementine marches over and whacks Big Daddy across the head three times with her alligator purse).
CLEMENTINE: Jean Lafitte was a gentleman pirate, you degenerated mud-cat! You ain't nothing but a dime-store Bayou billy-goat! Lord have mercy, send me a hurricane, or send me a rich husband from across the sea!
TABLEAU II: The Autumn of the Cardboard Baron
(Eight months later. Papa Brecht does NOT sing. He sits in his corner, grinning. When ENZO "BUGATTI" struts in wearing a checkered suit held together by safety pins and carrying a suitcase tied with sausage twine, Papa Brecht plays a grand operatic mandolin trill on his banjo that quickly degenerates into a sad, flat twang).
ENZO: (Spreading his arms like Caruso) Bellissima Louisiana! The Venice of the mud! Clementine, mia regina, your Sicilian prince has arrived off the steamer to rescue you from these hillbillies!
CLEMENTINE: (Drops the iron, leaps into his arms) My European tycoon! Tell me you brought a trunk full of gold doubloons!
MA MAW: (Charges in, pumping her lye-sprayer directly into Enzo's eyeballs. Papa Brecht makes wet hissing noises into a kazoo: Pffft-zzzt! Pffft-zzzt!) Back, Mediterranean bacillus! He smells like garlic and Ellis Island ringworm! Purify the foreigner!
ENZO: (Blinded, gagging on carbolic acid) Madonna Santa, crazy woman, you're melting my mustache! I am a captain of industry! I am bringing the "Bugatti-Enzo Horseless Carriage Corporation" right here to the swamp! Motorcars that run on moonshine and crocodile fat! By the way... do you have a crust of stale cornbread? I haven't eaten since Gibraltar. I've been sucking on my own necktie for nourishment!
🔊 AUDIO CUE: Loud vaudeville drum rimshot (BA-DUM-TSSSS!) followed by a sad slide-whistle. Enzo freezes, looks slowly out at the audience, checks under his shoe as if he stepped on the sound effect, and shrugs.
CLEMENTINE: (Grabbing him by the lapels and shaking him like a ragdoll) Cornbread?! You're broke?! You're just a starving ditch-digger with rolled R's?! Look at you—your shoes are painted onto your socks with shoe polish!
ENZO: (Dropping to his knees) My capital is tied up in the Bank of Palermo! Meanwhile, let me sleep on your cot! What barbaric people you Cajuns are—no statues, no opera, just mosquitoes the size of pelicans!
(Furious, Clementine swings her heavy alligator purse in a 360-degree arc and clubs Enzo in the back of the neck. Papa Brecht slams a metal trash-can lid with his boot: CRASH! Enzo drops flat on his face. Ma Maw immediately begins mopping the floor using Enzo's unconscious body as the mop).
TABLEAU III: The Winter of the Stolen Gumbo
(One year later. Freezing swamp dampness. Everyone shivers under burlap sacks. Spotlight hits BLIND PAPA BRECHT. He lights a cigar stub and plays a wicked, syncopated New Orleans ragtime stomp, singing at breakneck speed).
BLIND PAPA BRECHT: (Singing)
Here come the cousins from St. Charles Street!
Got silk on their bellies and spats on their feet!
They buy up the shanties and paint 'em uppink,
Then charge you ten dollarsTo use your own sink!
Oh, the landlord's a buzzard, the banker's a tick,
Till the whole house of cards tumbles down in the creek!
(Full lights. Enter THE VULTURE TWINS — BEAUMONT & BELMONT. They walk on tiptoe, wearing fur-trimmed coats, holding lace hankies over their noses).
BEAUMONT: Sweet Jesus in a surrey, Belmont! It smells like wet hound dog and generational failure in here!
BELMONT: Don't inhale deeply, brother, poverty is airborne! We just came from our new luxury tenement in the French Quarter. We evicted all the locals and rented the apartments exclusively to exiled Russian Dukes and Parisian Aristocrats! We are pioneers of "Urban Renewal"!
