History of Western Theatre: 17th Century to Now/American Post-WWII

"American playwrights...tend to show a steady downhill pattern in their careers...Their early (often quite autobiographical) work is their best, so that instead of showing a steady deepening and maturing of purpose and skill, their careers frequently become a rather sad and often frantic attempt to recapture the magic and lost innocence of first things” (Rosenberg, 1967 p 53).

=Tennessee Williams=



Among American playwrights after World War II, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) figures predominantly with "The glass menagerie" (1944), "A streetcar named desire" (1947), and "Summer and smoke" (1948).

"The glass menagerie" is “a play in which time becomes a central concern. So, Amanda’s present, in which she exists on the margins of society, surviving by pandering to those whose support she needs, is contrasted to a past in which, at least on the level of memory and imagination, she was at the centre of attention. Laura’s wilful withdrawal into the child-like world of her menagerie derives its sad irony precisely from the fact that it is a denial of her own maturity, of time. Even her ‘gentleman caller’ is momentarily forced to confront the discrepancy between the promise of his high school years (recalled by the photograph in a school yearbook) and the reality of his present life. Time has already begun to break these people as their fantasies and dreams are denied by the prosaic facts of economic necessity and natural process alike. Laura seeks immunity by withdrawing into the timeless world of the imagined, Amanda by retreating into a past refashioned to offer consolation. Tom alone seems to have escaped these ironies, at the price of abandoning those whose lives he had shared. But the play itself is the evidence that he has no more escaped that past than have his family. For why else does he summon this world into existence but for the fact that the past continues to exert its power, as the guilt engendered by his abandonment pulls him back to those whose sacrifice he had believed to be the necessary price of his freedom” (Bigsby, 2005 p 268). The play "translated a depression story into a sensitive character drama. It gave evocative realization to the ineffectual struggles of a small family- a seedy Southern woman who clung to the memory of better days, her painfully shy crippled daughter for whom the mother tried to find 'a gentleman caller', and a restive poetic son who, tiring of perpetual nagging, ran away from home after the tragi-comic fiasco of bringing an already affianced young man for his sister" (Gassner, 1954a, pp 698-699). Berkowitz (1992) suggested that "rather than rejecting Amanda and Laura as misfits, we [should] cherish them as beautiful alternatives to the ordinary" (p 89). However, such an attitude reduces the sadness inherent in Laura's failure to find her man. "Laura retreats into her world of illusion, in which a menagerie of glass animals stands as symbol of her fragility. Poignantly and tenderly drawn, Laura has little chance of a life independent of her overbearing mother, who thrives on memories of a romantic youth in which she was the lady of choice to a gaggle of gentleman callers. The play, which is offered as a memory, is both powerful and sad, capturing the spirit and the longing of one who now lives on the edge of poverty but who has known a finer life" (Schlueter, 2000, p 299). “The tender insight into character, the delicate symbolism, the familiarity with the environment, and the sustained tone of elegy were like a revelation of what superb theater could be” (Atkinson, 1974 pp 405-406). “Laura is incapable of adopting the role of the belle. Her intense sexual frustration combined with her father’s abandonment and her mother’s tyranny have produced such a fragile sense of self that she is utterly incapable of the kind of projection required in the coquettish behaviors Amanda prescribes...Amanda understands the social and economic realities of their world, and, by modelling the role of the belle, she attempts to teach her daughter an important survival technique” (Hovis, 2011 p 179). Because of the tediousness of his job, Tom rejects "society's demands on working, self-sufficient, upwardly mobile young people" and so abandons mother and sister in favor of his own happiness (Greenfield, 1982 p 122). Such critics have an overly negative opinion of Jim in that "his values hold out a false hope for a wonderful America" (p 123) when his values have no direct influence on the plot. Likewise, Fleche (1997) finds Jim's associations funny when he equates knowledge with money and power; there is also a fear that "science's explanations imply an insidious will to mastery" (p 85). Granted that Jim represents a false hope for the Wingfields, that does not mean his ideas, irrelevant to Laura's fate, are false. A positive view of Jim was expressed by Krasner (2006) in that Jim “exudes optimism”, “amuses everyone with his upbeat mood”, ‘believes in the future”, “does not let the Depression discourage him” (p 32).

"The shock of A Streetcar Named Desire when it was first staged lay in the fact that, outside of O’Neill’s work, this was the first American play in which sexuality was patently at the core of the lives of all its principal characters, a sexuality with the power to redeem or destroy, to compound or negate the forces which bore on those caught in a moment of social change” (Bigsby, 2005 p 277). The play is “a modern tragedy without a hero or a villain; each protagonist is also an antagonist, and so instead of a hero’s journey, we are offered rather a raw and painful view of human misunderstanding” (Keith, 2018 p 174). The play “placed in opposition to Stanley Kowalski at the beginning of play, [Blanche as] the aristocrat who condescends to the plebeian when she is not actually scorning him...Stella is fortunate...as ordinary people, who have an aptitude for the ‘blisses of the commonplace’, are fortunate. Blanche, on the contrary, cannot renounce her view of herself as a rare individual...One cannot help pitying [Blanche] and also laughing at her because the life she affects to despise seems so invincibly alive while her eyes are fixed on a decadent past. But pity claims priority because her helplessness is so palpable, and because she is so evidently concealing a wounded past” (Gassner, 1965 pp 375-381). “Her consuming need...is to make herself and others aware of her refinement. She is concealing her tawdry past of alcoholism, incontinence, and common prostitution” (Gassner, 1954b pp 355-356). "Before Blanche’s arrival, Stanley and Stella enjoyed, through compromise, an intimate, happy marriage, and in this could be said to have achieved a degree of civilization, of humanity, unequaled by the DuBoises of Belle Reve, a distortion of “beau rêve”, beautiful dream; before Blanche’s arrival, Stanley also enjoyed the best of friendships with Mitch, who in some ways is as sensitive and in need of understanding as Blanche" (Cardullo, 2016 p 90). When Blanche arrives via "A streetcar named desire", Stanley immediately resents her presence, viewing her as a threat in reminding Stella "of their past prior refinement and sophistication" (Krasner, 2006 p 41). "Blanche stands for idealism, culture, purity, and the love of beauty, but also for falsehood, fantasy, weakness, and the rejection of unpleasant reality" (Berkowitz, 1992 p 90). Blanche is the southern belle clashing in the new south, a more hostile environment than the old south she is used to, when “ante-bellum days represent an ideal of gracious living, an ideal that includes a code of personal honor extending into every area of his experience...So Blanche appears high-strung and sensitive, on one hand, but exploiting the Kowalskis’ resources and willing to destroy her sister’s marriage, on the other. As in her youth, she plays the coquette, requesting Stanley to button up her dress, teaching Mitch how to present flowers by bowing first, dropping a French word or two. But when a tempting newsboy enters, coyness turns to downright kissing. Yet clinging to the old ways governs her mind when she refuses to bed with Mitch, disillusioned after Stanley’s report of her past conduct, even when pre-nuptial copulation appears as her last hope. The situation worsens when instead of submitting to Mitch’s love she is raped by Stanley, the opposite pole of southern gallantry. Nevertheless, at the end, the intruding imposter appears worthy of pity through accumulated maledictions: husband’s suicide, family deaths, loss of Belle Reve, job dismissal, and send-off to a psychiatric institution" (Porter, 1969, pp 154-173). The newsboy scene's "real poignancy, is its evocation of Blanche’s own lost innocence as well as her imagination and depth of feeling- an innocence or purity suggested by her very name (the feminine form of the adjective 'white' in French), which identifies her with the achromatic color white as opposed to Stanley’s primary colors and by her astrological sign, Virgo (for 'virgin'). We may see Blanche in the negative light of seductress here, but we should also see her in a positive light, as one who recognizes her own lost innocence (not accidentally, in the figure of a young man who recalls Allan Grey) and responds to it effusively. This is one way of explaining her turning to a seventeen-year-old boy for an affair in Laurel after her many 'intimacies' with men at the Hotel Flamingo: in turning to a boy, Blanche was attempting to return to her own youth when, with Allan, she 'made the discovery- love. All at once and much, much too completely” (Cardullo, 2016 p 100). "More than any major character in the early postwar years, Blanche embodies the conflicts of a changing world. A lover of poetry and music and ballroom taffeta, Blanche stands as a fading tribute to refined life unable to survive in Stanley Kowalski’s crude and raucous world. Herself a complicated woman, Blanche has memories of an ideal she may never herself have known and finds refuge in alcohol and lies" (Schlueter, 2000, p 300). “Stanley’s reference to Blanche as a ‘queen’...reveal that his resentment stems at least in part from class envy...In his relationships with both Blanche and Stella, Stanley longs to reduce them to his level, as his remark about dragging Stella ‘down off them columns’ indicates. Alternatively, Stanley posits himself as royalty” (Harrington, 2002 p 71). Mitch’s rejection of Blanche is a cruel counterpart of her rejection of her homosexual husband (Featherstone, 2008 p 265). “Blanche finds her own version of Stanley in Mitch, who, although of the same working-class background as Stanley, has ‘a sort of sensitive look’ and seems to her ‘superior’ to his other friends. Mitch becomes the ‘cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in’, and Blanche admits to Stella that she wants ‘to deceive him enough to make him want me’. The deception involves her acting out the tradition, refusing any sexual activity beyond a kiss because, she tells Mitch, she has ‘old-fashioned ideals’. Williams makes sure that the audience is aware of Blanche’s acting, as she rolls her eyes when she says this, and, perhaps more dangerously, compares herself to the most famous courtesan in literature, Alexandre Dumas fils’s Camille, when she tells him ‘Je suis la Dame aux Camellias! Vous êtes Armand.’ and after Mitch assures her that he doesn’t understand French, asks him, 'Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?’ [Would you like to sleep with me this evening?], which it wouldn’t take a great knowledge of French for someone who frequents the French Quarter of New Orleans to understand. There is a dangerous flirtation with self-exposure in Blanche’s behavior with Mitch that is related to her guilt over her behavior with Allan and her reckless promiscuity subsequently. Nonetheless, she succeeds in deceiving Mitch until Stanley discovers her past, with its ‘intimacies with strangers’, and she is forced to admit it to Mitch, who finds her no longer ‘straight’ or ‘clean enough to bring in the house with [his] mother’ despite her plea, ‘I didn’t lie in my heart’” (Murphy, 2014 p 78). "There is a doubleness about Blanche’s involvement with Mitch. In each case, she seems less interested in the affair for its own sake than in the ritual of romance in its relation to her first love, the defining relationship of her life...Similarly, she recognizes the possibilities for imaginatively evoking the past when she flirts with the newspaper boy” (Hovis, 2011 pp 178-182). “Blanche...calculates the effect of her performance on her various audiences...By contrast, Stella dispenses with the role of belle and speaks candidly to her husband, trusting him to respect her openness with commensurate tenderness and honesty. Stella fled Belle Reve and the example of her older sister perhaps because she recognized the dangers of performance. Unfortunately, Stella fails to recognize the dangers of not performing. “The duality of Dionysius whose gift of wine can bring both pleasure and madness permeates this world. Similarly, the play’s Dionysian sexual passion leads both to ecstasy (desire) and destruction (cemeteries) while the inexorable passage of time juxtaposes Blanche’s poetic dream of Elysian Fields with the decay of the Quarter. The plot embodies the complex structure and climax of Aristotelian drama, but Williams alters its proportions to his own dramatic ends. While the play fits no standard definition of tragedy, Blanche’s struggle with Stanley endows her with the status of a tragic figure. Intro- duced as an unsympathetic and pretentious snob, she becomes more sympathetic as she mentally disintegrates over the play’s 11 scenes. Following the rising action of scenes 1–6, the brutal reversal stretches over scenes 7–9 culminating in the violent climax when Stanley rapes Blanche at the end of scene 10. The painful extended denouement of scene 11 reveals the irrevocable change in the lives of the central characters” (Berwind, 2015 p 242). Unlike Blanche’s, Stella’s passivity is real and Stanley takes advantage of it by intermittingly bullying her and by virtually denying her a voice in the affairs of their home. He invites his drinking buddies over for poker nights and ignores her objections. He physically and emotionally abuses her, even when she is pregnant- and afterward, to the chagrin of Blanche, Stella returns home to forgive and make love to her husband. When Stanley ultimately betrays Stella’s trust by raping her sister while Stella is in labor at the hospital, Stella passively accepts Stanley’s denial of Blanche’s report and even acquiesces to his demand that her sister be institutionalized for her delusions...Stella is confronted with the choice of choosing her husband or her sister. Stella chooses Stanley (Lewis, 1965 p 63). “Stella’s concern for her sister on the one hand and her content with her life with her loutish husband are objective and understanding” (Atkinson and Hirschfeld, 1973 p 194). "In contrast to her sister, Stella already has her man, a southern belle content to submit to her husband’s lack of manners and to attend to household affairs in a degraded context. Stanley’s crude taste for say-what-I-think behavior extends to mother-dominated Mitch, who when heading towards the bathroom hears his friend say: 'Hurry back and we’ll fix you a sugar-tit.' For entertainment, he wants sex and 'getting the colored lights going', akin to a people’s taste for fireworks and kaleidoscopes. There is ironic contrast between words and acts. While Stanley dirties his sister-in-law’s reputation, Blanche takes a bath" (Corrigan, 1987, p 31). "When Blanche leaves for the insane asylum, and the oblivion attending it, at the end of Scene 11, Stanley remains behind with Stella: his way of life thus appears to have won out over his sister-in-law’s. But it is not that simple. Life for the Kowalskis will never be the same after Blanche’s departure, and Williams provides plenty of evidence for this conclusion in the final scene of the play— evidence that, once again, has hitherto mostly been ignored by critics. If the Mexican woman of scene 9 is the symbol of death, desire, and the past in A Streetcar Named Desire, then the newborn child of Scene 11 is the play’s symbol of life, maternity, and the future for Stella, but not for the paternal Stanley. Stella’s absence from both scene 9 and Scene 10 while she is giving birth, coupled with her reappearance onstage in scene 11, serves to distance her in our minds from her husband and to pressure her relationship with him beyond the perimeters of the play. That Stella does not once speak to Stanley in the last scene of A Streetcar Named Desire (even when addressed by him one time) is indicative of the essential silence that will permeate the rest of their lives together" (Cardullo, 2016 p 97).

"Summer and smoke" as a title "comes from [Hart] Crane’s Emblems of Conduct: ‘By that time summer and smoke were past/Dolphins still played, arching the horizons,/But only to build memories of spiritual gates’. This title from Crane’s work evokes the nostalgia of a world long past its apogee and now declining. Williams’s clear intent is further reinforced in the only passage where Crane’s phrase is echoed, when Alma describes her former “Puritan” self (and by inference all those who lived by this code), late in the play, as having ‘died last summer, suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her’” (Debusscher, 2005 pp 75-76). “Considered alone, the story elements show Williams the potential author of banal novels...The essential worth of Summer and Smoke lies in its integrity as a play. As such it is a compound of story, plot, characterization, atmosphere, mood, and an attitude of sultry irony” (Gassner, 1960 p 220). Alma, whose name evokes the soul, rejects the body in favor of the soul, whereas John does the reverse (Murphy, 2007 p 181). "I am more afraid of your soul than you are of my body," he confesses. They never meet because at the moment when Alma accepts the body, John has accepted Nellie, who seems to incorporate body and soul together. “The play reveals the failure of Alma to find satisfaction of both sex and spiritual values in the man she loves. Her lover is as frightened of her soul as she is of his body; he could not feel decent enough to touch her. Since she cannot find true love, she destroys her spiritual quest and gives herself to the first travelling salesman she meets” (Lumley, 1967 p 187). Gassner (1954a) understood the play as implying that Alma "loses her chance of love as a result of too much fastidiousness...Driven to desperation by ironically losing the man she had kept at a distance too long, Williams’ heroine makes an assignation with the first footloose person she meets. Frustration, painstakingly motivated by her sensitivity and her unhappy family life, starts the idealistic girl on a road that may have many widenings but will ultimately bring her to complete moral, as well as psychological, bankruptcy" (p 741). Ganz (1965) offered an opposite view of Alma's end. "Like Blanche [Dubois of "A streetcar named desire"], she is condemned to be tormented by the urges she had turned away from, and like Blanche she turns to promiscuity, but because her sin has been somewhat mitigated by her realization of it, there is a suggestion at the end of the play that the travelling salesman she has picked may lead her to salvation rather than destruction" (p 210). “Unhappily, [Alma] has grown up in a sheltered environment, mostly in the company of her elders. Years of dull church entertainments and of her father’s dreary sermons have brought alma few contacts with the less inhibited citizens of Glorious Hill. Because of her narrow training, she believes that man’s nature is coarsened by an animality which only his spiritual nature can control. Actually, she herself possesses a truly deep sexual nature which struggles against her protected and arid way of life...For John, too, there is the problem of a ruinous loneliness...He resembles Alma in his need for a warm and stimulating association with a loving woman who understands his real temperament” (Herron, 1969 pp 363-364). “Alma...moves from her rarefied world of genteel art, idealism and hysteria to a less idealized world of drugs and assignations with travelling salesmen. At the same time, John moves in the opposite direction, from dissipation in the violent shadows of the moon lake casino to a career of hard work, heroic medicine and cloying domesticity...[When] Alma and John consider the statue of Eternity...the word at the base of the statue is worn and can no longer be read...It is the juvenile Alma who introduces John to the physical pleasures of tactile understanding...Williams suggests that the way we encounter the boundlessness of the sublime is not by repudiating sexuality but by accepting it...[At the conclusion]...John, having rebelled against patriarchy, suddenly finds his patriarchal impulses become reality with his father’s death. After this, John assumes the patriarchal position and becomes the good doctor, husband and model citizen who repudiates Alma’s advances [as a fallen woman]” (Gross, 2002 pp 93-98). In yet another interpretation of the ending, we have “John marrying the conventional Nellie and Alma seducing a salesman, suggesting that the ultimate winner in every contest is a conservative, business-minded America” (Abbotson, 2010 pp 50-51). Alma “is afraid to confer her love for Buchanan for fear that its mere expression will destroy it. But the irony around which the play is constructed derives from the fact that Alma comes to be convinced of the need to complete her life by conceding the existence of a physical sexuality at precisely the same time that Buchanan learns the insufficiency of the merely physical” (Bigsby, 1984 p 69). “In a schematic way, the two characters change places as Alma realizes the sexual nature of her attraction to John and John comes to see that, despite the fact that there is no ‘soul’ in his anatomy chart, Alma is right that love can be something beyond mere sex because ‘there are some people...who can bring their hearts to it, also- who can bring their souls to it’. Alma first rejects John’s sexual advances because he is ‘not a gentleman’, maintaining her ideals against his sensual desire. But John undergoes a change as a result of his relationship with Alma, and though she ultimately finds that ‘the girl who said no...died last summer- suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her’, she also finds that ‘the tables have turned with a vengeance’ when he says that he couldn’t have sex with her now. He tells her, ‘I’ve come around to your way of thinking, that something else is in there, an immaterial something–as thin as smoke...and knowing it’s there- why then the whole thing- this- this unfathomable experience of ours- takes on a new value, like some– some wildly romantic work in a laboratory’. And he realizes that 'it wasn’t the physical you that I really wanted,’ but a 'flame, mistaken for ice. I still don’t understand it.’ The symbolic scheme and the psychological struggle come together when John rejects Rosa Gonzalez, to whom his attraction is purely sexual, and becomes engaged to Alma’s former music pupil, Nellie Ewell, the daughter of a somewhat notorious woman who picks up salesmen at the train depot. At the end of the play, Nellie has escaped from her mother and has been educated at Sophie Newcomb College. She combines a straightforward, vibrant, and youthful sexuality with a reverence for Miss Alma, whom she calls ‘an angel of mercy’, and the influence Alma has had both on her and on John. John’s future looks to be stable and bourgeois, a conventional if loving marriage which will clearly include a healthy sexual element. Alma’s future, on the other hand, is less conventional. The final scene, in which she picks up a young salesman in front of the fountain, is more ambivalent. Having taken one of her sleeping tablets, which makes her feel ‘like a water-lily on a Chinese lagoon’, she prepares to go off with him to the Moon Lake Casino, the scene of her earlier rejection of John’s advances. Clearly she has different intentions this time, but the meaning of the play’s ending is ambivalent. On the one hand, she is walking in the footsteps of Mrs Ewell, and is probably about to be ostracized by the town. If she continues this way, as Stanley Kowalski says of Blanche DuBois, her future is ‘mapped out for her’. On the other hand, she has accepted a part of her nature whose denial had reduced her to painful loneliness, hysteria and debilitating panic attacks, and seems for the first time to be at peace. As she jokes with the young salesman, she laughs 'in a different way than she has ever laughed before, a little wearily, but quite naturally’. The overall sense at the end of Summer and Smoke is of integration and peace for its two tortured main characters, as well as loss. In the terms of Williams’s symbolic scheme, the fierce flame of spiritual and sexual tension that glowed between them is quenched, leaving the smoke” (Murphy, 2014 pp 70-71).

