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I Know What Stillness Is

A two-person drama scene from Trifles by Susan Glaspell. About 1 min.

While the men search a farmhouse for a motive, two women left in the kitchen have found the dead canary, and begin to understand why a quiet wife might have killed her husband.

Mrs. Hale
40s to 50s. A farmer’s wife who knew Minnie as a girl
Mrs. Peters
40s to 50s. The sheriff’s wife, married to the law
You read

  1. The Wrights’ farmhouse kitchen. The men have gone upstairs. The two women sit not looking at one another, as if afraid of what they are saying.

  2. Mrs. Peters

    We don’t know who killed the bird.

  3. Mrs. Hale

    I knew John Wright.

  4. Mrs. Peters

    It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs Hale. Killing a man while he slept, slipping a rope around his neck that choked the life out of him.

  5. Mrs. Hale

    His neck. Choked the life out of him.

  6. Her hand goes out and rests on the bird-cage.

  7. Mrs. Peters

    We don’t know who killed him. We don’t know.

  8. Mrs. Hale

    If there’d been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still, after the bird was still.

  9. Mrs. Peters

    I know what stillness is. When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old, and me with no other then—

  10. Mrs. Hale

    How soon do you suppose they’ll be through, looking for the evidence?

  11. Mrs. Peters

    I know what stillness is.

  12. Mrs. Peters

    The law has got to punish crime, Mrs Hale.

  13. Mrs. Hale

    I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons and stood up there in the choir and sang.

  14. Mrs. Hale

    Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?

  15. Mrs. Peters

    We mustn’t—take on.

Public domain, Susan Glaspell, 1916. Text from Project Gutenberg #10623.

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