ENZO: (Crawling forward, tipping his battered hat) Buongiorno, fellow aristocrats! I am Count Enzo...
BEAUMONT: (Poking Enzo away with a silver-tipped cane) Shoo, you greasy organ-grinder! Where is your monkey?
BELMONT: We came to perform Christmas charity for our trashy kinfolk. Here is fifty cents. (Throws coins into the mud; Big Daddy and Enzo dive headfirst, cracking their skulls together). Go buy okra, sausage, and blue crabs, and cook a massive pot of Seafood Gumbo for everyone! We wish to observe the peasants dining.
(Fast-motion silent-movie sequence! Papa Brecht plays a frantic, galloping banjo breakdown. Clementine, Big Daddy, and Enzo chop, stir, and fan the flames at warp speed. Clementine sets a steaming five-gallon cauldron of Gumbo on the table. The family's tongues hang out like panting dogs).
(The Vulture Twins sit down, tie giant bibs around their necks, pull out two soup ladles the size of shovels, and begin shoveling the entire cauldron of Gumbo down their throats without offering a single drop. Crab shells fly everywhere).
🔊 AUDIO CUE: The deafening blast of a MISSISSIPPI STEAMBOAT FOGHORN mixed with a 1920s JAZZ TROMBONE SOLO at stadium volume. The Twins freeze with whole crab claws sticking out of their mouths. The family freezes mid-drool. Four seconds of surreal noise. Silence returns. They keep chewing ferociously.
MA MAW: (Twitching) Ain't you gonna leave us one spoonful to test for botulism?!
BEAUMONT: (Spraying rice from his mouth) Charity builds character through deprivation, Auntie! Watching us eat is spiritually nourishing!
(A Western Union boy on roller skates crashes straight through the courtyard fence, slams a yellow telegram onto Belmont's forehead, and skates out. Belmont reads it. He chokes on a sausage. Beaumont hits him on the back with a chair; the sausage flies across the room into Big Daddy's eye).
BELMONT: Ruined! The Sheriff padlocked our building! Our "Russian Dukes and Parisian Aristocrats" turned out to be broke Hungarian circus clowns and fugitive bootleggers who paid their rent in counterfeit poker chips!
BEAUMONT: (Looking at his hands in horror) We're... we're poor! We're just like THEM! Run, Belmont, before Ma Maw scrubs us with lye!
(The Twins flee screaming, carrying the hot cauldron of Gumbo between them. Papa Brecht plays a rapid descending banjo scale as they vanish).
TABLEAU IV: The Spring of the Great Stampede
(Three years later. The mountain of unironed laundry now reaches the proscenium arch. Papa Brecht sits quietly. A fancy pink perfumed envelope floats down on a fishing line from the ceiling. The Swamp Brats snatch it).
THE SWAMP BRATS: It's a letter from Paris, France! From brother Billy Bob—who now calls himself "Jean-Luc LeBlanc", the famous French poet!
CLEMENTINE: (Bitterly) What does that beret-wearing traitor want? Did he write an ode to our empty belly?
THE SWAMP BRATS: He says his "bourgeois existential guilt" is giving him indigestion at the Café de Flore! So he took a steamship back to Louisiana and is walking down our street right now to give each of us... A HUNDRED FRANCS!
BIG DADDY: A hundred French francs?! With the exchange rate, that wouldn't buy a wooden leg for a cockroach!
(Papa Brecht pulls a violin bow across his banjo strings, creating an unbearable, screeching horror-movie drone).
MA MAW: (Climbing onto the ironing table, eyes rolling back into her skull like a Pentecostal prophetess) Filthy French money! It's the apocalypse! First thehookworm will eat our toes, then the boll weevils will eat our drawers, then the levee will break and wash us into the Gulf of Mexico covered in boils, ringworm, and French syphilis! We will die blind, toothless, and crusty on the steps of the Cabildo! Crust and damnation! Damnation and crust! And you, Clementine, will iron shrouds in Hell—!
CLEMENTINE: (Raises the ten-pound cast-iron above her head like Thor's hammer) HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!