In general, Feranow (2007) described Williams' plays as "character-driven drama in which the plot is submerged beneath the cumulative events in the lives of the characters. Plot points emerge suddenly, often surprisingly, and reveal hitherto unseen workings of the characters' psyches. This branch of realism is often identified with Chekhov...Added to the Chekhovian structure is the mark of Williams- a romantic attraction to the grotesque, the beautiful spirit in an ugly body, compassion for the broken, the miserable, and the deformed. The plays are neither unrelievedly grim nor the damaged characters doomed, as one would expect in a work by Sartre or Genet. The plays suggest a vague hope, if not redemption, resulting from the characters' suffering" (pp 425-426).

"The glass menagerie"


Time: 1930s. Place: St. Louis, USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.2826 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.234940 http://www.pval.org/cms/lib/NY19000481/Centricity/Domain/105/the_glass_menagerie_messy_full_text.pdf

During an evening at home with her son, Tom, and her daughter, Laura, Amanda Wingfield recalls her youth spent in the south, at Blue Mountain, when young women knew how to talk and gentleman callers were plentiful. She chaffs her daughter about the absence of gentleman callers for her this evening. "What, not one?" she queries ironically. The following day, Amanda is astonished, abashed, and humiliated on learning that Laura, whom she thought a student at a business college, has been spending all that time walking around the city. Laura vomited during a typing speed test and never returned. On his part, Tom often goes to the movies after drudging all day in a warehouse to support the family. Amanda asks him to find a man his sister might date. As her brother, he should be willing to help, because Laura does not appear to be apt to work, nor is she competitive for men's attention. She only seems interested in attending to her glass menagerie and listen to phonograph records. Tom asks a shipping clerk at the warehouse, Jim O'Connor, to come over to his house for dinner without mentioning Laura. Jim already makes more money than he does and appears to have a good future. Amanda queries Tom about Jim's habits and at length is satisfied. On the alley-way landing, "a poor excuse for a porch," according to Amanda, she hopes for the best. Before Jim arrives for dinner, Amanda tries to stuff Laura's breasts with a "deceiver", but she declines to use it. A perturbed Laura recognizes Jim as the boy she once loved in high school and has often thought about ever since. As he enters the house, she panics, leaving the room precipitously in fear. During the course of the evening, Amanda does most of the talking. She has herself prepared salmon but pretends it is Laura's work. When Laura is compelled to come back in, she feels faint and rests on the sofa. Suddenly, the lights go out because Jim has neglected to pay the light bill, spending instead for a shipman's union dues as a first step in moving away, because he does not want to be like those who look at movies instead of moving. After dinner, Laura is left alone with Jim. At ease with the world, Jim thinks she obviously lacks self-confidence. Laura shows him her glass menagerie. While hearing music from the dance hall across the alley, Jim proposes that they dance. While they dance, he clumsily bumps against the glass animals, knocking the unicorn to the floor and breaking off its horn. Jim is very sorry, but Laura says it does not matter. "Now it's just like the other horses," she concludes. As they grow friendlier, Jim reveals in passing he is engaged to be married. On learning this, Amanda is outraged at her son for not knowing in advance about Jim's engagement. After leaving the family and remembering that night's events, Tom advises his imaginary Laura to blow out her candles.

"A streetcar named desire"


Time: 1940s. Place: New Orleans, USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.86608 https://archive.org/details/twentyfivemodern001705mbp

Blanche DuBois arrives at the house of her married sister, Stella Kowalski, to say that she lost their ancestral home in a mortgage, and has no place to stay. Stella's husband, Stanley, is suspicious of his sister-in-law's version and promises to investigate. Blanche meets Mitch, an unattached friend of Stanley at a poker game, and they sympathize. During the course of the night, as the women listen to music, a drunken Stanley tosses out the radio in the street and hits his wife, who first seeks refuge with a neighbor but then, to Blanche's amazement, goes back to him. He confronts Blanche after discovering that she was a regular at the Flamingo Hotel in the town of Laurel, a brothel, but then pretends to believe his informer must have been mistaken. Alone in the apartment, Blanche lets in a young man who collects money for a newspaper, and flirts with him. Despite this interlude, she and Mitch grow fond of each other. She tells him an anecdote from her youth, when she married a man only to discover he was a homosexual. He killed himself and she was left feeling guilty over the event. Mitch needs someone because his cherished mother is near death and he has no one else. On Blanche's birthday, Stanley informs Stella about her sister's wanton tendencies in Laurel. Stella calls her merely "flighty" and blames men's behaviors for the way she behaves. Undeterred, Stanley gives Blanche a one-way bus ticket as a birthday gift. Having learned from Stanley of Blanche's misrepresentations, Mitch does not at first show up at her party. When Mitch finally arrives, he attempts to sleep with her, what he "has been missing all summer", but his brutality makes her cry out until he leaves. With his wife in a hospital bed soon expected to give birth, Stanley chats amiably with Blanche but then his real intention becomes clear as he moves towards her in silk pajamas and carries her off to bed. The Kowalskis, knowing Blanche has no other place to go, alert a psychiatric institution about her plight. A doctor and a nurse arrive to take her away. She is disoriented and begs for sympathy. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers," she affirms while being led away. Suspecting that Stanley had raped her sister, guilt-ridden Stella nevertheless chooses to continue living to her husband than her sister.

"Summer and smoke"
Time: 1910s-1920s. Place: Glorious Hill, USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/summer-and-smoke-by-tennessee-williams-pdf-free.html

Alma seeks to attract her neighbor, John, a handsome medical doctor, just arrived from a prestigious university. She is mocked by her demented mother, who waltzes before her and chants: "Alma's in love, in love." Alma manages to get John to a culture club, but he remains in the club only briefly. In difficulty to sleep, she consults John's father, Dr Buchanan, at 2 AM, but John prevents her from seeing him, diagnosing loneliness as her main trouble. One day, the two friends go out near a gambling casino, where he suggests that the two retire inside a rented room. But the suggestion offends her. "What made you think I might be amenable to such a suggestion?" she coldly asks. She hears a rumor about how John intends to marry the daughter of the owner of the casino, Rosa Gonzales, after having lost a good deal of money, that being the only way to recuperate his losses. A desperate Alma calls Dr Buchanan on the telephone to warn him of his son's intention. As a result, Buchanan orders Rosa and her father out of his house and insults them. Losing control of his anger, Gonzales shoots him to death. Racked by feelings of guilt, Alma confesses to John that she was the person who made the call. Though recognizing that Alma loves him, John dismisses her, specifying that to him she represents "nothing but hand-me-down notions, attitudes, poses". He leaves town to pursue medical research and succeeds in notable discoveries. When he returns, he engages himself to marry Nellie, a musical student of Alma's. Nellie is grateful to Alma, because her future husband revealed the fortunate influence she has had on him. Alma seeks John out one more time, now willing to experience life in the flesh after being reminded how she once refused him. "But now I have changed my mind," she says, "or the girl who said "no" she dosn't exist any more, she died last summer- suffocated in from something on fire inside her." But it is too late. While Alma has come round to his way of thinking, he has come round to hers. Alone in a winter park, she initiates conversation with a stranger and they head together towards the casino.

=Arthur Miller=



Arthur Miller (1915-2005) gained prominence with "Death of a salesman" (1949) and "The crucible" (1952).

To understand a play of the 1940s, one must be reminded that "'Death of a salesman' is set in a society that does not provide 'job security, health benefits, or provisions for retirement'" (Featherstone, 2008 p 230). Death of a Salesman was conceived as an expressionist play…The play’s eye was to revolve from within Willy’s head [as he visualizes the past] (Gottfried, 2003 p 122). Willy can be seen as a victim of the idea that money is the reward of virtue, as expressed by the clergyman, Horatio Alger (1832-1899), focal-point of the Protestant ethic, as well as the idea that wealth is essential to the growth of civilization, as expressed by the essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). “In Alger...the key to success is not genius or gentle breeding but character, enabling the common man to succeed in this life and the next as well as his children’s lives should he transmit his values. It is critical that the salesman, the link between producer and consumer, be well liked because he must sell himself as well as his products. Believing up to the end in financial success ideology, he commits suicide to give Biff a chance to succeed" (Porter, 1969 p 130). “Loman has been unable to learn that business ethics, the morality of his work-community, oppose the traditions he assumed were still in action: the personal ethic of honour, the patriarchal nature of a basically benevolent society and family, and neighbourhood relations” (Mottram, 1967 p 134). The force of the play "continues fitfully to grasp at us: the idea of a man who has sold things without making them, who has paid for other things without really owning them, who is an insulted extrusion of commercial society battling for some sliver of authenticity before he slips into the dark. And battling without a real villain in sight. Willy’s boss, Howard, comes closest to that role when he fires or retires Willy for poor performance, but Howard’s failing is not ruthlessness; it is lack of understanding" (Cardullo, 2016 p 163). “From the conflicting success images that wander through his troubled brain comes Willy’s double ambition to be rich and to be loved. As he tells Ben, ‘the wonder of this country is that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked’. Willy’s faith in the magic of personal attractiveness as a way to success carries him beyond cause and effect to necessity; he assumes that success falls inevitably to the man with the right smile...Willy “regularly confuses labels with reality. In his last scene with his son, Biff, Willy cries out: ‘I am not a dime a dozen’...The strength and the pathos of that cry is the fact that Willy still thinks that the name should mean something. It is effective within the play because we have heard him imply that a punching bag is good because, as he says: ’It’s got Gene Tuney’s name on it’” (Weales, 1967a pp 87-88). Willy “not only views the world in terms of what people think of him but also in terms of what his sons think of him. He desires not only the respect of his sons, particularly Biff whom he has failed, but he wants them to like him. In his worldview, likability is the most marketable commodity and leads to self-worth and economic and social advantage. Willy’s association of likability with self-worth becomes clear in the exchange with Biff that leads to the father’s suicide. Following a day of failed attempts to ensure their financial futures, Biff explodes to his father about the pretence and ‘hot air’ that has compensated for genuine success and authentic character. ‘I am not a leader of me, Willy, and neither are you,’ Biff famously remarks. ‘You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them’ (Robinson, 2018 p 190). "Willy Loman's own experience proves that...success is...not guaranteed to the well-liked or even the hard-working...Despite his growing realization that he does not want what the world calls success, Biff can only call himself a worthless failure for not having achieved it" (Berkowitz, 1992 p 80). Money as a reward for virtue is sometimes termed "Willy’s law". Driver (1966) complained that Willy’s law is not countered by another character representing some sort of “law of love” (p 111), because Biff only seeks in trying to make his father understand that his law is false without showing him a new one. Likewise, Bernard has only negative advice for Willy: 'But sometimes, Willy, it’s better for a man just to walk away.' Loman...never knew who he was. Lear did” (Kitchin, 1966 p 79). von Szeliski (1971) criticized the meager ambitions and goals in modern attempts at tragedy relative to the Renaissance, commenting sarcastically that "'not being able to walk away' is Miller’s idea of tragedy" (p 173). Moreover, in the view of Stambusky (1968), Willy Loman fails as an Aristotelian figure of tragedy because his emotional stature is beneath that required and because, unlike Biff, who cries out that he is "a dime a dozen", he never recognizes his flaw, equating success in life with success in getting money and estimating popularity among one’s peers of more importance than richness of intimate relations (p 100). Freedman (1971) agreed that Loman never discovers what his flaw is. “All that Willy Loman wants is the middle-class apotheosis of success: a mortgage paid off, a car clear of debt, a properly working modern refrigerator, an occasional mistress, sons 'well-liked' if uneducated and aimless” (p 45). “Death of a Salesman is an admirable blend of pathos and satire...The play is non-tragic...simply because Willy Loman lacks the ferocity which is an essential ingredient of tragedy, and because his driving illusion is one which we do not respect...His identification of success with a cheering crowd...we at least profess to scorn. Willy Loman evokes pity...but he cannot evoke terror” (Gascoigne, 1970 p 177). Other critics have disagreed. “Willy Loman makes himself a tragic hero of sorts by his abundant capacity for suffering. He asserts a sort of tragic or semi-tragic dignity, with his fine resentment of slights and his battle for respect as well as for self-respect. He makes a claim for tragic intensity by his refusal to surrender all expectations of triumph for and through his sons...The thing that Miller could not do...is to give Willy an interesting mind...with a related limitation of language...that makes me contemplate the use of such a term as low tragedy” (Gassner, 1960 pp 63-64). “The fundamental enlightenment must be for the audience, whether or not the tragic character achieves it for himself” (Gassner, 1954b p 74). “Willy’s attitudes towards his work undermine his capacity for self-knowledge...What Willy sells is never stated, so that he can represent all salesmen. Being well-liked is so critical to him that instead of selling only products, he sells his soul. Linda is puzzled over her husband’s suicide when the house is paid for and he only needed ‘a little salary’; it is because of the work pressure he submitted himself to, which consigned him as a failure. Although Willy wants his sons to emulate Ben’s success, he is floundering, uncertain how to teach his sons to succeed in the world, and during Ben’s visit they are caught stealing lumber from a construction site with Willy’s approval” (Greenfield, 1982 pp 79, 102-111, 233-234). “Willy’s patriotic rhetoric about American great- ness is contradicted by his own occasional frustrated anger at the built-in redundancy of the things he has struggled to acquire and that define his life. And then there is human redundancy, the fact that individual aspiration to business success as the highest good is contradicted by the system’s readiness to disgorge anyone and anything that no longer serves the all-powerful profit motive. Above all, the play insists that the commitment to an ethos of success thus defined obscures and subverts the fundamental value of love, either between parent and child or on a larger scale, as a genuine sense of social relatedness. Though Miller has Willy achieve at least a partial recognition of his son Biff’s love for him in spite of everything, the play ends on the tragic irony that he can only conceive of furthering his dreams for them by pursuing his commitment to financial success to its reductio ad absurdum, committing suicide so that his family can claim the insurance money” (Crow, 2015 p 172). The play “is a masterpiece of concentrated irony and controlled indignation...Biff, the recalcitrant one, draws his rebellion in Miller’s best manner, more from disgust at one of his father’s infidelities than from any reasoned objection to what he has been taught. Nothing short of a slur on that universal idol, the American mother, could have roused this character from his mental lethargy” (Kitchin, 1960 p 62). “Willy has a supportive wife who makes her husband’s self-delusion possible. She is a woman who loves her husband and commits herself to him even at the expense of her personal integrity, the nourishing mother-wife without whom neither head of the household could survive…Linda fortifies Willy with encouraging words and praise, reviving his spirits whenever they sag. When Willy’s commissions are not so substantial as they might have been, even in earlier years, Linda allows him to pretend he made more than he did and praises him for his achievement. When Willy tells her how he lost his temper and hit a salesman in the face when the man called him a walrus, Linda does not reproach him for his behavior but tells him that, to her, he is the handsomest man in the world. When Willy keeps driving the car off the road, though she knows of his death wish, she tries to excuse the action by suggesting he needs an eye examination or a good rest. Even when Linda discovers the rubber hose in the basement, hidden beneath a pipe for the day that Willy can no longer endure, the faithful wife neither confronts him nor removes the hose, knowing Willy depends on her thinking that his strength cannot falter” (Schlueter and Flanagan, 1987 pp 57-66). Hobson (1953) disagreed with critics' complaints about the play's common speech, pointing to the final scene when, bewildered, Linda says of her dead husband that "he only needed a little salary." "No man needs a little salary," Charley responds. "He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not coming back, that’s an earthquake." Hobson found the rhythm “moving and true” and on Charley’s comment on the theme of man cannot live on bread alone he wrote: "I never heard in an American play something wiser, better said, or better worth saying” and that Linda “touched depths of sadness and reached heights of royalty that passed beyond royal and purple speech” (Hobson, 1948 pp 122-123). “In the pastoral world that Willy Loman creates in his mind, there is no real place for women, precisely because this is the 19th century world of his father and grandfather. The subordinate role of women is thus less a product of Miller’s incapacity than of the necessities of a play which examines Willy’s imperfect grasp of reality” (Bigsby, 1985 p 421). “Death of a salesman” “would have represented an attack upon the system- and a telling one at that- had Mr Miller elected to reverse the situation and make Charley the central character and Bernard a failure” (Gardner, 1965 p 125).

