you’re about to get a very short synopsis of my new play that’s coming out. Tell me what you think.

Grand Rapids dirt holds

a perfect grave measured square—

inheritance bleeds

Axes misaligned,

father down, son toward the sky—

grief becomes physics

In the transcripts of Diggers, the first play in the Furniture Foundry Fulcrum trilogy, Monet Marcel by Delray announces himself as a playwright of rare structural ambition. Set against the industrial and psychic landscape of Grand Rapids, Michigan—“the furniture city”—the play is less concerned with wood and steel than with what the transcripts call “the ghosts in the machinery.” This is not a conventional kitchen-sink drama. It dismantles the kitchen entirely.

At the center is a father, Dig, obsessed with carving a perfect rectangle into the earth—a grave of exact proportions. His son, Digger, who renames himself Alex, strains toward the sky, toward flight, toward transcendence. Their conflict is described not merely as emotional estrangement but as “coordinate misalignment.” They occupy different geometric orientations: one fixed downward in containment, the other upward in escape. The tragedy is architectural.

What distinguishes Marcel’s writing is his use of what production notes describe as “subjective grammar”—a fusion of arithmetic and liturgy. The play is structured like a sestina, rotating through six emotional stations: song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss. These tropes recur in shifting order, creating an algorithm of inheritance. The audience senses inevitability without stability—an elegant metaphor for generational trauma.

The coined term “fathcorn”—defined as “steal from my pop, become my father”—haunts the trilogy. Rebellion becomes replication. Escape becomes inheritance.

There is growing industry conversation about the future life of this work. With whispers of workshop development involving Ross Egan and the Asolo Repertory Theatre, Diggers feels poised for a significant theatrical incubation. In a regional theatre landscape increasingly hungry for formally daring, structurally rigorous new writing, Marcel’s trilogy offers something rare: a civic myth built from dirt, geometry, and trembling human voice.

Six stations rotate:

song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss—

looped destiny hums

Monet MARCEL by DELRAY

Deep dive transcript——-

I want you to picture Grand Rapids, Michigan, the furniture city. We usually think of that in terms of you know, industry right, dining tables office,

chairs, the physical stuff. But we aren't here for the furniture, we're here to talk about the uh ghosts in the machinery.

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm. deeply messy and human that it kind of rewires how you think about family drama entirely.

[Speaker changed]

It really does. It takes the typical kitchen sink drama and just I mean it completely dismantles the kitchen. We're diving into the furniture foundry

fulcrum trilogy and I wanna be very specific right off the bat, this is the work of Monet Marcel, Monet Marcel of Delray. I think

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm.

[Speaker changed]

Yeah.

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and specifically we're gonna focus on the first play in this cycle Diggers, because from what I've read in these notes, these proton docs and essays

Diggers, is the wound. It's the origin story for everything that follows.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. If you look at the trilogy as a living body, Diggers is the initial injury. It's what the source is called the foundational family wound. And what's

fascinating here is well the playwright doesn't just use dialogue or shouting matches to explain that wound, they use geometry, they use arithmetic,

they use something called subjective grammar.

[Speaker changed]

But here it's actually about how people stand on the earth or you know look, at the sky.

[Speaker changed]

Right. It's suggests that our emotional problems are actually physics problem.

[Speaker changed]

That's a great way to put it. It's the physics of grief.

[Speaker changed]

So we have a lot to unpack today. We have a father obsessed with a perfect rectangle in the dirt. We have a son trying to launch himself into the

stratosphere. And we have a mathematical structure, a cystina that traps them all in a loop.

[Speaker changed]And we absolutely have to talk about the fatth corn.

[Speaker changed]

The fatth corn. Oh we cannot forget the fatth corn. That word alone gave me chills when I read the definition in the source material. But let's not get

ahead of ourselves. Before we get into the heavy geometry of grief, can you just lay out the landscape for us What. is this trilogy what are we looking

at?

[Speaker changed]

to the ritual to the civic.

Sure. So the furniture foundry fulcrum is a triptych, three plays. And the sources describe the arc in a really beautiful way. It moves from the personal

[Speaker changed]

Like a camera lens zooming out.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. So play one is our focus today. Diggers, right? Diggers is the intimate personal story. It's the family wound. It's a very claustrophobic set-up.