🔊 AUDIO CUE: Wagner's "RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES" blasts at earth-shattering volume, mixed with the sound of a freight train. Clementine stands heroic and petrified for five glorious seconds. The music cuts dead with the sound of a vinyl record scratching.
CLEMENTINE: (Brings the iron down, splitting the wooden table clean in half) Not me, you bleach-sniffing banshee! I'm done! I'm leaving this mosquito-bitten madhouse! I'm going Up North to Chicago to scrub floors for Al Capone! At least Yankee dollars don't smell like swamp gas! Who's coming?!
ENZO: (Clinging to Clementine's ankle) Io! Take me to Detroit! I'll tell Henry Ford I invented the steering wheel!
BIG DADDY: (Getting his spurs tangled in a fishnet) Wait for Big Daddy! I'm going to California to get one of them "old-age pensions" and marry a silent-movie starlet!
CLEMENTINE: You're hallucinating, you senile possum, you ain't worked a legal day since the Civil War!
THE SWAMP BRATS: (Putting on stolen Mardi Gras masks) We're going to Beverly Hills to be nannies for rich babies and pawn their silver rattles!
(They grab absurd luggage: a stuffed alligator head, a broken washbasin, a birdcage with no bird. They form a conga line and march out the front gate. Papa Brecht plays "When the Saints Go Marching In" horribly out of tune on his kazoo as Clementine drags Enzo out by his leg).
TABLEAU V: The Chemical Epilogue
(Night falls instantly. The courtyard is empty. Eerie green moonlight. MA MAW stands alone in the center, hair standing on end like Bride of Frankenstein. BLIND PAPA BRECHT plays a slow, mournful, weeping St. Louis Blues on the banjo).
MA MAW: (Counting maniacally on her fingers) Six of 'em left... Six times a hundred... That's SIX HUNDRED FRANCS FOR ME! All mine! (She begins waltzing with her wire brush). Oh, glory! I can buy fifty gallons of industrial muriatic acid! Formaldehyde! Borax, arsenic, turpentine, magnesium nitrate, and pure hospital-grade chloride! I'll scrub the skin right off the bricks!
🔊 AUDIO CUE: A whistling TEA KETTLE starts shrieking softly, growing louder and more piercing as Ma Maw loses her mind.
MA MAW: (Dropping to her knees, scratching furiously at a floorboard) I see you, French microbe! Don't you wink at me!
(Three slow, pompous knocks echo on the wooden courtyard door: KNOCK... KNOCK... KNOCK. The whistling tea kettle cuts off instantly. Papa Brecht hits a deep, vibrating bass string).
MA MAW: (Cocks her pump-action lye sprayer like a Winchester shotgun. A terrifying, blissful smile spreads across her face) Ah... my six hundred francs have arrived. (Bellowing at the door) COME ON IN, PRODIGAL SON! HAND OVER THAT CASH AND STRIP OFF THEM PARISIAN PANTALOONS, 'CAUSE MAMA'S GONNA FUMIGATE YOU ALIVE!
(The rotting wooden door creaks open two inches. We do not see Jean-Luc. Only a single, dainty HAND wearing an aristocratic purple velvet opera glove reaches through the crack. It clutches a massive fan of surreal, oversized French Francs glowing in radioactive neon pink, electric green, and ultraviolet).
(Ma Maw cackles—a laugh between an opera diva and a hyena—and pumps the sprayer furiously, engulfing the glowing neon money and the velvet hand in a thick white cloud of chemical mist).
(Stage lights snap off, leaving only two tight pin-spots: one illuminating the glowing neon banknotes inside the cloud of lye, and the other on BLIND PAPA BRECHT).
BLIND PAPA BRECHT: (Singing slowly, with a wicked wink to the audience)
And that's how you wash your sins away,
With carbolic acid and lye-soap spray!
The family's gone, the mind is shot...
(Spits on the floor, hits one final dissonant banjo chord)
Sure is a mighty clean... vacant lot!
FAST BLACKOUT & CURTAIN
RAGTIME WITH A TOUCH OF BRECHT © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