On the subject of marvels and superstitions, Bacon wrote in “The advancement of learning” (1605): “neither am I of opinion that this history of marvels, that superstitious narrations of sorceries, witchcrafts, dreams, divinations, and the like, where there is an assurance and clear evidence of the fact, be altogether excluded. For it is not yet known in what cases and how far effects attributed to superstition do participate of natural causes: and therefore howsoever the practice of such things is to be condemned, yet from the speculation and consideration of them light may be taken, not only for the discerning of the offences, but for the further disclosing of nature” (1957 edition, p 36). "The crucible" "is freely based on the notorious witch trials of 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, when nineteen honest citizens were hanged for dealings with the devil, and innumerable others imprisoned, in a panic started by hysterical young girls who testified themselves possessed through the satanic influences of their neighbours...For sheer cruelty and stupidity, the Salem witch trial must take its place among the most degrading spectacles of apparent civilisation. And it is Miller's strength that he has given the material dramatic shape, and by selecting three key characters (two of them created, one the malevolent girl Abigail Williams- historical) ignited our interest not only in the theme but in individual psychology...The mixture of exorcism, revivalist hysteria, pretended possession and blinded justice, combining to further private grudges and public fanaticism, is presented by the dramatist with masterly excitement...The language has a biblical ring of metaphor, graphically in period; and though the play at the end, with Proctor's recantation, comes near enough to Saint Joan to make us conscious of its principal lack- Shaw's intellectual grasp of the wider issues- its dramatic impact, failing only here, has already been made and sustained with unremitting power" (Williamson, 1956 pp 54-55). Differences between history and play included changes in the ages of two characters. “The real Abigail Williams had been 11 years old and John Proctor in his 60s. Miller decided to make her 17 and Proctor 30ish” (Gottfried, 2003 p 199) to introduce a romantic element in her and a guilt element in him for having committed adultery with her. “The fierce narrative thrill of the action depends on Mr Miller’s mastery of period dialogue. “The language is a rich and stageworthy mix of past and present vernaculars and suggest...English spoken in Puritan 17th century Massachusetts” (Gottfried, 2003 p 224). The prose is gnarled, whorled in its gleaming as a stick of polished oak, an incomparable dramatic weapon” (Tynan, 1961 p 254). “The Crucible is built on a rhythm of assertion and denial, statement and retraction. Hence, Mary Warren is first accuser, then confesses the truth and then retracts her confession. The Reverend Hale is at first a fierce prosecutor and then a desperate defender. Elizabeth Proctor at first privately insists on her husband’s moral culpability and then publicly asserts his probity; Giles first accuses his wife and then retracts; Proctor first signs the confession and then tears it up” (Bigsby, 1984 p 198). “Hale is so fearful of being perceived as less than religious that he hides behind his books more than asserting without hesitation what he truly believes. Danforth is so fearful of being perceived as less than vindictive toward the accused that he hides behind his robes more than demanding substantive proof from the accusers. Putnam is so fearful of being perceived as less than prosperous that he schemes to steal what is not his. Elizabeth is so fearful of passion that she hides behind her judgmental frigidity while demurely maintaining that she cannot judge, which simply means that she cannot love. It's really her fear of loving that ‘would freeze beer’. The Crucible is a play that dramatizes manifestations of fear that arise when humans lose their way because they have lost each other” (Livesay, 2012 p 12). “The Puritans who initially provided the predominant temper of America, a temper that survives to this day, established the principle of economic and religious democracy. But the proper atmosphere for political dissent (so striking in England) and for moral freedom (for which America has alternatively envied and condemned France) was missing at the outset” (Goldstone, 1969 p 19). “The figures of authority in the play, including the reverend, the judge of the makeshift court and the authority on witchcraft, all work to suppress and maintain Salem’s theocracy” (Robinson, 2018 p 194). “The vested interests of the Puritan theocracy and magistracy are represented...by resentful, twisted, or narrow-minded souls: the contentious Parris...Reverend Hale...whose manly efforts to bring moderation...are thwarted with his own vacillating...gullible Governor Danforth...fumbling in his conduct of a special court, Judge William Hathorne, worried by problems of conscience and the Puritan suppression of all opposition” (Herron, 1969 p 34). “By contrast with those who too readily compromise and by parallel with Rebecca Nurse, who refuses to do so, Proctor becomes one of thee few who survive the crucible, though he loses his life doing so” (Schlueter and Flanagan, 1987 p 69). "Proctor refuses to yield to those who would hold him guilty of trafficking with the devil. And though he signs a confession on his dying day, and later retracts it, he refuses to name names and, finally, champions as his highest value the honor of his name. By contrast, others in the community who are accused are persuaded that confession offers the only hope of redemption, and each in turn both admits complicity and names others" (Schlueter, 2000, p 303). "Abigail is driven by revenge on Proctor and fear of being punished for dancing. To reach her goals, she is willing to have people of her town slain and 'subvert the function of the law'..."The Putnams are motivated by greed, Parris and Cheever by power. Danforth is eventually faced with a dilemma. Twelve people have been hanged...pardon for the rest would be to admit judicial error, and so he sacrifices them for the greater good, for rebellion is stirring in a neighboring town and chaos threatening the theocracy" (Porter, 1969 pp 188-195). “The Crucible rises to its heights on the personal level in Proctor's tragic predicament, but...the social and the personal are tightly interwoven...Miller had used Ibsen’s method of piecemeal revelation, gradually filling in details from the past throughout the play” (Gascoigne, 1970 pp 179-180). “The best versions of The Crucible don't divide its characters into a heroic Us, with whom the audience identifies, and an evil Them. We have to feel that we are all, potentially, one of Them. Every one of Miller's plays is steeped in a sense of guilt that taints each of its characters; they all take place ‘after the fall’. Proctor knows, to his agony, that his one act of conjugal infidelity has played a role in inspiring the horrors that overtake Salem. And just before his execution, he considers recanting, to save his life…In my ideal Crucible, the audience doesn't leave the theater identifying exclusively with Proctor. There has to be some part of us that knows that we, in such circumstances, we might just as easily have been Parris or Abigail or even a hypothetical Proctor who, at the last minute, chose another, safer road in the woods” (Brantley, 2012 pp 2-3). “John Proctor is a perfect character because he knows that he is imperfect. And that is our attraction to him, that he goes to his hanging with all his imperfections on his head. In the course of the play, Proctor comes to understand that it is possible to live without being perfect, that is possible to sin and still have goodness. His redemption lies at the tightening of the noose and the snap of the rope” (Marino, 2012 p 13). “Unlike Joe Keller and Willy Loman, Proctor ultimately is concerned with more than merely his own dignity. He dies defending not only himself but also the dignity of all the other innocent victims of the Puritan court’s brutal hypocrisy. This gives his tragedy a broader dimension than the downfalls of the heroes of Miller’s earlier plays” (Marino, 2018 p 94). “An engine of righteousness propels The Crucible and its powerful declamation against the ignorance that begets, allows and sustains political evil (Gottfried, 2003 p 225). “It is interesting to remember that 20 years after the executions, the government recognized that a miscarriage of justice had been done and gave compensation to the victims still alive...[To be] admired most is the sweep of Miller’s convictions, the power of his faith and the urgency of the subject matter” (Lumley, 1967 p 195).

"Death of a salesman"


Time: 1940s. Place: USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.86608 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.505675 https://archive.org/details/twentyfivemodern001705mbp http://www.pelister.org/literature/ArthurMiller

After a disappointing business trip as a traveling salesman and feeling old, Willy Loman returns home where his wife, Linda, proposes that he should ask his boss to work locally. He agrees he should. Despite showing early signs of promise, their sons, Biff and Happy, have yet to succeed financially, in Willy's view of utmost importance. In turn, the sons are worried about their father's mental condition. He often mutters to himself and shows signs of possible thoughts of suicide. When Willy accuses his sons of shiftlessness, they inform him that Biff is about to obtain a lucrative business proposition. Not only is Willy unable to convince his boss of working at the home office but he also loses his job, all this at the hands of the son of the man who first hired him over thirty years ago. Meanwhile, Biff is unable to get a job offer from a supposed friend. In frustration, he steals the man's expensive fountain pen. Willy meets Bernard, Biff's childhood friend, who tells him that Biff was never the same after going to Boston in his youth. Willy knows why. It was there that his disillusioned son saw him in the company of an unknown woman at a hotel. After a trying day, Willy meets his sons at a restaurant to hear news and perhaps celebrate. Unwilling to hear of any sort of bad news concerning Biff, the brothers feel constrained to lie about Biff's success. While Willy washes up in the restaurant washroom, Biff suddenly leaves, so does his brother to pursue the alluring company of two unknown women. Angry and aggrieved at learning about her sons' behavior in the restaurant, Linda accuses her sons of heartlessness. When a frustrated Willy learns the truth about Biff's rejection, he accuses him of failing out of spite. Biff angrily shows him the electric cable Willy used in attempting suicide awhile ago, asking him whether that was meant to inspire pity for him. Willy pretends to know nothing about it. Biff divulges he was imprisoned for a few months for theft and lost other jobs because of it, a result of being unable to take orders from anybody because of his father's tendency to exaggerate his importance. "I'm a dime-a-dozen, and so are you," he shouts. "I'm Willy Loman and you're Biff Loman," Willy retorts, still believing that since he is a Loman, he must necessarily succeed. Conscious of his worsening mental condition, he nevertheless drives away and incurs a fatal road accident, a suicidal sacrifice to his family's welfare. At the funeral, Biff refuses to take the life insurance money so start a business career, but Happy decides he will follow his father's wishes.

"The crucible"


Time: 1690s. Place: Salem, Massachusetts.

Text at https://archive.org/details/TheCrucible https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.505675 https://pdfcoffee.com/the-crucible-pdf-free.html

Reverend Parris' daughter, Betty, lies in bed unresponsive after he caught her dancing in the forest with her friends. She fears punishment while he fears his enemies will use this incident to bring him down if the girls called forth spirits. He questions Abigail, his niece, about this event, who admits only to dancing. But Thomas and Ann Putman are convinced there is witchery about, because their daughter, Ruth, is afflicted with the same condition as Betty. "It's death, y'know, it's death drivin' into them, forked and hoofed," Ann declares. She is convinced a black slave, Tituba, conversed with the dead to find out who murdered her seven babies who died at childbirth. Reverend Hale arrives from out of town to investigate the rumors of witchcraft. Abigail seizes this opportunity to accuse Tituba of conjuring. In the ongoing investigation, Giles Corey reveals that his wife reads books at night. "I'm not sayin she's touched the devil, now, but I'll admire to know what books she reads and why she hides them," he declares. The deeper the investigation probes into, the higher the number of suspects increases. John and Elizabeth Proctor learn from their servant, Mary, that 34 women have been arrested and at least one man, Osburn, is condemned to hang, accused by his servant, who had been turned away empty while begging for bread. For disobediently leaving the house, John raises his hand to whip Mary. To protect herself, she cries out that she saved his wife from suspicion after being accused by Abigail, their former servant, because, according to Elizabeth, Abigail desires to take her place as John's wife. More officials arrive and Elizabeth is charged with witchcraft after all, because a doll was found in her possession with a needle in it, after Abigail had been stuck that very night with a needle in her belly. In the Salem court-house, Corey pleads his case before Deputy Governor Danforth, defending his wife accused of witchcraft, far from his original intentions, for he only wanted to find the cause why his wife reads books. Corey, John, and Francis Nurse, all three men whose wives are charged with witchcraft, accuse on the basis of Mary's confession Abigail, Betty, Ruth, and others of fraud. Afraid of what may happen to his daughter and himself, Parris immediately disbelieves it. Although Hale, having signed 72 death-warrants, nervously wishes this accusation to be seriously examined, Danforth resists, so that Mary's version is disbelieved. When Danforth examines Elizabeth's case, the Proctors contradict themselves, he admitting to have copulated with Abigail, she, to defend his name, swearing he did not. As a result, she is condemned to die. A cornered Mary now points to John as "the devil's man" and joins her friends in crying out further accusations. Later, Danforth is deeply troubled on learning that Abigail and Mercy Lewis robbed Parris and escaped from the area in a ship. Twelve witches have already been hanged, partly on the basis on their accusations, yet he decides to continue the examinations. Since Elizabeth is pregnant, her condemnation is delayed. She begs her husband to admit he used witchcraft, but he refuses and is hanged.

=William Inge=



In addition to Miller, indirect social commentary is prominent in the plays of William Inge (1913-1973), notably "The dark at the top of the stairs" (1957). Inge also wrote "Come back, little Sheba" (1950) and "Picnic" (1953). The former "revealed insight into commonplace life and a capacity for transfiguring it into consuming pathos. The play dealt with a well-bred man’s sense of failure in marriage and his explosive alcoholism before he relapses into remorseful quiescence" (Gassner, 1954a p 740).

"The dark at the top of the stairs" “lets a young family find its way through a variety of emotional crises, triumphing over none but surviving all, through admission of mutual dependence” (Berkowitz, 1997 p 183). “The divided emphasis of the play, [the Rubin-Cora conflict and Sammy’s suicide] was disconcerting and distracting to some critics...Sammy’s suicide brings Cora and Reenie to a new understanding of what life is about and to a deeper understanding of themselves. Certainly the suicide is the major precipitating factor in Cora and Rubin’s being reunited...Rubin...is afraid of the dark, because it represents the uncertain future that stretches before him. But just as Cora assuages Sonny’s fear of the dark by going up the stairs with him at the end of act 2, so does she assuage Rubin’s fear of the dark future by going upstairs...at the third-act curtain...Rubin leaves Cora because he does not want to be like his hen-pecked brother-in-law, Morris. When he returns to her, it is apparent that he will be tamed in much the same way Morris has been. A night in bed will neither alter the overall futility of the Floods’ marriage nor resolve the problems responsible for Rubin’s insecurities...Even at the end of the play, Rubin is unable to communicate with his son...Reenie is not unlike Laura Wingfield in Williams' Glass Menagerie (1945)...Reenie’s shyness is indirectly responsible for Sammy’s suicide...[Afterwards], for the first time, Reenie uses her music not as a form of escape for herself but as a means of bringing pleasure to someone else...Sammy dominates the first half of act 3 even though he is dead” (Shuman, 1989 pp 53-63).

“All of the family’s fears, of isolation, connection, poverty and loss of respect, are manageable by the close of the play, as Cora mounts those stairs toward her husband, and her children happily attend a movie together. Through love and honesty, the family have reconnected in more positive ways, and it is those outside this group, Lottie, Morris and Sammy, who end in darkness, as the shallowness of Lottie and Morris’s marriage has been revealed and Sammy commits suicide. Once they have relinquished their petty differences, the Flood’s household is based on love, and that has made all the difference…There are further aspects that make it a 1950s play, with several jokes and references to psychiatry, and Cora’s suggestion that kids don’t just get over things in some magic way. These troubles stay with kids sometimes, and affect their lives when they grow up. Also, Reenie’s schoolfriend Flirt’s comments on her differences of opinion with her father evoke the growing cultural generation gap of that decade…Reenie may be shy, but she is not ignorant. She knows that Flirt is just using her, and her qualms about going with Sammy are not because he is Jewish, but because she would be uncomfortable with anyone. While she understandably finds her petulant brother annoying, she is a sensitive soul and loves her family. She worries over the expense of the dress and when her parents fight. Both Reenie and Sonny keep the wider society at arm’s length, but while Reenie finds it intimidating, Sonny seems to find it simply repugnant, aside from his idealized film stars…Cora is more refined than her husband and from a moneyed background, but she loves him. Her love, however, can be smothering for all the family, as it manifests in a belittling jealousy toward her husband as she tries to bully him in the same way she bullies her children when she is not using her disempowering protectiveness against them. She envies her richer friends, which causes a rift in her marriage, but we are meant to excuse her for this as she was pampered as a child, her husband has not been fully honest with her and once he is she accepts the situation without complaint. She is also, despite her initial intolerance toward her own family, by the close, the greatest voice of tolerance in the play” (Abbotson, 2018b pp 120-122).

In the first act of "The dark at the top of the stairs", "a baseless quarrel between a husband and wife results in his departure. The tension arises from the husband's inability to communicate his anxieties to his wife and from the latter’s failure to realize how frightened of the future this superficially confident man is...The play, sometimes veering toward comedy and sometimes toward tragedy, was inconsistent in tone...The last scene of the play, the prodigal lummox beckoning his wife upstairs to bed while beckoning the kids out of the house, stuck me as forcibly and inharmoniously comic. I had little stomach for comedy after observing the suffering of the children and experiencing the penumbral mood of the scenes just past” (Gassner, 1960 p 171).

“It is in fact Cora's interest in the children, at the expense of her relationship with Rubin, which causes him to leave home. The precipitating argument over a party dress for Reenie, is only a manifestation of their far deeper marital problems, problems which are resolved by Cora's shattering of Sonny's attachment to her and by her sending the children to the movies so that she and Rubin can make love undisturbed. Also, by the end of the play, the children's rivalry has diminished, and one can assume that Sonny will also be able to overcome his jealousy toward his father. Reenie has always been closest to Rubin, and consequently her dislike of Sonny is based partly on the boy's undisguised glee at the prospect of his parents' permanent separation. Sonny is selfishly delighted that his rival has vanished and that as a result, he may get to live in a new town, away from the taunting boys of bis neighborhood. His sister, of course, feels quite the opposite...And Cora, in her fear and worry, turns not to the daughter who is older and probably more capable of understanding the dynamics of the situation, but to the child whose love is animal and total” (Mitchell, 1978 pp 302-303).

“Lottie...works defensively at being an extrovert, Morris Lacey, her sensitive husband, a dentist who has the resigned gravity of a meek and defeated man looking back on his bachelorhood...Sammy...a Jewish cadet...who has suffered from both prejudice and lack of parental care...are all afraid of the dark at the top of the stairs...a moving, perceptive, and striking drama of the impact of the changing times of the 20s upon southwestern townspeople” (Herron, 1969 pp 434-435). “Many critics see [Lottie] as a pathetic creature trapped in a childless marriage with her passionless husband...Her vulgarity, bigotry, and self-righteousness are the products of a protective persona, similar to Rosemary’s [in “Picnic” 1953], that she busies to shield herself from the essential angst of having to create an identity instead of allowing others to determine her character for her. Lottie presents one self to Cora, another to Morris, both mutually inconsistent. She acts more solicitous about the feelings of others than she does about her own shortcomings, allowing Cora to believe that he envies her wife-beating adulterous husband and her spoiled, irascible children, while remaining sensitive to Morris’ moods and keeping him in her confidence...[In the ending of the play], there is no sign of romantic epiphanies, only a salesman hawking a new and improved version of himself and a wife who will put up with beatings and infidelity for a steady squeeze and the semblance (at least) of paternal authority guaranteed to stabilize the household” (Johnson, 2005 pp 80-82). Brustein (1965) resented the wife’s man-taming: “Underneath Inge’s paen to domestic love lies a psychological substatement to the effect that marriage demands, in return for its emotional consolations, a sacrifice of the hero’s image (which is the American folk image) of maleness. He must give up his aggressiveness, his promiscuity, hid bravado, his contempt for soft virtues and his narcissistic pride in his body and attainments and admit that he is lost and needs help. The woman’s job is to convert these rebels into domestic animals. If this requires (as it always does with Inge) going to bed with the hero, she will endure it; and although she may accuse her husband...of marrying her because she was pregnant, she nevertheless has managed to establish the hero’s dependence on her and thus insured that he will remain to provide for the family” (p 90). Other critics view the ending more positively. "The loss of his job forces Rubin to acknowledge his weakness towards a wife he has neglected in a world where economic progress has left him behind and where the future and his place in it are unknown. The dark symbolizes, in part, that fear of the unknown. When Rubin stands naked at the top of the stairs...and beckons Cora to come, his nakedness suggests acceptance of his vulnerability; now unafraid to reveal his weakness as well as strength to Cora, he knows she will provide the reassurance of physical love to bolster his self-respect" (Adler, 2007 p 166).

“While Tennessee Williams continued to depict the miserable lives of non-conformists, Inge seemed to depict the equally miserable and lonely lives of conformists. Inge presented images of ordinary Americans who lived outside the main urban areas, and, through his portraits, challenged the old idealized image of small-town America by depicting such places as filled with frustration and limitation. His work centres on Midwesterners, never previously considered to be good subjects for art, but through them he draws out the difficulties of living and surviving in a country that promised much and often delivered so little” (Abbotson, 2018a p 50). "If there was a playwright who shared the respect of Miller and Williams in the fifties, not for innovation of form but for the sensitivity with which he dramatized the American family, it was William Inge...In this important cluster of plays, which had respectable runs on Broadway, Inge examines a large but typical cast of characters and relationships, repeatedly creating situations that dramatize the details of lives anesthetized by habit, dreams suffocated by compromise, and sexuality denied- the stuff of small-town America" (Schlueter, 2000 p 307). “Inge’s strongest depictions are of female characters, particularly sexually frustrated ones who have little control over their own destinies. If they controlled and sometimes emasculated their men, as Robert Brustein (1958) contended, they did so because their men needed taming. Jhunke’s (1986) objects to this portrayal on the grounds that many raucous men settle down when they attach themselves to one woman” (Shuman, 1989 pp 147-148).