A father, Dig, and his son, Digger, who is also known as Alex, locked in the struggle over land inheritance and naming.

[Speaker changed]

Then we move to play two. Shiva or, seven days of waste.

[Speaker changed]

Which is the communal mourning. If Diggers is about the impossibility of outrunning the past, Shiva asks, what do we do with what's left behind?

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The objects, the bodies.

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The mess, yeah. It widens the lens from the family unit to the community that has to you know clean up that mess.

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And then the finale. The gospel according to Mary. Or sometimes just called fulcrum.

[Speaker changed]

Right and fulcrum is key here. The notes mention that fulcrum isn't just a title, it's the structural concept of the whole cycle. A fulcrum is a balance

point, and in each play the balance point shifts regarding who carries the history. By the time we get to the third play, the lens has widened to the city

itself to Grand Rapids. It deals with displacement development, and who gets erased from the map.

[Speaker changed]Diggers.

[Speaker changed]

Diggers. Because if you don't understand the wound and the dirt, you can't understand the rest of the city.

[Speaker changed]

Correct. You can't understand the lever if you don't know where the fulcrum is placed.

[Speaker changed]

So let's talk about dig and digger, the father and the son. The notes describe their conflict as a coordinate misalignment, which is such a cool clinical

way to describe a family fight. It sounds like an engineering failure.

[Speaker changed]

An engineering failure in a sense, and this comes directly from that subjective grammar theory we found in the production documents. It suggests

that the tragedy between these two isn't just that they don't get along emotionally or, you know, have different interests, it's that they exist in different

geometric orientations.

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm. And specifically he's obsessed with the grave.

[Speaker changed]

Which is exact.

Yes. The perfect rectangle. The sources mention this repeatedly. Dig is trying to dig the perfect grave. He wants geometric perfection in the earth.

[Speaker changed]

Right. It's a geometry of containment. He believes that if he can just get the angles right, if he can make the container perfect, he can somehow

contain the history or maybe contain the grief.

[Speaker changed]

Which is

[Speaker changed]

Wow. That's heavy. And then you have the son Digger.

[Speaker changed]

he wants to be Alex.

Who is desperate to look anywhere but down. His coordinate system is oriented upward, toward the sky. He wants escape, he wants transcendence,

[Speaker changed]Mm. But he calls himself Alex. Alex.

[Speaker changed]

Right Alex, is an individual identity. Alex has a future. Alex is a pilot. Digger belongs to the dirt. Alex belongs to the air.

[Speaker changed]

Mm.

[Speaker changed]

And because their eyes never meet on the horizontal plane.

[Speaker changed]

Connection is impossible. That's the coordinate misalignment. They literally cannot see each other because their vectors are pointing in opposite

directions. The tragedy is geometric. They could stand next to each other for a hundred years and never actually meet.

[Speaker changed]

That is so heartbreakingly logical. It's like no amount of therapy fixes that if you're living on different axes. You're just shouting past each other.

[Speaker changed]

And that misalignment creates the vacuum where the drama happens, but the playwright doesn't just leave it at geometry. They layer in arithmetic.

[Speaker changed]

Oh yes. The math. I saw the proton docs in the source pile. These notes on subjective grammar from math. And this is where it gets really interesting

for me because, you know, you usually think of poetry and math as opposites. Math is cold, poetry is feeling. But here the playwright is using

arithmetic as a linguistic engine.

[Speaker changed]

use the structure of a sestina.

It's fascinating. The notes discuss how arithmetic isn't just adding numbers, it's the formal machinery that underlies meaning. And specifically they

[Speaker changed]

For those of us who haven't taken a poetry workshop in a decade, remind us, what is a sestina?

[Speaker changed]

A. sestina is a very strict, very old poetic form. It dates back to like the twelfth century troubadours, It. doesn't use rhyme Instead. it uses repetition.

It relies on six end words. You have six stanzas of six lines each. The same six words that end the lines of the first stanza have to end the lines of every

other stanza, but in a specific rotating order, a mathematical remix exactly, It's. an algorithm It. creates a sense of obsession, because these words

keep coming back over and over, you can't escape them, but in diggers, playwright doesn't just use words, they use tropes, emotional stations.[Speaker changed]

Right I, have a list here. The six tropes are song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. So imagine the play isn't just a linear story where A. leads to B., it's a liturgical machine. The characters are trapped in an algorithm where

they must hit these six emotional stations. They have no choice.

