Mercy for the Meek

In the first few months of quarantine, back when it felt more like a vacation from real life responsibilities (i.e. working late night shifts as a hostess) than a sentence to purgatory, I started reading a book I had bought at the Getty Museum in California a year prior. It was a modern translation of a medieval “bestiary”, a collection of encyclopedia-style entries about various real and fictional animals. The text itself was funny, bizarre, and at some points, very dark, and by the end of reading The Bestiary I felt compelled to write something about animals that dealt with death. You see, in these medieval entries, every animal had a Christ-like significance. They would die and resurrect, kill their pups—all of the sort of darkness you could expect from a text from such a bleak period in history. I started to write a radio play about rats. I figured if I finished the script by June 2020, I’d be able to record all the parts before the academic year began.

Quarantine, however, ended up far more eventful than I could have ever anticipated, and the idea was scrapped during the June protests that swept the nation. I was very disappointed to begin the semester without a quarantine project under my belt. And I was even more disappointed to have never written something quirky about rats.

Ultimately, this became the generative idea for Mercy for the Meek—I traded gritty sewer rats for docile mice, and decided to craft a story that dealt with very serious issues around a drama that I could more easily wrap my 20-year-old head around: teenage hormones. The conceit of Mercy for the Meek is that it’s a comedy surrounded by bleakness and awfulness (which I think is timely). Much like the medieval texts I read, the subject matter is at times dark, but (also like the medieval texts I read) the presentation of all this absurdity and terror is funny.

Right before I began to write the second draft of this script, I was forced to put down my family dog of fifteen years. It was an intense experience to watch the eyes of an animal as it dies—especially one that I loved dearly. But it is an experience that, as a human on the precipice of true adulthood, I am happy to have had. Because I think it taught me, on a base level, the preciousness and fragility of life, and how much power I have as a person with opposable thumbs. Now two years after production, finally finished with the help of my incredible collaborators, my hope is that when you watch Mercy for the Meek this human tenderness—above all the bleakness and dark comedy— moves you as much as it moves me.