"The dark at the top of the stairs"


Time: 1920s. Place: Oklahoma, USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/qdownload/dark-at-the-top-of-the-stairs-inge-pdf-free.html

Before going to work as a traveling salesman, Rubin discovers that his wife, Cora, bought their daughter, Reenie, a party dress he considers too expensive. Husband and wife quarrel. He hits her and threatens never to come back. She considers moving in with her sister, Lottie, but the latter thinks that solution is impractical. Lottie has her own troubles, including the troubling fact of her not making love with her husband, Morris, for over three years, though admitting that this state is partly her fault. "I never did enjoy it as some women say they do," she admits. Renee is so anxious about going on a blind date with a stranger, Sammy, that she vomits at the thought. Because her mother is a movie actress, Sammy has been living in military academies throughout his life. He is very friendly with Renee's brother, Sonny, as they head to a party given by the rich Ralston family. On their way out, Cora asks her son to walk upstairs, but he is afraid of the dark, though not when someone accompagnies him. The next day, Reenie lies to her mother over the fact that she left the party because Sammy went off to court other girls. When asked whether she would have done as others do, she responds that Sammy "would not have liked me that way". "I'm just not hot stuff like the other girls," she adds. Sonny bursts into the room excitedly to announce that he won $5 for reciting at a tea-party. When his mother places the money in his piggy bank, he is offended and says he hates her. The family is stunned on learning that Sammy committed suicide. Cora insists that her daughter tell her what really happened. Reenie danced three straight times with Sammy until she was ashamed of having no other boy ask her. "I just couldn't bear for Sammy to think that no one liked me," she confesses. She introduced him to the daughter of the house, but Mrs Ralston interrupted their conversation, exclaiming that she will tolerate no Jew dancing with her daughter. Rubin returns home to say he lost his job. He is sorry for having struck his wife, but becomes impatient again when she strongly suggests a position he may apply for in town instead of traveling. Nevertheless, they become reconciled. With a view of going to bed with his wife, Rubin gives his son money to go to the movies. Ashamed at the selfish way he has treated her, Sammy smashes his piggy bank to treat his sister to the movies. With her husband waiting for her at the top of the stairs, Cora ascends slowly, as if she were the shy maiden she once was.

=Sam Shepard=



Sam Shepard (1943-2017) achieved prominence with "Curse of the starving class" (1977), "Buried child" (1978), "Fool for love" (1983), and “A lie of the mind” (1985).

Nash (1987) showed how "Buried child" reflects an agricultural ritual, the killing of the corn spirit in the winter of his life as described in James Frazer’s “The golden bough” (1890). "Dodge represents the corn spirit whose death is necessary to make the corn grow. He wishes his body to be burnt, akin to farmers setting fire to the figure, akin to the sun needed for growth. Vince may represent the murdered brother, Ansel, or the reincarnation of the buried child, Halie and Tilden’s incestuous progeny killed by Dodge. The reality of the state of the cornfield appears doubtful. On one hand, Tilden dumps the corn in Dodge’s lap as if brought from their field. On the other, Dodge and Halie deny cornfield growth so that Tilden appears to have either bought or stolen it, an unresolved matter" (Sauer 2011, pp 202-214). "Only after Dodge’s death does Halie see the growth, an indication of mental blindness whereby she somehow was impeded from seeing it before his crime. Miraculous vegetation may be seen as a symbol of Vince’s inheritance from Dodge" (Marranca and Dasgupta, 1981 p 108). “The family haunts its own home. From the opening curtain, the setting, with the decrepit Dodge holding centre stage on a deteriorating couch and wrapped in a symbolic but nevertheless tawdry blanket, suggests a charnel house.36 We seem to be below ground (and Dodge refers to himself as ‘a corpse’), with a set of stairs leading nowhere and a spectral light emanating from the front porch behind the couch mirrored by the flickering blue light coming from the omnipresent television. While the environment seems, in the tradition of naturalism, a causal agent of the inner state of the dilapidated souls who inhabit the space, it soon becomes clear that in fact the locale is an exteriorization of the moral state of a family bound not by love, history or shared joy but by a collective sin that binds them in a communal hell over which Dodge presides...[Vince] violently crosses the threshold of the home by cutting his way through the screen door and tumbling into the main room. An unsettling image of self-birth, the gesture resonates strongly with the earlier dialogue about the murder and secret burial of the child. Seemingly, only violence confirms one’s identity and position in the family, and Vince reveals his patrimony by threatening to usurp the territory and take control of the family homestead by force...Vince might be expected to play the role of the external agent whose arrival instigates the process of a revelation that he, himself, might culminate. Vince is the only family member who seemingly has no prior knowledge of the dark secret of the child, nor does he see it when Tilden carries the remains up the stairs toward Halie. Vince’s monologue describing the vision of his family legacy encountered while attempting to escape toward the Iowa border is the major statement of self-identification and family continuity in the entire play, and so if anyone should succeed in establishing a new, transformed order in the family line it should be him. But that vision concludes with everything dissolved and Vince abolishes his origins rather than penetrating to the heart of the myth of family” (Vanden Heuvel, 2018 pp 129-131). “Vince, the only possibility for the future, lies down at the conclusion, taking exactly the same posture as the recumbent Dodge” (Adler, 1987 p 108). “Vince settles peaceably into his (now dead) grandfather's position on the family couch. Tilden returns from "out back," this time hugging the corpse of a buried child. From Tilden's and Dodge's earlier confessions, we guess this child to be Vince, the product of Tilden's incestuous relationship with his mother, Halie. At the end of the play, then, there seem to be two Vinces and two contradictory but simultaneous dramatic actions involving him” (Cima, 1993 p 166). Marranca and Dasgupta criticize the Alibi Club episode as “contrived” and the gangsters arriving to blow up the family car as imposing “a cartoon quality that doesn’t suit the play’s general landscape” (p 107). But critics are often biased towards wanting and accepting likely events naturally issuing from a play’s initial premise, whereas real-life events are sometimes composed of unlikely events not necessarily issuing from the past. Shepard tends to emphasize madness as a theme: characters are mad, events are mad, the events not necessarily being a reflection of the characters’ psychology. In such plays, the most pleasing response is to sit back and wonder, not lean forward expecting that events will grow out of characters’ motivations. “When the literal uncovering of the secret magically revitalizes the farm, whose barren soil suddenly starts producing vegetables in fantastic variety and abundance, the play’s warning is clear hope for the national future can only come through the unreserved acceptance of the past, even the shameful past” (Berkowitz, 1997 pp 164-166).

In "Curse of the starving class", "although the family members claim not to belong to the starving class, they do, starving for identity and dignity. Every family members keep opening and closing the refrigerator door. The family is so dept-cursed that their home is prey to predators...At the end of the play, mother and son recite the parable of the cat and the eagle, clawing at one another high in the air...Greedy America has seized its own killer" (Cohn, 1982 p 184). “The family collapses, reaching out for things which they hardly need, oblivious to the human demands of those around them” (Bigsby, 1985 p 240). Winters (2017) criticized the exploding car at the end of the play as being “ironically comic rather than tragic” (p 206). But other critics consider the scene as blending with the rest. "One of the startling occurrences in the play seems to go beyond curse: Emma’s death in a car explosion. Shepard has made her rather unsympathetic in her last appearance onstage, and the notion that she is going forward and Wesley backwards (he asks her at one point, 'How come I’m going backwards?') is quickly dispelled for us when she meets her end at the hands of Emerson and Slater. By the close of the play, the girl who at the start was learning about menstruation has grown up enough to make sexual overtures to her jailer (after her arrest for shooting the Alibi Club full of holes); [the one] who was blissfully making diagrams of a frying chicken for her 4-H club demonstration has learned to look behind the front that everybody presents to the world; [the one] who wanted to work as a mechanic, travel, and possibly write, has stolen her mother’s money (even as the latter “stole” her frying chicken) and decided to take up a life of crime...Emma’s learning experience in the play is distinctly negative, then...Weston’s and Ella’s experiences in Curse of the Starving Class are negative as well. For long periods of time they lie onstage while the action of the play continues around them. Very drunk after a night away from home, Weston falls asleep on the kitchen table in Act II; exhausted after a night spent at the jail tending to Emma, Ella falls asleep on the same kitchen table in Act III...The fact that shouting and arguing go on around the sleeping characters draws attention all the more to their dormant condition, since neither one awakens...they sleep imperviously through events that will have a major effect on their lives" (Cardullo, 2016 pp 114-115). “In Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard...incorporates ritualistic actions, as if to prompt the audience to identify elements of the play with larger, mythic concerns and traditions. A lamb, a symbol of innocence in Abrahamic traditions and Christianity, is slaughtered off-stage by Wesley. When its skinned corpse is brought on-stage, visitors to the family farm believe it to be a dead goat, an explicit reference to the “goat song” of early Greek tragedy and a ritualized reference to the tragedy of the father’s slaughter of innocence within the play” (Skelton, 2018 p 158).“When Weston and Ella bring food into the home, this functions as another futile attempt to restore the wasteland...Instead of transcending into the status of hero, Wesley...usurps his father, wearing his filthy garments and being mistaken for Weston by both his mother, Ella, and the two thugs...Shepard further subverts Wesley’s rebirth through Wesley’s slaughter of the lamb. The slaughter of the lamb in biblical lore offers a purification of the self. Yet Wesley’s slaughter of the lamb does not or aid him into cleaning himself or his family...but instead he butchered it because he was hungry” (Weiss, 2002 pp 325-326). “The live lamb, brought on stage in the first act to be treated for an infestation of maggots, is eventually cured by Weston at the beginning of Act 3...Wesley, who eventually slaughters the lamb for food, projects himself into the Christ-like role of saviour only to discover that such redemption will fail to transubstantiate the family’s condition...Throughout, references are made to moments of latent individual nourishment and transformation, but unlike the potential for conversion in Shepard’s earlier plays, each of these is thwarted or mocked...The third act, somewhat jarringly, lifts the action from the naturalistic to the elemental by all but dispensing with the social and economic themes and focusing almost exclusively on the mythic patterns of renewal...Weston cannot flee the effect his poison has had on Wesley, who in his final scene with his father stands before him wearing the filthy, urine-stained clothing thrown aside when Weston envisioned himself reborn in freshly laundered clothes. In addition, Wesley evidently has absorbed Weston’s understanding of masculine survival as connected to violence and a never-satiated hunger, for he slaughters the lamb Weston claims he has saved from its infestation...Wesley has assumed the role of violent patriarch and that Weston’s feeble attempt at redemption and regeneration has failed to lift the family curse. The starvation...finds stark expression when Wesley then deposits the contents of the refrigerator on the floor and begins eating it ravenously” (Vanden Heuvel, 2018 pp 123-126).

"The first wall is the star of the mise-en-scène in 'Fool for love'. As Eddie and May slam themselves and each other against it, as they kick it, punch it, and crawl along it, they discover its unyieldingness...When May and Eddie finally leave their sleazy motel room they do it unceremoniously- through a side door. But their exits create no sense of resolution or conclusion. Since the bond between them is inescapable, they will be back. Visually their exits provide no resolution either. The Old Man still holds the stage. He points into space, forcing the audience to see what is not there: 'Ya see that picture over there? Ya see that? Ya know who that is? That's the woman of my dreams. That's who that is. And she's mine. She's all mine'" (Zinman, 1988 p 518). “The old man, who is both Eddie and May's father, is perhaps a memory or a projection of guilt. His godlike presence, which ominously looms over Eddie and May's incestuous relationship, evokes O'Neillian drama: a world in which the past seems to control the present” (Penner, 2000 pp 117-118). “The old man is located outside any semblance of real time: the movement of his rocking chair locks him into a theatrical present which will defy any systematic attempt at chronology” (Brater, 1998 pp 24-25). “The stories told by Eddie and May, leading to Fool for Love's climax, are neatly integrated into the play's action, building tension, collecting information from the past, and revealing to the old man the fatal fruit of his bigamous and incestuous family tree” (DeRose, 1984 p 101).

"A lie for the mind" "is typical of Shepard's domestic dramas that violence occurs in a context of absurdity which dismisses its injury (although this is not the case in Beth's brain damage). When Frankie, acting as emissary between Jake and Beth, is shot in the leg by Beth's father and subsequently develops blood poisoning, Beth sweetly acknowledges his pain as she disrobes and begins to seduce him" (Dickey, 1988 p 543). “Beth’s acting career...challenges Jake’s stereotypical expectations regarding women...Beth tried to reassure him that her acting was only [pretense], but Jake does not believe her...Beth oscillates between independence from men and dependence on them...But by the end of the play, Beth wears all the trappings of the female stereotype: she dresses like a prostitute and behaves like an innocent virgin...Jake has won: he has transformed her into an object...Baylor...considers his mules more important than Beth’s injuries...He selfishly wants to keep Meg and Beth separated because he needs someone to talk to in the car...Meg submissively takes his abuse throughout much of the play. Not until the end of the play does she reach some conclusions of her own regarding gender. When Baylor tries to humiliate her and her mother, Meg responds that she was not a ‘basket case’ but instead a ‘female’...The set is littered with dead deer that no one ever eats and it occurs to her that the men just enjoy killing for the sake of killing...Lorraine realizes that she, too, was just another object and the bonfire that she and Sally set is a symbolic gesture of independence, burning down the house that kept her captive“ (Hall, 1993 pp 110-114)and that women can be as destructive as men but in a sneakier way. “Beth’s brain damage, which causes her staccato speech, matches the even greater damage endured in different ways by all the characters, each of them hurt in their minds, none of them able to escape from the lies that fester within” (Duncan-Jones, 2001 p 45). "The damaged Beth attempts to piece her life back together both by adopting a degree of empowered masculinity when she tries on a man’s shirt as if experimenting with new identity options, and by turning to Frankie as a gentler version of her husband, his violent brother Jake" (Bottom, 2015 p 208). “Throughout two thirds of the play, Jake believes he has killed Beth, and Beth believes that she is either dead or mentally mutilated beyond repair. Both are convinced that this time, they have gone too far. They are past redemption...Jake's quest in the play is to seek out the source of the mirages, to see as a mystic sees, that is, to conjure up the dead-living-murdered Beth that completes him, that makes him ‘one whole thing’, and to let it go...For both Jake and Beth, the greatest fear is losing the other” (Rosen, 1998 pp 34-35). “Almost from the first moment we see her onstage, [Beth] is emphatically resisting male domination in the form of Mike, her strong-willed and narrow-minded brother, and again and again in the course of the play she fights back at his attempts to stifle her will. She is also capable of making a devastating criticism of another powerful male figure, Baylor, her father, in whom all love has apparently died. Beth, however, will keep her love alive, and it will be love of an ideal man, a Jake without violence” (Whiting, 1990 p 499).

In “characters like...Vince in Buried Child, Eddie in Fool for Love, Wes in Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard has created a new American anti-hero: the disenfranchised cowboy who searches in vain for a range that has long since vanished, the round peg who refuses the square hole of middle-class, corporate America, the last true iconoclast who rejects bourgeois values...to wander the west alone but self-sufficient...Eddie conforms to the best romantic traditions, and his attractions become even more obvious when Shepard deliberately contrasts him with the dreadfully dull, monochromatic Martin who, God forbid, actually allows the woman to choose the movie. Which character is the average spectator more likely to identify with- violent, crazy, irresponsible Eddie or wimpish Martin? The question is almost rhetorical...Women find their rough-hewn vulnerability attractive, and men imagine themselves into this image of the self-sufficient loner who bursts the chains of bourgeois conformity” (Schuler, 1990 pp 221-222).

"Buried child"


Time: 1970s. Place: Illinois, USA.

Text at http://www.aaronbooth.info/uploads/7/5/6/9/7569212/buried_child.pdf

In a neglected farm-house, Tilden surprises his father, Dodge, by showing him that corn can picked from their field although no one has been planted any for several years. Although Dodge sits around doing nothing but drink alcohol, he complains of Tilden's inactivity who lives at his expense. Dodge's wife, Halie, defends their other son, Bradley, from his insults. Dodge does not answer her directly but instead points to the field and says: "My flesh and blood's out there in the backyard." When Dodge is asleep, Bradley comes over on his wooden leg and cuts his hair without waking him up, leading to cuts and scars. Tilden's son, Vince, arrives unannounced after six years of absence, along with his girl-friend, Shelly. To Shelly's growing concern, Dodge confuses Vince with a younger Tilden. The field mystery deepens when Tilden enters with an armful of carrots that were never planted. Shelly is all the more anxious as Tilden stares without speaking at his son. Dodge asks Vince to buy him another bottle of liquor, but Tilden does not acknowledge his presence. "I had a son once, but we buried him," Tilden says, for which Dodge admonishes him. Shelly offers to help Tilden prepare and cook the carrots, but Vince considers this a distraction. To jog Dodge's memory of him, Vince drums tunes on his teeth with his fingernails, but that does not help. While Dodge dully watches television, Tilden strokes Shelly's coat and then puts it on his own. Eventually, Dodge becomes concerned about the growing rapport between Tilden and her. "Don't tell her anything," he advises, "she's an outsider." The following morning, Shelly appears ready to take over as the woman of the house, offering Dodge beef bouillon. On entering the house, not knowing who Shelly is, Halie worries about where Tilden is. Shelly playfuly takes Bradley's wooden leg from him. She feels there is a family secret that should be known. Bradley tries to reassure her. "Everything is all right here," he says. But Dodge disagrees. He starts to tell her a secret, but Halie interrupts him. "If you tell this, you'll be dead to me," she warns, but yet he goes on to confess that Halie was once pregnant with another boy, to whom Tilden was often seen to talk. "I drowned it," Dodge confesses. Suddenly, a drunk Vince crashes in through the screen door from the porch and smashes bottles in the room. He starts to take charge and goes one step further than Shelly by continually pushing Bradley's wooden leg out of his reach. Feeling suddenly ill, Dodge declares orally his last will and testament and dies. "Tilden was right about the corn," Halie admits as she sees him enter the house carrying the bones of a long-buried corpse.

"Curse of the starving class"


Time: 1970s. Place: USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/curse-of-the-starving-class-script-pdf-free.html

An angry Weston had broken down his front door the previous day and forced his way in to threaten his wife, Ella, but left without harming her. His son, Wesley, clears up the debris. Wesley's sister, Emma, comes in to look in the refrigerator, irritated at not finding the chicken meant to demonstrate the correct way of cutting it up in 4-H class, likely because her mother ate it. Considering such courses useless, Wesley urinates on her anatomy charts. He complains of hunger to his mother. "No one's starving," she resolutely points out. "We don't belong to the starving class." Nevertheless, to improve their condition, she hired a lawyer, Taylor, to sell house, livestock, tractor, and land without consulting her husband. Wesley points out the mortgages are still unpaid. Emma, too, is hungry, as she stares into the refrigerator. "Any corn muffins in there?" she desperately asks. Wesley attempts to save a lamb infected by maggots by carrying it into the kitchen as Weston carries inside a bag of groceries. However, it only contains desert artichokes and dirty laundry. The following day, Weston learns that the laundry has not been washed, as his wife did not stay for the night. He informs son and daughter he has sold house and land. Shocked at these news, Emma suddenly leaves home. Wesley informs his father that Ella had the same idea and for this purpose left with her lawyer. Weston threatens to kill both wife and lawyer. Weston considers this mode of action reasonable in view of the fact that he owes money and intends to escape to Mexico with the new-found cash. He then raves and falls unconscious on the kitchen table. Ella returns with her own bag of groceries, throwing out the artichokes out of the refrigerator. Wesley discovers that his mother's lawyer is the same man who once sold his father useless desert land. He affirms that her plans are fruitless, since her husband has already sold house and land. The buyer, Ellis, enters with an amount of money sufficient to pay Weston's debts. He is followed by Taylor holding the final draft of his arrangement with Ella. They are interrupted by a police officer, who informs them of shocking news concerning Emma. "It seems she rode her horse through a bar downtown and shot the place full of holes with a rifle," he says. The bar in question is Ellis'. To compensate for Emma's rampage, Ellis grabs the money away from Wesley and hurriedly leaves while Taylor sneaks away. Ella follows the officer to get her daughter out of jail, after which Weston wakes up refreshed, with a new sense of ownership. He is no longer interested in selling his property. Wesley tries to enter into his father's sentiments, but is unable to. In the throes of hunger, Wesley butchers the lamb and eats ravenously his mother's groceries, imploring his father to run away, afraid that his debtor intends to kill him, but he dismisses such warnings. Emma obtains her release from jail by flirting with the police officer in charge and declares to her brother she intends to pursue a life of crime, since that alone pays off. Wesley's fears concerning his father's debts are all too justified when they hear a loud explosion outside: their car is blown up by the debtor's henchmen, carrying off Emma and the lamb he meant to eat.