[Speaker changed]

So in one cycle, say the the moonlight pass as, the notes call it, you might have a sequence like song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss.

[Speaker changed]

Right. And think about the emotional logic there. If a hug comes after silence, that hug might feel like a relief. It's intimate.

[Speaker changed]

It's breaking the tension. It says, I forgive you.

[Speaker changed]

Yeah. But then the machine rotates. In the next cycle, the sunshine pass, the order flips. Now you might have kiss, song, joke, prayer, hug, silence.

[Speaker changed]

Think about that. If you pray immediately after telling a joke, is that prayer sincere? Or is it brittle?

[Speaker changed]

Is it an apology for the joke?

[Speaker changed]

proposition.

Maybe. And if a kiss starts the scene instead of ending it, it changes everything. A kiss at the end is a resolution, a kiss at the beginning is a

[Speaker changed]

Or maybe a goodbye.

[Speaker changed]

Or a goodbye. The emotional weather changes completely, even though the components are identical.

[Speaker changed]

hug.

That is wild. So the audience starts to feel this inevitability Like. I know a hug is coming, but I don't know if it's gonna be a violent hug or a comforting[Speaker changed]

Exactly. It creates the sensation of return without stability, you're trapped in the loop, the sestina, but the ground keeps shifting under your feet. It's

a perfect structural metaphor for generational trauma. You're doing the same things your parents did, but the context is different, so it feels new and

old at the same time.

[Speaker changed]

Because we really need to talk about the women in this trilogy. Specifically Gretchen, Marguerite and Mary. Yes. In Diggers, Gretchen is there orbiting

this father-son conflict, but she's well she's silent. She's almost like a ghost in the room.

[Speaker changed]

She holds the silence trope from that list of six.

[Speaker changed]

She does. But what's brilliant about the trilogy is that the tropes migrate. They aren't stuck to one character forever, they act like a contagion or, you

know, an inheritance. You can catch silence from someone else.

[Speaker changed]

Becomes Marguerite's voicelessness in the backstory, the thing she couldn't say, which eventually becomes Mary losing the text in the final play.

[Speaker changed]

Right. Tell me about Mary, because the notes make a big deal about her role in the end. Seems like she's the key to the whole lot.

[Speaker changed]

So in the gospel, according to Mary, she is supposed to teach Sunday school, she's the authority figure, she's supposed to have the answers, but she

forgets her Bible. She loses the stable text.

[Speaker changed]

But structurally it's a revelation. Because she doesn't have the book, the authority, the rigid rules, she has to improvise. She starts misremembering

scripture, she mixes up proverbs and Psalms, she tells stories about moonlight and sunshine that keep changing.

[Speaker changed]

And the notes say this is actually the envoy of the sestina.

[Speaker changed]

Yes. In a sestina the envoy is the final three lines where all six words come together. It's the knot, the release of pressure. And Mary's speech, her

flawed human trembling act of telling, is that release.

[Speaker changed]

So while Dig was trying to make a perfect rectangle in the earth, something rigid, something dead, Mary is making something messy and alive.[Speaker changed]

You have to retell it even if you get it wrong.

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In fact getting it wrong might be the most honest thing you can do.

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That's what the notes seem to argue.

[Speaker changed]

Wow. That's a powerful distinction. The perfect grave versus the trembling story. One craps you, the other frees you.

[Speaker changed]

It really is, and it brings us back to that terrifying word you mentioned earlier, the word that sums up the trap.

[Speaker changed]

The fathcorn.

[Speaker changed]

The fathcorn.

[Speaker changed]

Okay lay, it on me. What is the fathcorn? Because it sounds ancient, but it's actually a coined term for this play.

[Speaker changed]

It is. The term appears in the notes as a unique concept for this cycle. It represents a specific terrifying cycle of male inheritance. The phrase used to

define it is, steal from my pop, become my father.

[Speaker changed]

Steal from my pop, become my father. That is ominous.

[Speaker changed]

It turns the whole idea of rebellion on its head Usually. we think that if a son fights his father, if he wins, he escapes. He becomes his own man.