"Fool for love"


Time: 1980s. Place: Near the Mojave desert, USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/fool-for-love-sam-shepard-pdf-free.html

In a drab motel, May receives the visit of her old lover, Eddie. Although his fingers smell of a woman's cunt, she asks him to stay. He promptly threatens to stab both her and himself "systematically, with sharp knives". She embraces him in apparent tenderness then knees him in the groin. Recovering from the pain, he also chooses to remain, though only for a single night. However, his anger is aroused on learning that she expects the visit of another man, Martin. While waiting for him, Eddie takes from his horse trailer a shotgun and then practices roping tricks inside the room. Suddenly, a car's headlights appear at the window. When May sees a woman in the car, he immediately drops to the floor and warns her to get away from the door. A pistol shot is heard from outside, followed by the sound of shattering glass and the blaring of a car horn. The headlights menacingly reappear as the couple get down on the floor. May guesses that the woman shooting at them is Eddie's old lover surnamed the "countess". May yells at her in the dark, at which time Martin bursts in. Thinking her in danger, he attacks Eddie until May asks him to desist. On seeing the strange rapport between May and Eddie, Martin becomes uneasy and starts to go away, but Eddie pulls him back inside. Eddie offers him a drink, at the same time pouring some in his father's cup, a man invisible to everyone except him. Eddie explains to Martin their situation. He and May are lovers from the time of adolescence, though his half-sister, their father having lived in an alternating fashion with two women unknown to each other. It was at the other woman's house that he once followed his father and first saw her. Eddie's mother never discovered her husband's adulterous relation. "He'd disappear for months at a time and she never once asked him where he went," Eddie relates. "She was always glad to see him when he came back." May adds that her mother often tried to track him down, even to the extent of travelling from one town to another. Eventually, he left and was never seen again. "And my mother just turned herself inside out," May explains. "I kept watching her grieve, as though somebody'd died. She'd pull herself up into a ball and just stare at the floor." To this comment, the father retorts to Eddie: "She's gettin' way out of line here." Noting her daughter's infatuation with Eddie, May's mother begged him not to see her again, but he ignored her wishes. She then went to Eddie's mother for the same purpose. In grief, Eddie's mother shot herself to death. Unaware that this had happened, the old man is stunned. "Speak on my behalf," he cries out to Eddie. "There's no one to speak for me now. Stand up." "It was your shotgun," Eddie retorts. The old man is further shocked on seeing Eddie and May approach each other as lovers. "Stay away from her," he warns. "What the hell are you doin'? You two can't come together." Despite his admonestations, the incestuous couple embrace. The car headlights flash again from outside. There is the sound of a collision, an explosion, and horses screaming, followed by a gasoline fire. Martin informs Eddie that his horse trailer is on fire and that the horses are loose. Eddie quickly goes out while May packs up her suitcase, convinced that her lover will return to the countess.

“A lie of the mind”
Time; 1980s. Place: Billings, Montana, and another region in the USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/a-lie-of-the-mindpdf-pdf-free.html

Over the telephone, Jake confesses to his brother, Frankie, that he thinks he has killed his wife, Ruth. But she is alive, her head covered in bandages at the hospital, her face badly bruised. She has difficulty in speaking to her brother, Mike, has difficulty recognizing him, and spits in his face before asking him to stay with her. Jake explains to Frankie that he suspected Ruth was making love with an actor during rehearsals of a play. He suddenly gets dizzy and falls. He, too, asks not to be left alone. Mike tries to help Ruth walk and discourages her from thinking of Jake. But she fails to cooperate. Frankie explains to his mother, Lorraine, and his sister, Sally, that Jake might have killed his wife, news which means nothing to Lorraine as she does not recognize the name of her son’s wife. “I don’t keep rack of his bimbos,” she declares. Both women are taken aback by Jake’s pale face and eyes sunken and dark. Mistaking his sister for Beth, he seizes her, so that Lorraine strikes him on the head with her shoe and then strikes Frankie when he tries to prevent her. Frankie proposes that both women should take Jake home with them until he finds out what happened to Beth. Despite Sally’s protests, Lorraine takes him in. Mike explains to his father, Baylor, and his mother, Meg, that Beth has suffered brain damage. In a parallel manner to Lorraine, Meg fails to recognize the name of her daughter’s husband. Since Baylor has livestock to feed, he leaves his wife with his son. Although Lorraine tries to feed her son soup, he refuses to eat, instead crashing the bowl on the mattress and stomping on the soup. Meanwhile, Sally has left the house. After calming down, he asks his mother about his father’s remains in a box and is stunned to learn that he was present when his father was killed by a passing truck. Some time later, Beth returns in better shape to her parent’s house in Montana. She thinks she hears Jake’s voice outside, but Mike explains it was Frankie. While hunting deer, Baylor accidently shoots Frankie though the thigh without touching bone. He encourages his daughter to place a footstool under Frankie’s leg so that he can rest. Sally returns at Lorraine’s house, where Jake, the country’s flag around his neck as a scarf, sent by the army at his father’s death, informs her that he has no intention of ever going outside again. Fearing Sally’s bad influence on her son, Lorraine wants her daughter to leave, but Jake prefers to keep her in his room. With their mother out of the room, he begs her to help him escape so that he can see Beth again, whom he now knows to be alive. Beth takes her shirt off to wrap around Frankie’s injured leg. She worries over a black line on it, a sign of blood poisoning. Frankie worries over Beth being found by her family without a shirt. “You could pretend to be in love with me, with my shirt,” she proposes. He pushes her away and looks for a way to leave. Mike returns carrying the hindquarters of a buck. Frankie’s pleadings to help him leave are unheeded by Mike, Beth, and Meg. To fool his mother, Jake camouflages Sally under the blanket of his bed to make her think he is in it. Sally next finds herself taking care of a shaking Lorraine in Jake’s bed. Lorraine knocks the spoon out of her daughter’s hand. Sally accuses Jake of being the murderer of his father in encouraging an alcoholic to drink until he was run down in Mexico. Lorraine denies that Jake planned the event, accusing her daughter instead. While Frankie sleeps, Baylor encourages Meg to pour on his aching feet some oil meant to care for boots, not feet. Frankie has lost sensation in his leg. He wraps himself in a blanket to avoid Beth’s gaze as she enters wearing a strange outfit and declares: “This is my man. This is the one. We’re gonna get married, daddy. I’ve decided.” A rifle shot is heard and, soon afterwards, Mike enters with the news that he has scared Jake to submission and tied him to the stove of their shack outside. Baylor is indifferent to the matters of son and daughter, Beth nestles her head against Frankie’s stomach, and Meg considers wedding plans. With Jake away, Lorraine and Sally prepare to move away to Ireland, where Lorraine’s maternal grandmother lived, by piling up their junk before burning it. To her daughter’s surprise, Lorraine burns the house down along with the junk. Armed with a rifle, Mike leads Jake while clucking as to a horse whose bit consists of the American flag, then removes it while he goes inside the house to fetch Beth so that her husband can apologize for the beating. But in Beth’s view, Jake is dead. She pulls away from her brother as Frankie shivers on the sofa. Instead of apologizing, Jake tells Beth: “I love you more than this earth,” hands his wife over to his brother, and leaves. Although Frankie wants no part of her, she puts her head on his breast while Baylor and Meg, uninterested in this business, seize the flag and fold it over successfully.

=David Mamet=



Also attracting plentiful notice is David Mamet (1947-?), who wrote "Sexual perversity in Chicago" (1974), "American Buffalo" (1975), and "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1984). The language is rough in a Pinter-like style, in which characters needlessly repeat themselves, or speak while conveying little information; but even crude speech attains some degree of power in the proper dramatic context.

"Sexual perversity in Chicago" brought to the fore the sexually permissive pre-AIDS atmosphere of the 1970s, when “swinging couples find that the gender roles of the dating game actually block any possibility of romance” (Berkowitz, 1997 p 168). Cohn (1982) proposed that the "perversity" in the title refers to "the refusal to invest in sexual relations with affection" (p 43). “Beneath the insistent rhythms of the speeches and the white noise of the parallel monologues is a silence which his characters try to neutralize. The urban aggression which typifies the encounters in the play drives the characters even further back into privatism. The mask not only conceals the self; it substitutes for it. The subject disappears to be replaced by the body as object. Loneliness, pain, simple human need are implied only through the rigour with which they are expelled from a world in which pace, ironic humour and a brittle energy are substituted for anything more solid...Commodity value  alone seems to survive, sexual voyeurism, sexual fantasies and sexual possession being offered as correlatives of a vapid materialism. And yet the energy of the play is not without its seductiveness, the sardonic humour not without its attractions” (Bigsby, 1985 p 257). Herman (1987) described the play as “a ritual of seduction gone sour” where there is a “general weariness of any kind of sentiment...The older of the pairs represents hardened attitudes of permanent hostility between the sexes and even the younger couple displays a lack of trust in each other" (pp 132-133). Despite the hostility, Bernie thinks about and wants women. The play "evokes a world in which aggression is a mode of communication and words have become denatured. Its principal currency is sexuality but a sexually devalued, counterfeited to the point at which it neither buys immunity from solitude nor offers satisfaction for needs. The singles bar becomes an effective image of a society in which alienated individuals market themselves, seeking the very companionship they fear, as they substitute lifestyle for life" (Bigsby, 1992 p 208). “In the case of the men, the relationship is sterile, not a genuine mentor-protégé relationship, because the mentor can impart no genuine insights about how to relate to women...In the case of the women, Joan can reveal no effective sympathy with Deb’s attempt at optimism, and puts down as often as possible her need for encouragement...[When] Bernie and Joan encounter each other at a singles bar...its cross-over between a man who wants a woman and then doesn’t and a woman who doesn’t want and then does...parallels in miniature the development and demise of the central relationship between Dan and Deb...Though [Dan and Deb] can set aside their verbal armory developed for social role-playing, they have nothing to replace it. The challenge here is to find ways to commune with each other beyond sex” (Carroll, 1987 pp 56-57). For the characters “sex really has become a dirty word, a sniggering pastime for the easily bored. Rather than fulfilling its original function as an integral part of an emotional relationship, sex is for them little more than a cheap thrill, something that men “do” to women and for which women should be grateful… The characters in Sexual Perversity in Chicago are, in common with many others in Mamet’s drama, emotionally adrift in a world where the second-rate has been accepted as the norm. They occasionally glimpse the possibility of something other than the tawdry lives they endure, but these momentary revelations have no chance of taking root in the febrile atmosphere in which they exist. With no real moral base upon which to pin their ideas, their lives are shapeless, distorted, and corrupt...The frenetic verbal affrays that the characters indulge in are their way of concealing the vacuum that exists at the root of their lives; the abandon with which they bounce wisecracks and platitudes off one another only partially conceals their desperation… Deborah and Joan in Sexual Perversity in Chicago...appear to be idealistic but, as the play progresses, their disappointment with what they are offered becomes almost tangible. By the end of the work they seem to have concluded that affection is often more genuine and freely forthcoming from members of their own sex, and that the whole fabric of heterosexual pairing is something of a confidence trick...Joan frequently undercuts the sobriety of the situation by casual interruptions such as ‘Are you going to eat your roll?...This roll is excellent’ (scene 20, p. 38) and so on. Deborah responds only intermittently and monosyllabically, twice announcing ‘I disagree with you’ and stating that she is ‘moving in with Danny’. Mamet therefore makes Joan’s grave sentiments psychologically questionable; could not there be a suggestion that she is, in fact, jealous of her friend’s success with Danny and that her denigration of heterosexuality is little more than resentment? Deborah’s disagreement with her friend’s ideas is also based on rather ambiguous premises; she has just decided to live with Danny, and so Joan’s criticism of the basis of sexual relationships between men and women could be seen as a threat. Her friend’s castigation undermines Deborah’s security and the reasons for her decision to move in with her lover. It is not, therefore, altogether surprising that she should repeat that she disagrees with Joan- in her present situation, she cannot really afford to do otherwise” (Deane, 2005 pp 126-141).

"American Buffalo" “shows small-time criminals trying to plot a robbery only to find themselves constantly sidetracked by the need to establish and maintain the images of competence and dignity they present to each other, and by the minutia of etiquette and logistics their roles force on them” (Berkowitz, 1997 p 168). Demastes (1988) cited several critics who complain that almost nothing happens in the play (p 80). Yet here, as in “Waiting for Godot” (1953) and “Hamlet" (1600), inaction is as dramatically tense as action. Other critics see the play as a "critique of the American business ethic" (Herman, 1987 p 141), "the dog-eat-dog system...where business loyalty shifts precariously depending on who 'holds the cards'" (Krasner, 2006 p 104) when it is only a thief’s delusion of acting as a businessman (Demastes, 1988 pp 82-83). Indeed, Teach speaks of himself as the representative of free enterprise, rather a sign of self-aggrandizement (Haedicke, 2007). “‘Without this, we’re just savage shitheads in the wilderness,’ he says. Civilisation in Teach’s sense of the frontier myth is defined by the opportunity to make money, and his glorification of the individual as opposed to the collective echoes the individualistic ruthlessness of the American dream, an every man for himself mentality” (Saddik, 2007 p 143). "The corrosive effect of such a stance is revealed in the corruption of Don, whom Teach coerces, 'simply as a business proposition' into excising Bob from their 'thing', the ludicrously planned heist of the buffalo nickel from the 'fucking fruit' who bought it" (p 413). “The characters repeatedly justify their actions by reference to the necessities of ‘business’, which becomes little more than a self-justifying mechanism...The characters deplore the violence and the decay of values for which they are the principal evidence and in which they are prime movers...To Teach, arming himself for the robbery, the weapon is a ‘necessary protection against some crazed lunatic’ of a householder who may irrationally see the assault on his property ‘as an invasion of his personal domain’” (Bigsby, 1985 pp 262-264). "Mamet reveals the philosophical dilemmas raised by money as the primary concern of American Buffalo early in the first act, when his protagonist Don gives lessons on business to Bob, lessons that nicely foreground issues central to the logic of naturalism. The first of these issues involves what is for many critics the defining theme of literary naturalism: the conflict between one's sense of free will and one's sense of behavior as determined. In discussing Fletcher- the winner of a card game that precedes the action of the play and one of Mamet's many Godot-like characters representing powerful off-stage forces- Don evokes the paradox of human freedom through his own use of the terms skill, talent, and experience. First Don ascribes Fletcher's success at cards to '[s]kill and talent and the balls to arrive at your own conclusions', which implies some mixture of learned experience, innate ability, and independent thinking...Another of Don's business lessons for Bob, that 'action talks and bullshit walks', is another way of saying that action talks and talk acts- that action is talk and talk is action. This seeming paradox is a central truth in the work of both the playwright and the salesman...That Don is both aware of and troubled by this paradox is clear in the way he tries repeatedly to control the talk of other characters in the play. When Teach, in an attempt to replace Bob as Don's accomplice in the planned robbery, subtly refers to Bob's heroin addiction, Don interjects, 'I don't want you mentioning that,' and a few lines later, 'I don't want that talk'...More difficult to explain is Don's relation to that which constitutes the very essence of his profession: buying and selling. Nowhere in the play do we see this salesman sell anything. In fact, the one item we are told of his selling- the buffalo nickel whose sale precedes the action of the play- Don spends the entire play trying to get back. The motive for this planned robbery is not pecuniary...A perceived loss of honor, rather than any desire for money, is what motivates Don. In fact, when Teach brings up the issue of the value of the different coins the two imagine to be in their would-be victim's possession, Don is not interested...Robbery has sometimes been considered more honorable than exchange, since it involves a personal involvement and a good deal of risk on the part of the robber. In this sense, Don's desire to get his nickel back through robbery, clearly motivated by a sense of injured honor rather than a desire for money, constitutes a rejection of the alienating world of economic exchange...Unlike Don and Bob, Teach never understands talk as 'just talk'- an attempt to be friendly, to establish community. In the first act, Don's seemingly innocent question about how Teach did in the poker game the night before is interpreted by Teach as a kind of attack. Don has to explain 'I'm just saying...for talk'. Similarly, when Don tries to engage in friendly chitchat about the weather, Teach takes his questions very seriously. Teach can only understand talk as manipulative, useful in getting others to act in a certain way. This is why he is so shocked to learn at the end of the play that all the planning he and Don have done in the course of the day was based on a lie: Bob had claimed that he saw the coin buyer (their intended victim) with a suitcase, apparently leaving on a trip, but finally he reveals that he did not" (Dietrick, 2006 pp 331-342). "Don is a contemporary version of a goldbug...[referring to] late-nineteenth-century advocates of an economy backed by precious metal- gold or silver- [who] argued that a greenback economy is dangerous because it relies on currency that can do no more than promise value. The promissory note is an inauthentic, unnatural, unreal form of money because it merely simulates value. Only precious metals are real money because their value is naturally stamped into their physical form" (Little, 2004 p 150). “Teach uses language to manipulate, the aim of which is to convince, sell, and evade real contact. His words are bluster, puffery, self-doubt, false modesty...His strategy is all surface...This superficiality exposes his deep insecurities and vulnerability; he is conflicted about issues of loyalty; and he longs for Don’s approval” (Krasner, 2016 p 239). “In spite of Don’s earlier statement to Bob that ‘You don’t have friends this life,’ it is plain that he and Bob share a friendship, and that he is mentor to the boy. This nurturing relationship is often hinted at through pauses and the gentle rhythm of words which sometimes belie their overt meaning. Teach notices this- and his driving pejoratives about ‘business’ and ‘free enterprise’ are clearly designed to undermine it. They reveal his own desire to displace Bob in a positive relationship with Don” (Carroll, 1987 p 36). “Teach...becomes the catalyst between Donny and Bobby, helping them to realize their importance to each other...American Buffalo zeroes in on the language of petty hoods and unleashes a relentless storm of raunchy expletives. It is an exercise in absurdity in which nothing of consequence happens. The play ends with betrayal and failure to execute the heist. The play expounds on conflict of values- friendship, loyalty and business being defined as taking care of oneself. The play also tells of the price that is paid for lack of trust in human relationships. It speaks about love, envy and distrust that fester among men who battle for each other’s affections” (Barnes, 1983 p 444). “We never learn what Teach does for a living. Bob, a recovering junkie, cannot hold a steady job. Only Don has a tangible if marginal business, but it is he who abdicates his moral position. Don betrays his friendship with Bob" (Roudané, 2004 p 63).

"Glengarry Glen Ross" “focuses on the world of high-pressured salesmen and discovers that their sense of their own identity and manhood is so defined by their work that they can never stop selling, even to each other and to themselves” (Berkowitz, 1997 p 168). "The skills and instincts that give these characters their sense of identity and worth also cripple them, making them incapable of honesty, honour or even a simple, unpremeditated conversation" (Berkowitz, 1992 p 194). “Behind the obscenities, the incoherent sounds, the relentless platitudes of the salesmen’s chatter and the neurotic and overlapping monologues which pass for communication is a vacancy, a world whose existence can only be implied from the consistency with which it is ignored. The world- a world of genuine emotion, of human need and of spiritual aspiration- finds no solace, no articulation, no correlative in a public world defined only by completions which bear no relationship to the necessities of a private life or a moral existence” (Bigsby, 1985 p 286). As in "American Buffalo", Herman (1987) saw this play as a "critique of the American business ethic" (p 141) and Krasner (2006) as a “microcosm of the business world” (p 124) There may be more reason to, after considering Shelly's pronouncement that "a man's his job". "Few of the characters are able to reach, much less to maintain [a top position], and thus the competition ensures failure for the majority to achieve an identity defined as masculine...As Levene tells Williamson, 'a man's his job'. The clearly developed implication is that doing a job is what makes a man, what gives a person identity as a man. Levene goes on to say that if 'you don't have the balls' to do the job then 'you're a secretary', a job traditionally held by women. Or, as Roma exclaims to Williamson when the latter messes up a deal: 'Where did you learn your trade. You stupid fucking cunt! You idiot! Whoever told you you could work with men?' If a job is what defines a man, then failure in business is what defines the not-man, the woman. It is precisely the differentiation of these two positions that offers any sense of identity...The camaraderie of man-to-man talk, which is vividly developed between Roma and Lingk in scene three, is undercut by the realization that all of Roma's shared confidence has been simply a lead-in to a sales pitch aimed at the unsuspecting Lingk. Lingk's desire to believe in Roma's friendship, in their understanding and acceptance of each other as men, continues even as Roma's con-game is revealed. Lingk shows up the next day to reclaim his check, but he makes it clear that he has been sent by his wife, that she is what has come between Roma and Lingk. He tells Roma that 'It's not me, it's my wife' who has driven him to ask for his money back, and this wife has taken away from him 'the power to negotiate'. Lingk, whose relationship with his wife evidently does not reflect the masculine dominance/feminine submission dichotomy, is perhaps drawn to Roma precisely because Roma has power: Roma's identity as top salesman is secure. Even when Lingk discovers that his check has already been cashed, that Roma has evidently been lying to him, he still feels that he, not Roma, has failed in some way. He apologizes to Roma in lines reminiscent of Bobby's at the end of American Buffalo: 'I know I've let you down. I'm sorry'...The gender confusion of the men in Glengarry Glen Ross, while not complicated by the physical presence of women, is constantly evoked in language. Men who do not perform well are 'secretaries' or 'cunts'" (McDonough 1992 pp 201-203). “Roma’s creed is a purely rationalistic and self-serving one; salesmen, like others, must be as the times are, greedy and vulgar and petty, doing whatever is necessary for their own security” (Adler, 1987 p 106). In his sales pitch of Act 1, “Roma delivers what is all but a monologue to his mark, whose scant six lines of dialogue include one complete sentence (‘I don’t know’). The seductive philosophy Roma espouses is a rascal’s code casting shadows on ‘middle class morality’ and whether ‘bad people go to hell’, tossing off impressive comments about sexual escapades. Roma endeavours to personify fearlessness while enlisting his companion into his ethos of risk, action and life aggressively lived. The talk is so familiar and chummy that it is a striking surprise when Roma asks his companion’s name. Roma finally comes to the point about land, a pitch that he introduces with his own soft sell utterance of ‘Florida. Bullshit.’ Roma gets his teeth into the man, James Lingk, with ‘Listen to what I’m going to tell you now’ (Pressley, 2018 p 55). “Much of what is virtually a monologue directed at Lingk seems irrelevant, and some of it even obscure, but that is the point. He, Roma, is apparently relaxing at the end of a long day and sharing casual thoughts about life in general with a friendly face. Not until the very end, by which time his quarry has been readied for the kill, does he move into salesman mode– and then in a way (‘Florida bullshit.’ ‘And maybe that’s true’) which offhandedly suggests that he is not especially interested in making a sale. He preempts future objections by flatteringly implying that Lingk will look skeptically at any attempt by him to do so. But the whole monologue is actually purposeful. Roma seems to sense what Lingk’s later behavior confirms. He is passive, repressed, and fundamentally scared of his wife. At any rate, Roma appeals to a side of him that is not wholly intimidated by conventional morality and maybe would like to assert itself and even take risks” (Nightingale, 2004 pp 99-100). “Levene’s performances, as a salesman and an actor in fraud, are what constitute his identity, but when he pushes the illusion a step too far, threatening the profit structure of the business, his whole world comes down around him” (Quinn, 2005 p 198). "The very opacity of the language— its ellipses, parataxis, and concealment (as opposed to exposition)—makes us aware of speech as act, as something that functions rhetorically rather than as a lucid medium of transmission or communication. For the salesman is a rhetorician whose job hinges on the power of speech, the act of utterance, the theater of the word. Whatever the words used, the rhythms, the tones, the pauses, the fragments are designed to bully, to cajole, to advance, to retreat, to seduce, to impress" (Cardullo, 2016 p 248).

“Mamet’s world is a world of collapse. Relationships are attenuated. There are no transcendencies, secular or religious. Myths exist but they have been hollowed out. Language no longer works to bind people into a common world. Fantasy is the only force which retains its power, fantasy in the form of a nostalgia drained of human content or of ambitions which can only be entertained so long as they are not enacted” (Bigsby, 1985 p 288).

"Sexual perversity in Chicago"


Time: 1970s. Place: Chicago, USA.

Text at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/540b22a1e4b0d0f549866135/t/5e29f1038a61640c8c641d7e/1579806979695/Sexual_Perversity_in_Chicago+-+FULL+PLAY.pdf

Bernie tells Danny what happened to him the previous night, when, sitting in a pancake house, he paid a pack of cigarettes to a twenty-year-old girl he did not know before. "Come up to my room and I'll play you back for the cigarettes," she said. "No!" exclaims Danny, amazed at how keen she was to invite so soon. After showering, Bernie thwacked her with a towel, threw a radio on her shoulder, and copulated while she is wearing an old Flak suit. He left after she threw a can of gasoline on the walls and set them on fire. On another occasion, Bernie meets Joan, whom he has just met, and tries to seduce her, but is unsuccessful. Danny has better luck with Joan's roommate, Deborah. The couple continue to see each other. One time in bed, she describes her thoughts when they make love. "The last time we made love, I fantasized about other women," she says, to which he responds: "The last time I masturbated, I thought about my left hand." In the nursery school where she works, Joan catches two boys fondling each other's genitals. Bernie talks to Danny about his childhood experiences, when once a man touched his penis while reaching over to another man at a cinema house. He thinks that experience had no effect on him. Seeing Danny entrenched in a long-term relation with Deborah, Bernie advises him to drop her. But refusing to heed this advice, Danny moves in with her. "I give you two months," Joan cynically comments to Deborah on learning of this move. While viewing a pornographic movie with Danny, Bernie warns him to watch out for the other customers. "They got a lot of scum here now," he comments. In the course of time, Danny and Deborah's relationship begins to deteriorate. After learning that Danny and Deborah will separate, Bernie advises his friend not to lose his sense of humor. Back to living with Joan, Deborah considers that her break-up with Danny was all her fault. Joan does not believe that for one moment. Left with no girl-friend, Danny joins Bernie in gazing on women clad in bathing-suits walking on a beach. "I see no reason to go on living," a suddenly depressed Bernie confesses. "To think I gaze upon the highest man can wish for." Looking at a particular woman, Danny cries out amazed: "I can see her fucking snatch." When Bernie says hello to another, she silently walks away. "Deaf bitch," comments Danny, a comment worthy of Bernie.

"American buffalo"


Time: 1970s. Place: Chicago, USA.

Text at https://kupdf.net/download/american-buffalo_5a2a25b3e2b6f5ae5d2b5db9_pdf

Don, owner of a resale shop, asks Bob to spy on a client who bought from him an antique nickel for a surprisingly large amount of money. Bob then informs him that the man left his house with a suitcase. Don's other friend, Teach, informs him he can safely break into the man's house and rob him of his coins and for this, he does not need Bob. Don hesitates but, in the end, agrees with him. When asked how he will break inside the house, Teach is alarmingly vague, so that Don imposes a man named Fletcher to accompany him during the heist. That very night, Bob arrives with a nickel-head which he believes to be valuable and proposes to sell it to Don. The latter gives him some money, both agreeing to consult a catalog later to ascertain its value. Teach arrives late, but before Fletcher's arrival. He is unpleasantly surprised to find Bob there, who potters about and at last leaves. Don and Teach nervously wait for Fletcher and are unable to reach him by phone. Don is all the more unnerved when informed that Fletcher cheated Teach at cards the previous night. Finally, Bob returns with news that Fletcher is lying in a hospital bed after being mugged. When Don calls up the hospital Bob mentions, he is told no such man is registered. Don and Teach immediately become suspicious of Bob, who is unable to identify the name of the hospital and is very vague as to how he obtained the valuable nickel. Exasperated by such answers and fearing that he and Fletcher might have already robbed their intended victim, Teach strikes Bob on the head so hard that his ears begin to bleed. He also flails violently about the shop, destroying a good part of Don's property. However, they eventually learn that Bob spoke the truth about Fletcher. Teach carries Bob in his car to the hospital while Don sadly watches over him.

"Glengarry Glen Ross"
Time: 1980s. Place: Chicago, USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/glengarry-glen-ross-david-mamet-2-pdf-free.html

Shelly Levene, a real estate agent, tries to convince his office manager, John Willliamson, to give him leads (coordinates) of promising clients for the company they work for, Glengarry Glen Ross, to sell land in Florida. John is willing to accommodate Shelly with two leads but requests in exchange a sum of $100 which the agent cannot provide. Two other real estate agents, Dave Moss and George Aaronow, complain of the pressure tactics used by management to succeed. Frustrated, Dave suggests that they should steal 5,000 leads and sell them for $5,000 to a competing company headed by Jerry Graff. Since Dave has complained so often in the past about company policies and confesses to having a “big mouth”, he feels that George should enter the office and commit the burglary. George at first refuses to participate in the scheme but is intimidated into accepting it when informed that he would be considered an accessory to the robbery should Dave get caught. The most successful of the real estate agents, Ricky Roma, concludes a deal with a client named James, but, as a result of the burglary, is frustrated on learning that some of his unfiled leads were stolen, so that now he must try to sell to “deadbeats”. In contrast, Shelly is elated after just concluding a deal of eight units on “deadbeat magazine subscription leads”. While Dave curses the detective who accuses him of the robbery, Ricky points out that the robbery has no effect on one who has failed to close a good deal in the last month. Unexpectedly, James enters the office. Suspecting that James wants to cancel the deal, Ricky pretends that Shelly is a client to whom he has just sold five farms and that he must rush out with him. Shelly plays along. When James tells him that his wife wants him to cancel the deal, Ricky assures him that this is a “common reaction” to the size of the investment, a prudent reaction “that women have”. His attempts to trick James backfires when John, misinterpreting the situation and trying to help Ricky assure the client that the break-in had no effect on his check, lies to the client by saying that the check has been sent to the bank after Ricky had told the client that it could not be. As the detective continues to interview each insurance agent in regard to the break-in, it is Shelly,s turn to misinterpret the situation. Shelly curses John for destroying Ricky’s deal by lying to the client when Shelly had no way of knowing that John was indeed lying, as, unlike his usual habit, John had left the contract on his desk the previous night during the robbery. As a result, John accuses Shelly of being responsible for the break-in, since only the robber would know the contract was on his desk. When John threatens to reveal what he knows to the detective unless Shelly tells him where the stolen leads are, Shelly panics and reveals that Graff has them in exchange for $5,000 in cahoots with Dave Moss. When Shelly tries to cut a deal with John to give him half his sales, John tells him that his client for the eight units is insane and so his check is worthless, and then heads towards the detective to reveal what he knows about Shelly.

=August Wilson=



With "The piano lesson" (1987) and "Joe Turner's come and gone" (1988), the place of August Wilson (1945-2005) in American theatre became assured.

In "The piano lesson", the piano represents African heritage (Elam, 2007). In particular, "the piano embodies a legacy of two cultural loci: African and the south. Bernice opposes the sale because the instrument represents African ancestry" while Boy Willie "wants to plant seeds in southern roots...allowing the purchase of property once owned by Sutter...To reject the south would be to repudiate not only negro spirituals, the blues, and the oral tradition, but also the rightful ownership of land. Boy Willie's desire for Sutter's property represents the ethics of black entitlement" (Krasner, 2006 pp 158-159). “To achieve economic independence by making a living on the very land to which his enslaved great-grandfather was bound is what Boy Willie envisions as a way of redeeming the history of the family. Selling off a wooden relic that has fallen into disuse seems to him a small sacrifice in return for honouring his ancestors through the realization of his dreams...A combination of factors may be signaled in the exorcism of Sutter’s ghost from the house, beginning with the brother and sister at last overcoming their mutual antagonism and uniting in a joint effort to defeat their common foe” (Londré, 2007 pp 116-118). Berniece is haunted by Sutter's ghost because although she keeps the heirloom she does not play on it, thus lying cut off from her African ancestry (Elam, 2007, p 328). “Berniece is emotionally crippled, filled with hate and rage; she cannot begin to approach her heirloom piano, alive with the spirits of her ancestors...Wilson reveals his belief that history is not a burden as Berniece initially perceives it, but rather a source of positive energy that can empower the entire African-American community” (Herrington, 2002 pp 60-61). “Doaker, supported by Wining Boy who affirms the credibility of his narration, recounts distinctly the traumatic events of the past, even he remembers the exact dates and times; for instance, he recollects all the shocking events of his ancestral family split accurately...Doaker’s account proves that trauma is memorable and describable, and that trauma enhances memory rather than effacing it...Boy Willie thinks that owning the Sutters’ land, by selling the piano, is one way to overturn the painful memories of slavery that haunts their family’s present. He believes that having a piece of land will empower him with enough status and confidence to rival the white landlords; to all intents and purposes therefore he would merely imitate his capitalist oppressors approach...Berniece, by means of art requests support from her ancestors’ specters to exorcise Sutter’s ghost...The sound of the train signifies that Berniece chants or narrates her repressed past traumatic memory of the Yellow Dog. She has finally articulated Sutter’s crime, the subjugating, traumatizing memory that had been locked within the psyche of her family, that of its abject oppression...The ghosts in the play stand for the intrusive thoughts and repeated nightmares that haunt the victims of trauma, and the piano serves as a constructed memory of the past history of African Americans” (Maulood and Barzani, 2020 pp 111-121). “It is music, the music of the pleading, the summarizing, and the developing lament songs, that drives Sutter’s Ghost from Berniece’s house. Wilson lends to Berniece’s singing pleas to her ancestors (“I want you to help me’’) such power that music saves pianos and sanities both” (Hay, 1999 p 67). The piano’s “power...is only potent when it is played, for even Sutter’s ghost plays the piano in an effort to make it an instrument of his own melodic design...Although Boy Willie goes back to the south without the money he needs, there are signs that he realizes the bond of kinship that has been healed through the ordeal are much more important than Sutter’s land” (Young, 2004 pp 140-141). “Wilson aligns her with forces of white oppression in withholding the piano from Boy Willie; every time Boy Willie tries to remove the piano, Sutter’s ghost becomes agitated along with Berniece...She breaks her 7-year moratorium on playing the piano...After witnessing this ultimate manifestation of Berniece’s matriarchal power, Boy Willie, heretofore a torrent of brash verbosity, exits quickly and without protest, consigning the piano to his sister...Black matriarchy has silenced Sutter’s ghost and Boy Willie’s argument and ensured its own future” (Marra, 1994 pp 144-147).

In "Joe Turner's come and gone", "Herald Loomis arrives at the boarding house confused. To get on, he must settle 'his unfinished business with his wife' artificially cut off because of an unjust jail sentence. When Herald Loomis observes the singing and dancing of African rhythms, he resists the music but is thrown to the floor by music he fails to understand. His visions combine two fundamentals of spiritualism: Afrocentricity and Christianity", the first in the form of slaves rising from the sea and the second in the form of resurrection and baptism" (Krasner, 2006 pp 135-136) or Jesus walking on water. "When Loomis hears the song, he reacts vehemently against it. The song has clear political and social implications, acting as a powerful medium for change. With the assistance of the mysterious and powerful Bynum, a conjure man and resident of the boarding house, Loomis comes to understand his search as a spiritual and practical quest to find his song, a connection to a past lost while enslaved by Joe Turner. He journeys toward self-knowledge, spiritual and psychological liberation" (Elam, 2007 p 326), a form of liberation that rejects Christianity, of which Bynum approves. “Wilson created Bynum as a one-man chorus, which...was a way of personifying the community of the living and the dead and...would symbolize the collective African ancestors...who made sure that people obeyed ancestral traditions” (Hay, 2007 p 95). “Tensions between a religion that was forced upon Africans upon coming to America and their own belief systems that survived the Middle Passage drive the conflict of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and reveal deep fissures within both the boarding house community and Loomis’s own marriage. By juxtaposing aspects of African spiritualism and various customs that survived the Middle Passage with a drastically different set of rituals, customs and religious beliefs, Joe Turner captures the essence of cultural strangulation to which Africans were subjected...The play presents a searing indictment against New World Christianity and a seeming approbation of man’s penchant for self-determination. The friction between the slave owner’s Christianity and African spirituality create sparks that draw attention to the play’s overriding message about the dangers- and the essential impossibility- of completely erasing aspects of one’s culture and replacing them with those of another. Bynum Walker, the resident voodoo man in the Holly boarding house, best captures the reaction against cultural erasure for the sake of unity: ‘I’m a binder of what clings,’ he notes. ‘You got to find out if they cling first. You can’t bind what don’t cling.’ An extension of this reaction in each of Wilson’s plays is the cynical regard for Christianity as a positive force in the lives of his African-American men. In Loomis’s case, a dollar bill given to a so-called ‘people finder’ substitutes for what might have been a fervent prayer for God’s assistance. Moreover, displays of religious devotion are met with biting cynicism and blasphemy. For example, during a scene in which the doubting Loomis and the saved Martha finally confront each other, he reveals that Jesus Christ, to him, has become no more than a ‘great big old white man’...Herald Loomis, a former member of Joe Turner’s chain gang and one-time deacon in the Christian church, flatly rebuffs his wife’s religious fervour by brandishing a knife and drawing his own blood in an act that mirrors Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. His dramatic self-inflicted wounding, coupled with his abrupt phallic showdown with God- ‘Why God got to be so big. Why he got to be bigger than me? How much big do you want?’- suggest the extent to which Loomis wants no part of this new and alien religion. Indeed, the derisive tone of his comments as well as his outright challenge to God’s omnipotence coupled with his willingness to draw his own blood in the final scene of the play reflect a level of exasperation that is relatively new to African-American theatre” (Shannon, 2018 pp 146-147). “Almost everyone in the play seeks after someone and they appeal for assistance to two wondrously mythic types- similar in many ways to the rat wife in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf- the people finder and the binder of what clings” (Shafer, 1995 p 274). “What disturbs Herald Loomis about the characters’ participation in the dance is that sense of community, of solidarity, of an atavistic legacy of Africa and sadly of the bondage still in the consciousness of the post-Civil War generation, all of which are in sharp contrast to his desire for autonomy...Walker’s purpose, his song, lies in both his names: ‘Bynum’, the one who binds people together so that they discover a sense of truth within themselves; ‘Walker’, the one who wanders, a seeker...There must be an antagonist in the play, and, ironically, the antagonist is the protagonist, an ex-convict appropriately named Herald Loomis. He will become the herald, the shiny man, the one who knows all that came before as the ghost of Walker’s father foretold” (Bogumil, 2011 pp 61-70). “In redeeming himself, [Loomis] must overcome his own blind submission to a biased God who exists to promote the interests of the system of slavery...In essence, he realizes that he must be born again, but not in the typical sense of New Testament Christianity...Loomis, though he rejects ‘Mr Jesus Christ’ because he cannot differentiate him from Joe Turner, nevertheless has his own Old Testament-like vision and at the play’s conclusion cuts himself and cleanses his being in his own blood” (Young, 2004 pp 132-135). “Loomis’ rage is positive, because if it were not triggered by his coerced drudgery, he would have never realized his connection to Africa...[When he sees the juba], Loomis reacts in the way he does because he does not have a connection to any type of spirit, neither Christian nor African...The second way Bynum binds Loomis to his past is by singing about Joe Turner. In order for Loomis to know where he is going, he has to acknowledge where he came from...[Loomis becomes angry because] he thinks that all he needs is Martha...He does not need Martha, nor does he have to hide from Turner...Loomis recognizes that the Christianity he had been following before his imprisonment failed him; thus he falls back on the African traditional religions...Loomis needs to find Martha to get a starting place in the world...By equating her with Turner as halting his life, Loomis evokes comparison to characters such as Bigger Thomas and Silas in Richard Wright’s works; both blame black women for their plights and both link black women to a conspiring white oppressive system” (Harris, 1994, p 56). “Though Martha offers legitimate reasons of self-preservation for her actions, in Herald’s mind, she abandoned him to make a new life for herself serving the white man’s God. The betrayal is such that he cannot go back, either to her or her church. In restoring their daughter to her mother, Herald relinquishes his ties to a religious and familial past rooted in white domination...Whereas the playwright grants his hero the freedom to forge himself anew, he leaves this primary female character indelibly inscribed in an oppressive stereotype” (Marra, 1994 pp 137-138). Though Mattie was presumably searching for her husband throughout the course of the play, what she was actually searching for, according to Bertha and Bynum, is a man who has discovered himself” (Tyndall, 2004 pp 160-171).