[Speaker changed]

Right. You kill the king, you start a new kingdom.

[Speaker changed]But the fathcorn says no, it says that inheritance isn't a gift, it's a theft. The notes use Promethean imagery here, the lantern and stolen fire.

[Speaker changed]

Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. But in this family cycle, when the son steals the fire, when he takes the power or the identity from the father, he doesn't just get the power,

he becomes the father. The act of theft transforms the thief into the very thing he was running from.

[Speaker changed]

the ground.

Trying to escape dig, trying to look up at the sky, if he takes that fire, if he wins the battle for the name, he just becomes another dig looking down at

[Speaker changed]

The notes ask a very specific question. Is this cycle a cautionary tale or is it a form of captivity? Yeah.

[Speaker changed]

It can expect from the rectangle again, doesn't it?

[Speaker changed]

It does. If you aren't trapped in the fathcorn, you are trapped in the geometry of your ancestors. You think you're escaping, you think you're looking

up, but the coordinate system is rigged. You're just rotating through the sestina.

[Speaker changed]

Hitting the same stations.

[Speaker changed]

Song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss, you're just the next actor in the same role.

[Speaker changed]

That is profound and also slightly terrifying. It makes you wonder if Alex ever really stood a chance against Digger.

[Speaker changed]

Well and that's why the feminine presence is so vital. The men are locked in this binary father-son, down-up dig digger, it's a closed loop, a zero sum

game. But the women marry, specifically break the binary. She loses the text, she makes mistakes, she introduces subjective grammar, that allows for

a new kind of storytelling.

[Speaker changed]

Drop the book.[Speaker changed]

Man. So if we zoom out and look at this whole furniture foundry fulcrum trilogy, Diggers is the wound. It sets the coordinates. It establishes this

misalignment that bleeds through everything else.

[Speaker changed]

It sets the stage for the ritual of Shiva and the political reckoning of fulcrum. It all starts with that geometric tragedy in the dirt. You can't heal the city

until you acknowledge the shape of the hole in the ground.

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Speaker changed]

We haven't even quoted a line of dialogue and yet the math tells the whole story.

[Speaker changed]

tropes is the destiny.

The form is the content. That's the power of structural ambition. The sestina isn't just a container for the words, it is the plot. The rotation of the

[Speaker changed]

So what does this all mean for us? Why should we care about sestinas and coordinate systems and plays and grand rapids?

[Speaker changed]

I think it asks us to look at our own inheritances. We all have a subjective grammar, we all have a way we orient ourselves to the world, are we looking

up, looking down, looking back.

[Speaker changed]

And are those orientations inherited?

[Speaker changed]

really it's just the next stanza?

Are we repeating the same six tropes? Are we just acting out song, prayer, silence, in a different order than our parents, thinking it's a new life, when

[Speaker changed]

Are we just remixing their lives and calling it our own?

[Speaker changed]

Yeah.[Speaker changed]

Oof That. is home. It makes you question how much agency we really have.

[Speaker changed]

It should. The fathcorn isn't just a concept for a play, it's a question for everyone. Steal from my pop, become my father. How do you break that? How

do you steal the fire without burning yourself up?

[Speaker changed]

Maybe you break it by losing the script, like Mary. Maybe the answer isn't to win the fight, but to change the language.

[Speaker changed]

Maybe. Or maybe you break it by realising that the perfect rectangle doesn't exist.

[Speaker changed]

That's a thought to hold onto. We've covered the math, the myth, the geometry of grief. But here is one final thing I wanna leave you with, something

to mull over. We talked about the fathcorn becoming the thing you run from. But consider the perfect rectangle of the grave that Dick is so obsessed

with.

[Speaker changed]

A geometry of containment.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. But in nature there are no perfect rectangles. The earth doesn't do right angles, roots twist, rocks are jagged, the ground shifts. So ask

yourself, in your own family history, what is the perfect rectangle you are trying to dig? What is the rigid shape you are trying to force your life or your

children's lives into?

[Speaker changed]

Thanks for diving deep with us.

[Speaker changed]

Always a pleasure. Okay, let's start with the visual.

Thank you

Steal fire from your

father, wake in his shadow—

fathcorn takes your name

Mary drops the book.

Crooked stories break right angles—

the city exhales