"The piano lesson"


Time: 1936. Place: Pittsburgh, USA.

Text at https://www.hackensackschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=607&dataid=5293&FileName=the%20piano%20lesson%20-%20august%20wilson.pdf

Boy Willie and Lymon arrive in town to sell a large load of watermelons. Boy Willie also wants to sell a piano he owns along with his sister, Bernice, to buy some farmland owned by the brother of a man who has recently died, Sutter, once the slave-owner of their grandparents. Though she has not played on it for many years, Bernice refuses to sell, because she considers the instrument a family heirloom, their grandfather having pictures of their family history carved on the wood. Feeling that as long as Sutter owned the piano, they were still his slaves, Boy Willie and Bernice's father along with Boy Charles stole it from him. When Sutter discovered the theft, he was so angry that he burned the father's house down. On finding him inside a box-car in the company of four hobos, he and the sheriff set it afire with them in it. Over a period of many years, several men involved in the murder have been killed by being thrown down wells, the exploit, according to legend, of the Yellow Dog ghosts, the name originating from the train because of the sound of its whistle and the yellow color of its box-cars. Bernice suspects Boy Willie himself pushed Sutter down his well. That is the supposed reason why she, her daughter, and Doaker, the brother of her deceased husband, have been haunted by Sutter's ghost. After selling most of their watermelons, Boy Willie and Lymon celebrate. Late at night, Boy Willie comes back to his sister's home accompanied by a newly found girl-friend, but Bernice sends them away and repulses Lymon's sexual advances. The following day, Boy Willie and Lymon are puzzled as to why they cannot move the piano anymore. They use a wheeled board and rope, but Bernice interrupts their endeavor. A frustrated Boy Willie feels that owning farmland will make him equal with the white man. Throughout his life, he has felt unwelcome everywhere. "The world ain't wanted no part of me," he declares. But when he tries to move the piano despite Bernice's threats and despite knowing that his sister carries a gun, he is inexplicably thrown back from it. Content with that outcome, she sits down to play on it.

"Joe Turner's come and gone"


Time: 1911. Place: Pittsburg, USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/joe-turner-s-come-and-gone-august-wilson-pdf-free.html https://www.hackensackschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=925&dataid=7635&FileName=august%20wilson%20joe%20turner_s%20come%20and%20gone.pdf

Rutherford brings over sheet metal so that Seth can make dustpans for him. Bynum, a lodger in Seth's boardinghouse, asks Rutherford, known as a people finder, about whether he has seen his shiny man, a man "with light coming out of him" who once led him along a road where everything was bigger. "Said he had been thinking about me," Bynum says of the man, "and it grieved him to see me carrying other people's songs and not having one of my own." Rutherford has not seen him. Seth admonishes another lodger, Jeremy, for having being arrested on the charge of drunken behavior. But Jeremy denies even having taken one sip of a half-pint with a friend when white men showed up to arrest him and fine him two dollars. "They snatched hold of us to get that two dollars," Jeremy explains. Herald Loomis next shows up accompanied with his 11-year-old daughter, Zonia, in search of a place to stay while looking to track down his wife who left him. Seth agrees to let them stay and, following his wife's suggestion, allows Zonia to pay her way by helping her around the house. Just by looking at Zonia's face, Seth knows who the mother is, a local woman named Martha, but does not reveal this information to the suspicious-looking Herald, supposedly the deacon of a church. Mattie next shows up, also looking to recover a spouse. She requests Bynum's help, a man with a reputation of being able to bind people together, but he refuses on the grounds that the husband left when her two babies died, a sign that he should get away. Mattie's looks quickly entice Jeremy, who invites her to hear him play guitar at a public place. She accepts. Hearing about Rutherford's reputation as a people finder, Herald hires him to find his wife. Fonder than ever of Mattie, Jeremy agrees to pay Seth an additional sum so that she can lodge in his room. But when Molly shows up looking for a room, Jeremy eyes her carefully. One evening, while Seth, Bynum, and Jeremy play music together, singing and dancing to African rhythms, Herald interrupts them, admonishing their use of the Holy Spirit's name, declaring that he has visions, and starting to take his clothes off only to collapse, finally calmed down by Bynum, who asks him about his visions. "I done seen bones rise up out of the water, rise up and walk across the water, bones walking on top of the water." After Herald's recovery, an enraged Seth asks him to leave the house. Having already paid, he only accepts to go when the week is out. Jeremy informs Seth he lost his job for refusing to pay a white man fifty cents as protection money to keep his job, a foolish move according to Seth. In any event, Jeremy wants to move away with Molly. "Molly won't work," Molly tells him. He agrees. While playing dominoes, Bynum sings "Joe Turner's come and gone". "I don't like that song, mister," Herald warns. "My wife Martha gone from me after Joe Turner catched me." While trying several years ago to convince some men to stop gambling, he was arrested along with the rest and received a 7-year prison sentence. Rutherford finds Martha and brings her over to Herald, but, despite having tried to find him for years, she now refuses to follow, only accepting to take Zonia with her. To mitigate his disappointment, she encourages him to embrace the Christ who bled for him. "I don't need nobody to bleed for me," he retorts as he goes, "I can bleed for myself." "Herald Loomis, you shining, you shining like new money," Bynum enthuses.

=TS Eliot=



Of interest as well is the social comedy turned sour, "The cocktail party" (1949), by Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965).

In a letter to Lucie Wolf, May 25, 1883, Ibsen stated that "verse has been most injurious to dramatic art. A scenic artist whose department is the drama of the present day should be unwilling to take a verse in his mouth. It is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future; the aims of the dramatists of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it. It is therefore doomed" (Henderson, 1914 p 192). Luckily for dramatic art, Eliot believed otherwise. However, “Eliot, with The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk, has been trying to bring his dramatic poetry as close to prose as possible and has succeeded only too well” (Gassner, 1960 p 279).

"The cocktail party" is "in the light and gay texture of its witty conversations it beats, on his own ground, such a dramatist as Mr Noel Coward at his best. At the same time, The Cocktail Party has a profoundly serious underlying theme, that of thee various kinds of self-deception in which even cultivated and pleasant and well-meaning people tend to indulge, as one might indulge in a drug, in our uneasy society and of the way in which self-deception prevents people from living the life and doing the work they were meant to do, from following their true vocation...It has become clear...that the psychiatrist is not a mere psychiatrist but rather one of a group of people- the other two are a gossipy old woman and a facetious man-about-town- who have either assumed, or in some mysterious fashion been given, the roles of spiritual guardians to the less enlightened people in their circle. They see it as their job, in a word, to help to save souls from damnation; also lives, useful in this world, from ruin and waste at the practical level. If the husband and wife are diverted by the guardians into the channels of a decent, ordinary marriage, the girl who has been the husband’s mistress is a much more exceptional person, and the vocation which she is gradually led to accept is that of a missionary; a vocation which is to lead in a very short time to her martyrdom in a primitive country. The young man who has been in love with her, and who has simultaneously been the lover of the wife, has literary ambitions which have not exactly come to nothing, but which he has thought about with an exaggeratedly self-centred idea of his own importance and his own talent; he is sent off by the guardians to a more practical job, at which he is to do very well, getting rid at the same time of some of his egoism, in the film industry in Hollywood. But this young man, too, has high spiritual possibilities and when, in the last act, he learns of the martyrdom of the girl whom he has so long secretly loved, we see that this news brings about in him a kind of painful but healthy inner awakening. The last act, however, is very largely concerned with the husband and wife- the girl’s terrible death, naturally, is merely reported, it is not part of the action on stage- and it shows how, having accepted the order and limitations of married life for people of their temperaments, they are able to make something happy and creative out of it. They are much more mature and likeable people now than they were in the earlier acts" (Fraser, 1960 pp 156-158).

"The cocktail party" is an "acidulous comedy of manners...[but] suffers as a play mainly from the absence of its most interesting character in the third act, and from the transference of her story to reportage once she departs for Africa. For two acts the work has continuing tension, but loses it thereafter, and precisely at the point when it should mount. In the third act, too, the reunited Chamberlaynes display good breeding and sentiment, but what they make of their reunion is hardly of great consequence as drama. Nor does their later life redound to the credit of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, psychiatrist-extraordinary and Harley Street father-confessor. His mystical status cannot be seen in a very impressive light if little more than a cocktail party status quo is the end of his endeavors on stage while the spiritual redemption of Celia Copplestone remains off stage. Fortunately, the 'high comedy' atmosphere of the third act returns us to the milieu of the first act (though with some deepening of mood)" (Gassner, 1954a pp 730-731). “Fitting for a cocktail party that seems to go on indefinitely, all of Alex’s stories are incomplete” (Pattie, 2012 p 100). “Many...20th century plays contain formalistic elements. The high point in The Cocktail Party is the second act, in which Dr Reilly, the psychiatrist-guardian and his associates, Julia and Alex, assume a religious function. They perform a sort of ritual reminiscent of the mass with their cocktail glasses” (Gassner, 1956 p 169). “Mr Eliot is at his most effective in the scenes dominated by the psychoanalyst and at his least witty and most tedious when trying to write the brittle chitchat of the drawing room. The vigor of his mind and his precise command of language are the most strongly felt when his touch is both sardonic and serious” (Brown, 1963 pp 194-195).

English playwrights of religious plays “appear to have only a nodding acquaintance with Satan, and they have nothing to repent or transcend worth exhibiting to a public...All we know at the end of this kind of drama is that the authors are against sin and error,” unlike vibrant Montherlant’s The Dead Queen (1942) and The Master of Santiago (1948)” (p 430). Eliot posited “the needlessness of human wrong and the possibility of correcting it by social enlightenment...Eliot had predicted failure from the start: to live without redemption is to live under the cloud of original sin and to make even a satisfactory life for oneself without sanctification is merely to make the best of a bad bargain, which is the destiny of the worldly Chamberlayne couple...Eliot makes the cocktail party a morality drama which is neither exuberant, in spite of comedy of manners in the first and third acts, nor rationalistic in spite of the role of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly as psychoanalyst. The uniqueness of his role lies, indeed, in the fact that whereas his patients expect rationalistic or scientific treatment at his office, they receive only moral and mystic ministrations” (Gassner, 1954b pp 269-277).

“The Cocktail Party, a reworking of Euripides’ Alcestis, depicts characters trapped by almost-pathological indecision. They desperately need companionship and yet are destined to feel alone” (D’Monté, 2015 p 174). “In Euripides, Alcestis consents to die in order to save her husband’s life and Hercules, who is always in search of a good deed, decides to bring her back from the underworld. Alcestis corresponds to both Lavinia and Celia, that is to say to two aspects of femininity and to two levels of life in general. Lavinia does not die to save her husband; she merely leaves him alone so that he may find himself. When they both meet again after their brief respective journeys not through the desert but through life, they have both learnt to avoid excessive expectations; they both know now that they do not understand each other and that they must make the best of their humdrum existences. Celia is the woman who sacrifices herself. She began like Lavinia, Edward and Peter Quilpe by living in the dark in a world of blindness or partial blindness from which they all have to move towards a form of light. But once Celia has been touched by grace and has achieved a vision of the true life, she can no longer accept compromise and humdrum existence, and she becomes a preordained martyr” (Chiari, 1965 pp 96-97).

Porter (1969) pointed out that Edward wants Lavinia back and Peter wants Celia. The failure of the Edward-Lavinia couple could have been countered by the success of the Peter-Celia couple, except that Celia’s love is not directed at Peter (p 59). Instead, she veers towards being a Christ-like figure whose death may eventually encourage Peter to reject his false life to embrace a truer one. In Hobson's (1953) view, Edward's plight is not loving anyone, so that he settles for "a martial road of jog-trot give-and-take" (p 7). When consulting Reilly, Celia chooses to atone rather than be reconciled. Of her violent end, Williams (1965) writes: "It has been frequently said that Celia's motives are unsubstantiated, that the play does not prepare us for her decision. It seems to me that this criticism is a rationalisation, covering an essential antipathy to the nature of her experience. 'Making the best of a bad job' is a familiar contemporary morality, and much of the play has moved on this acceptable level. But Eliot seems to have deliberately provoked the shock of Celia's experience and decision and death. By making Reilly the guardian of those who follow both ways, he has achieved, in the most striking possible way, the realisation of a particular pattern of values" (p 242). Brandt (1962) pointed out that Edward’s conclusion that 'hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections' is opposite to Garcin’s in Sartre’s “No exit” (1942).

"The cocktail party"


Time: 1940s. Place: England.

Text at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.97677 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.525194 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.16283 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.528539 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.524184 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.526696 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.524620 https://kupdf.net/download/the-cocktail-party-pdf_5afbe151e2b6f500118749ae_pdf

Lavinia leaves her husband, Edward, just before a cocktail party at their house. An uninvited guest appears to speak with him. "There's ground for hope she won't come back," the guest assures him. "But I want my wife back," protests Edward, who finds such speculations offensive. "You are nothing but a set of obsolete responses," the guest counters. "The one thing to do is to do nothing. Wait." But since he refuses to wait, the guest promises that his wife will return within a day. Edward's lover, Celia, arrives next, who wishes to be reassured about the stability of their relation. He retreats. "This can't go on," he affirms. As the guest predicted, Lavinia indeed returns the following day. Husband and wife immediately launch into mutual grievances. He accuses her of always trying to turn him into what she wants him to be, to the extent that he has the impression of having lost his own personality. "Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections," he tells her. In turn, she accuses him of never troubling to understand her. He agrees to consult a psychiatrist, Dr Henry Harcourt-Reilly, who turns out to be the uninvented guest. To Edward's surprise, Lavinia shows up, and, to his further surprise, reveals that she, too, has had an adulterous relation. After listening to their complaints, Harcourt-Reilly concludes that there is common ground to work on: he is suffering from loving no one and she of not being loved. Their session is followed by Celia's, suffering from loneliness and a horrid sense of emptiness. "Can we only love something created by our own imagination?" she wonders. Harcourt-Reilly encourages her to strive for high ideals. "There is another way if you have the courage'" he says. "But the way leads toward possession/Of what you have sought for in the wrong place." "That sounds like what I want," she declares. To escape her unhappy lot, she leaves for a foreign country as a nurse, but falls as a victim to an uprising of the natives.

=Carson McCullers=



The domestic drama, "The member of the wedding" (1950), by Carson McCullers (1917-1967) is a moving account of female adolescence. The main part of the dialogue is taken from the novel of the same name with one important change: the absence of any meeting between Frankie and the lusty soldier.

Atkinson (1974) foolishly misinterpreted "The member of the wedding" as a sum of “the foolish trivialities of an adolescent girl” (p 410). In contrast, Gassner (1954b) wrote that the play “manages to be persuasive and revealing by being nothing more than a well-observed picture of a girl’s adolescence as she grows out of the tomboy stage. And parallel to this description runs another virtually plotless line of interest: the life of a negro servant who has cared for the girl” (pp 78-79).

“Usually spoken of as a first-rate comedy of sensibility, this appealing inward play is structured largely as a character sketch, or a trio of character sketches, rather than an intricately plotted narrative. What action there is comes rather explosively after two introductory acts sensitively concerned with atmosphere and nuances of character and feeling...Frankie is so puzzled by, an afraid of, the adult world that she impulsively alternates between avoiding it and then dreaming, or ludicrously scheming, about entering it...[McCullers] invested a familiar family situation and ordinary folk...with an appealing warmth” (Herron, 1969 pp 398-400).

“The theme of the play is...spiritual isolation- the type of isolation that results in an oppressive loneliness, in an intense desire to belong, and, failing these, in a need to escape...Act One...is a subjective, inner-compelled analysis by Frankie Addams of her problem- a many-faceted problem to which she returns again and again as she gropes for a solution, a solution which will alleviate her sense of spiritual isolation and cure her deep loneliness. The polarity of her quest for a solution becomes a vacillating and ever-recurring theme- the necessity to belong or else to escape from her restricted world into the world outside- which culminates, so she feels, at the end of Act One in her discovery that all along she had just been an I person and that she is the only person she knows who does not belong to a We. Act Two is largely a grotesque parable of love and death designed by Berenice to bring Frankie to a sense of reality, to carry her beyond her fantasies in an effort to make her see that one cannot merely decide what he will do to the exclusion of reason...In the final scene of Act Three, Frankie- now more properly called Frances, as she is in the novel, since she is now developing a proper feminine sex-role identity- gains her freedom from the kitchen. Frankie has formed a close, normal teen-age friendship with Mary Littlejohn. It is especially significant, symbolically so, that Frankie and Mary got to know each other in front of the lipstick and cosmetics counter at Woolworth's. Frankie's mental picture of herself- a psychic reality, which is the core of her self-concept- gradually changes with the emergence of her female identification, symbolized by the cosmetics counter" (Dedmond, 1975 pp 50-52).

“Sadness clings to Berenice, who mourns her first (of four) husbands, whose death thirteen years before the start of the play created an emptiness that has never disappeared...Berenice, like the kitchen, offers haven as well as sustenance. She listens to Frankie’s troubles; plays cards with the two youngsters; alters the dress Frankie buys to wear to the wedding; cooks and serves meals; makes the wedding cake, cookies, and sandwiches; watches the children; and washes dishes. Frankie relies on Berenice for comfort but also derides her as incapable of understanding anything, attacking Berenice for perceived insults and constraints. In one particularly confrontational moment, Frankie threatens Berenice with a carving knife” (Chansky, 2015 pp 158-160).

“McCullers rewrites Honey Brown as a surly misfit in open rebellion against white demands for subservience. Whereas in the novel he is merely too sensitive to live docilely in Sugarville, in the play he aggressively resists conformity, rebelling when Frankie’s father insists Honey call him ‘sir’ and condemning his black friend, TT Williams, for complying: “TT said ‘sir’ enough for a whole crowd of niggers,’ Honey charges. “But for folks that calls me nigger, I got a real good nigger razor’” (James, 2002 p 55).

"The member of the wedding"


Time: 1945. Place: Southern part of USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.3318 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.235460 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.60953

Jarvis, a soldier, is to marry Janice. His 12-year-old sister, Frankie, harbors jealous feelings towards her. "I bet they have a good time every minute of the day," she comments to Berenice, their black servant. Frankie is frustrated at being rejected from joining a girl's club. When Berenice teases her, she snatches a carving knife and threatens her with it. They are interrupted by the arrival of T.T., Berenice's suitor, in the company of Honey, her foster-brother, whose head has just been struck by a policeman following an altercation with a soldier. Tired of living at her father's house, Frankie wants to join her brother and his bride. "I love the two of them so much because they are the "we" of me," she confides to her 7-year old friend, John Henry. For the wedding ceremony, she buys for herself an orange satin dress with silver stockings and shoes. Berenice and T.T. consider it too grown up, but since it cannot be returned, she is determined to fix it. Berenice is aware that Frankie is paying too much attention to the to-be-wedded couple, warning her of the dangers inherent in loving too intensely, in her own case Ludie, the first of four husbands. "What I did was marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I came across them," she explains. "It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces." During this conversation, John Henry starts to feel sick, but the two ignore his complaints. During the wedding ceremony, after many hesitations, Frankie informs her brother she wants to follow him and his wife, but he refuses. Sick at heart, she leaves the house with her father's gun. He and T.T rush after, but cannot find her. Eventually, not knowing where to go, she returns on her own. Honey also comes back after being involved in an altercation with a white man who would not serve him in a restaurant. He drew out a razor and cut him. Although Berenice hands money over to facilitate his escape from the police, he is caught and hangs himself in a jail-cell. John Henry is diagnosed with meningitis and dies. When Frankie's father decides to move with his sister to another house, Berenice quits his service. Although Frankie promises to visit her, Berenice doubts she ever will.

=Robert Anderson=

Also of note in the domain of domestic drama is "Tea and sympathy" (1953) by Robert Anderson (1917–2009), ”a poignant drama about the agonies of an adolescent boy in a private school suspected of being a homosexual” (Atkinson, 1974 p 440).

“An intensely dramatic and illuminating interpretation of several attitudes toward love, this appealing 3-act drama is the story of 3 insecure people: a 17-year old student, misunderstood because he is idealistic and sensitive, the warm-hearted and sentimental wife of a schoolmaster whose emotions overpower her common sense, and her athletic husband, who is unsympathetic and even brutal because of his own feeling of insecurity. A select and long-established boys school in a New England town provides the circumscribed backdrop for a series of embarrassing situations making up the community entanglements” (Herron, 1969 p 460). “Tea and sympathy” “is one of those studies of victimization that American authors write so well and so often, the victim on this occasion being a teenage boy…[whose] descent into despair is hastened by the glib pep-talks of his uncomprehending father and the bleak hostility of his housemaster, whose strident maleness is merely a cloak for long-suppressed homosexual tendencies. It is the housemaster’s life...who resolves the boys doubts by going to bed with him...And...the process is...often extremely moving” (Tynan, 1961 p 172). “Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy can...be viewed, like Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), as a warning of the dangers caused by careless insinuation, as the boys spread rumours about Tommy and one of the school instructors…The young faculty wife, Laura, defends Tommy by pointing out how people wrongly make targets out of others they simply do not like, without any real proof against them, and we learn that the instructor also loses his position without any hearing or chance to face his accusers” (Abbotson, 2018a p 76).

“Tea and Sympathy and Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959) show that one should set aside traditional moral norms in favor of responding to another person in time of need...[Among his dramas], few of the characters can match Laura Reynolds, the gentle, compassionate schoolmaster's wife of Tea and Sympathy, or Tom Lee, the sensitive and misunderstood schoolboy” (Stanton, 1980 p 91-92). “Laura understands...that ‘manliness...must include...tenderness, gentleness, consideration’, qualities...that...society has traditionally ascribed to the feminine sensibility and that men...suppress. Anderson assaults this artificial, culturally imposed cleavage between the masculine and the feminine principles...as a warped way of thinking that produces half persons like Herb Lee and Bill Reynolds, who destroy the life of feeling within themselves and suppress its development in others...But if Laura can no longer help Bill, she is now in a position to help Tom...As she suspects, Tom is naïve beyond his years in matters of sex...because communication with his father...has been virtually nonexistent...What ultimately precipitates Tom’s visit to Ellie is Laura’s rejection of him...Later, Laura comprehends that the social and ethical strictures that prompted her to say no despite the inclination of her heart are wrong and caused her to fail another in time of crisis...Laura’s giving herself to Tom...fulfills her need to be needed, but beyond that it satisfies a woman starved for sexual affection” (Adler, 1978 pp 74-80). Yet “since the final curtain comeds down on the seduction, there is really no way of knowing whether or not the sexual therapy will prove effective” to the boy (Curtin, 1987 p 297).

Lewis (1965) found that the concluding scene when Laura unbuttons her blouse for Tom has “little relation to the logic of the plot” (p 156). However, it is logical when we consider it not as a result of pity but as a spontaneous act of love for the youth and resentment against a dishonest husband, the contrast between boy and man underlined throughout. Moreover, since sex is the core of the problem, it is therefore the core of the solution. Adler (2007) criticized the same scene because "sexual physicality" is presented as "redemptive, a panacea or too-easy cure for a person's ills" (p 167), an all too-puritanical view. In contrast, Gassner (1953) approved of the ending as the story of a boy "misjudged by school and parent alike as a homosexual...The story itself is appealing, with its demonstration of how obtuseness or callousness on the part of classmates and their elders can wreck a boy's life. And the plot acquires a novel and bold twist that takes Tea and Sympathy out of the Young Woodley category of school plays when the school-master's wife gives herself to the boy after his fiasco with a local tart in order to assure him on the score of his questioned masculinity. This is more than a twist of plot, however, because Mr Anderson has related it to tensions in the domestic life of the woman, given the action as much psychological credibility as is possible under the circumstances, and treated the rapprochement of boy and married woman with as much delicacy as anyone could desire" (p 353).

"Tea and sympathy"


Time: 1950s. Place: New England, USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.86608

Laura, wife to one of the housemasters at a boy's school, Bill Reynolds, prepares a costume for Tom, a 17-year-old student boarder at their house about to play a woman's part in a play. Their fitting is interrupted by a teacher, David Harris, worried that his contract will not be renewed because Tom has revealed the two went swimming down off the dunes last Saturday evening. Tom denies having said anything to the dean. Soon afterwards, Bill tells Laura that two boys from the varsity club saw the man and the boy lying naked on the dunes. Laura is upset that Tom, whom she has befriended, may be expelled. Bill replies that Tom should be and that Laura should not become emotionally involved with any student, but, as the headmaster's wife suggested, merely offer them "tea and sympathy". Although there was no sexual intercourse, David is fired but Tom presumed innocent. Nevertheless, Tom's father, Herb, an old school-friend of Bill's, insists that Tom quit his role in the play and that Laura invites a girl over so that she can be his party date instead of herself. As a result, Tom is flustered and hurt. Pressure mounts as boys walk out of the shower-room when he walks in after gymnastic practice and tennis, while Bill adopts a cold, contemptuous attitude. Moreover, Tom's roommate, Al, harassed by his father, moves to another house away from his influence. To restore his reputation, Al suggests to Tom that he should meet Ellie, a waitress in a soda shop known to be free and easy with the students. Tom sets up a date with her on Saturday night on the telephone, a conversation overheard by Laura, who, on that night, tries to prevent the meeting by stalling for time. As she teaches him to dance, he kisses her passionately. When she rejects him, Tom escapes to Ellie's place, but the overwrought boy is unable to have an erection with her. In his confused state, he tries to kill himself, but Ellie prevents it. However, the noise of their struggle attracts the attention of the campus police and Tom is expelled. Incensed and hurt at her husband's involvement in the goading Tom suffered from, Laura says she wants to leave him. "Did it ever occur to you that you persecute in Tom, that boy up there, you persecute in him the thing you fear in yourself?" she asks him. After hearing this accusation, he wants her out. As she enters Tom's room to offer words of encouragement, he is still disheartened, certain he is no man. But when she unbuttons her blouse, he begins to respond. "Years from now, when you talk about this- and you will-, be kind," she pleads.

=Lorraine Hansberry=



Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote a fine domestic drama in "A raisin in the sun" (1959). The play's title derives from a poem entitled "Harlem" by Langston Hughes (1902-1967): What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore and then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Wilkerson (1986) presented the historical context of 1950s white-black segregation. "In 1955...the Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in public schools illegal, marking a climax to decades of advocacy and legal challenges, but initiating a new level of resistance." The critic also pointed out the appeal of the play in its delineation of its central characters. "Lena Younger was a strong point of identification. She was everybody's Mama- strong, caring, determined- the glue that held the family together. The self-sacrificing love of wife and mother were recognizable in Ruth's quiet strength and giving nature. Although Walter Lee was a new kind of character for white audiences, intended as a 'ghetto hero' by Hansberry, the generational conflict with his mother was very familiar. For blacks, Walter was a welcome affirmation of the urgency and potency of the black struggle, while his sister, the ebullient Beneatha, represented its intellectual potential...characters neither sentimentalized nor stereotyped...Yet Walter Lee's dilemma raises the following question: 'in order to advance materially, must the Youngers also become materialistic? The contradiction between the profitable, economic values of acquisition, power, and status and the 'unprofitable' values of integrity, justice, and freedom runs deep in the American psyche" (pp 443-445).

The play's “action begins with the ringing of the alarm clock, which figuratively echoes throughout the rest of the work. It is indeed time to wake up and the play is in effect concerned with the awakening consciousness of one black family as they come to realize the effects on their own sensibilities and identities of internalizing the values of their society. The inheritance enables them for the first time of challenging the rules, written and unwritten, which leave them locked in a ghetto, with their hopes doomed to remain unrealised and this forces them to confront the reality of boundaries which they have always known to exist but which they have not been obliged to acknowledge” (Bigsby, 1985 pp 381-382).

“Mama’s mode of expression is her domestic performance: the act of caring for her family that produces a narrative whose theme is a vigilant mother attempting to prohibit invaders from entering her home and thus to shield her family from the vulnerabilities of surveillance. This narrative is made visible and compelling through Mama’s attachment to the well-being of her potted plant...Multiple times, Mama moves the plant in and out of the house, particularly when her children’s futures are at stake...Mama understands that the plant’s survival, like her children’s, is directly related to what it receives from the outside environment. Though she allows her plant to venture outside, she is right there to pull it back in” (Kiser, 2020 p 446).

“Unlike Mama, for whom life is freedom, Walter Lee Younger equates self-expression with material gain and wealth, and his aspirations mirror the segment of the post-war black population who believed acquiring capital would ensure entrance into ‘good’ society...Although she disapproves of Walter’s plan to open a liquor store with Willy and Bobo, Ruth similarly houses herself in the American Dream’s portico as she hopes to escape from the family’s Southside ‘rat trap’. Yet Ruth’s dream involves the significant differences that emerge from a version of capitalism that privileges hard work and determination as the means of social mobility...With Beneatha Younger, Hansberry explores two other homes as possible sites of resistance and change: black nationalism and Pan-Africanism” (Matthews, 2008 pp 559-562).

“Although Beneathea is a 20-year old medical student, she is quite adolescent in her behavior. She is fresh, full of talk about dates and forms of expression...Some wonderfully warm, humorous scenes involve Beneathea and her African boy friend, Asagai” (Ambramson, 1969 p 245). The play “examines differences between older rural blacks and younger urban blacks, the tensions between educated and uneducated blacks, and it presents a credible picture of a crisis in self-image among black males, which, sociologists tell us, is largely the result of the paucity of black males in meaningful, well-paying jobs.” The critic criticized that the play does not answer the economic questions it raises and that the family’s rejection of Lindner’s plan “seems to sugarcoat the very serious problems it raises by turning into an uplifting drama of social pride” (Greenfield, 1982 p 137). The Lindner episode is resolved because it pertains specifically to black people, whereas most of the social problems raised above by the critic are relevant to all poor people which is not the main subject of the play.

Walter Lee is “a negro chauffeur whose only criticism of the dollar philosophy arises from the fact that he resents his employer getting a bigger cut” (Kitchin, 1960 p 101). "The positive qualities of character which should lend dignity to Walter's character, such as his iron will, his high expectations of himself, and his determination to succeed, are those which often reduce him to the role of villain when he is compared to his mother. Hers may be a more positive image, but this is due to the fact that she must rely on, and fight with, Walter using the only tools available to her- patience, understanding, selflessness, and love- even though these may be, indeed are, genuine expressions of her character...That Walter seems to many to possess an inordinate degree of self-respect and to expect too much out of life for himself and for his family may have more to do with viewers' perceptions than with Walter's actions. If one has been conditioned to expect little, as many blacks have been through racism, or to believe that blacks deserve and are entitled to little, as some members of society have been led to believe, then the demand for any degree above this 'conditioned less' will seem excessive. For such viewers Lena Younger's dream appears much more 'normal'...Because he is 'high-minded' and wants to 'be something', Walter readily accepts the American value which holds that owning one's own business is the primary path to economic success and prosperity. His acceptance of this value contrasts with Lena's belief in the efficacy of hard physical labor like that which killed her husband...Walter's dream of success was nurtured by a young white man whom he saw in town and sought to emulate...He believes he can do what they do and that he deserves to have what they have...The freedom that Lena seeks...is freedom from racism and discrimination...[while Walter seeks] a much more important kind of freedom, economic freedom...Although the end of the play supplies conclusive proof of the soundness of Walter's character as he comes to appreciate a concept of manhood based on love rather than power and accepts the consequences of his actions by refusing to exchange his family's racial pride and dignity for money, it does not resolve the family's economic plight” (Washington, 1988 pp 112-122).

"A raisin in the sun"


Time: 1950s. Place: Chicago, USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.60953 https://pdfcoffee.com/the-odd-couple-pdf-free.html

After the father’s death, the rest of the Younger family receive benefits of his life insurance premium. The mother, Lena, wants to buy a house to fulfill a dream previously shared with her husband, but her son, Walter Lee, would rather invest it in a liquor store. Walter's wife, Ruth, agrees with his mother, thereby providing a better home for their son. Walter Lee’s sister, Beneatha, wants her mother to use it as she wants. In addition to the house, Lena decides to use the money for Beneatha's medical school tuition. Ruth discovers she is pregnant and fears the financial pressure a child will bring. Walter Lee says nothing when she considers abortion. Lena soon places a down payment on a new and bigger house in an entirely white neighborhood. Learning about this, white people living in that neighborhood send over a man named Lindner from the Improvement Association to buy them out. Although Walter Lee loses his part of the money to a supposed friend who stole the investment money and despite some hesitation, the Younger family refuse Lindner's offer. Beneatha rejects her suitor, George, whom she considers to be too shallow to the problems facing the black community, and rather looks favorably on Joseph, a man who wishes her to obtain a medical degree and move away with him to Africa. The Youngers move to their new neighborhood, fulfilling part of the dream, though the future seems very uncertain.

=William Gibson=



William Gibson (1914-2008) delved into late 19th century history with "The miracle worker" (1959), based on the life of Helen Keller (1880-1936) and Annie Sullivan (1866-1936).

Lewis (1965) complained that “an efficient, well-plotted, sentimental, tear-jerking melodrama overwhelmed the emergence of character...Empathy, instead of arising from the depths of human compassion, is stirred by theatrical manipulation, as in the scene when the young Helen Keller drops the water pitcher and is being guided to the pump. The long walk to the discovery of the relation between words and objects is made subservient to the outward physical excitement” (p 155). It can be argued that the water pump discovery beautifully illustrates word-object recognition and thus no theatrical manipulation but an illustrative metaphor of a mental process. “When Helen has had her moment of epiphany and, with Annie’s patience, tolerance (and intolerance), fortitude, focus, and with her Socratic method of bringing out what is already there in the child, and with all the pain that has gone before, she makes her thrilling discovery at the water pump of the connections that will serve as a foundation for her ongoing knowledge and for communication throughout her life (the real Helen Keller went on to attend Radcliffe College, 1894–1904), we as audience undergo a parallel experience of ecstasy and ‘jouissance’. We comprehend that what has just happened, this culmination, and this new beginning, which Annie Sullivan has helped Helen Keller to achieve, is profound and irreversible. Something has changed forever” (Spitz, 2020 p 114).

“Gibson created a strong and appealing story centered on the character of a tough-minded woman...He added some helpful shadings to the drama in his characterization of Helen’s parents and elder stepbrother...The conflict between teacher and pupil is gripping. The Miracle Worker is, for the most part, arresting theatre” (Gassner, 1960 p 216). The story “could scarcely be nobler, or more squarely affirm the dignity of our wayward species” (Tynan, 1961 p 329).

"The play concentrates on Annie and her pupil. The rest of the Keller household is only roughly sketched in, except for the ineffectual, rebellious half-brother James Keller...whose character and prospects have suffered from the domestic situation created by Helen's tragedy; but about whom no one seems really to care. Helen's mother, Kate, is shown as a fond but unimaginative parent. Captain Keller, when the play opens, has all but given up hope of doing anything with Helen, so that Annie Sullivan has the mother's fondness and the father's unbelief to contend with as a background to the almost impossible challenge that faces her...Though the play's main interest lies in the long mental struggle- at times a physical struggle, too- between the teacher and the pupil who does not know she is a pupil, a strong subsidiary interest is the unfolding of Annie Sullivan's own character and the growing in her of a deep love for the creature who at the start only presents a grim intellectual challenge" (Stout, 1962 pp 125-126).

"The miracle worker"




Time: 1890s. Place: Alabama and Massachusetts, USA.

Text at https://archive.org/details/the_miracle_worker_william_gibson https://pdfcoffee.com/the-miracle-worker-4-pdf-free.html

Annie Sullivan is hired by the Keller family to develop their child, Helen, deaf and blind from birth. In pity of her condition, the family has so far let her do mostly as she pleases, so that she often acts like a little savage. With her finger, Annie writes on her pupil's hand the name of objects, such as "cake" and "doll", to be obtained as a reward provided she imitate the writing on her own hand. When Helen gets the cake, she crams it indelicately in her mouth. When she partly spells back "doll", she unexpectedly hits her teacher's face with it and locks her inside the room. Helen's father, Captain Keller, has to retrieve the teacher through the window with a ladder. Annie next attempts to improve Helen's table manners, since she is in the habit of picking food from everybody's plate with her fingers. A difficult struggle ensues, but Helen at last eats from her own plate with a spoon and folds her napkin. But to achieve a higher level of comprehension, Annie insists on being left alone with her in a garden house, away from the family's distracting and overly tolerant influence. Helen succeeds in imitating 18 nouns and 3 verbs, but to her it is still a "finger-game", without understanding the fundamental concept that each thing has a name. At the end of a two-week period, Helen's mother is unable to tolerate a longer period of separation. When Helen returns at table with the family, she tests their level of tolerance, cramming food into her mouth with her fingers as she did before, which the family, but not Annie, is inclined to tolerate as a sort of homecoming. Exasperated, Helen drenches Annie with a pitcher-full of water. An even more exasperated Annie drags her filthy pupil to the water pump, where the latter seizes the connection between the sign on her hand and the water on her hand. She eagerly touches various objects, asking Annie to spell everything. Annie ends the day's lesson by triumphantly spelling on Helen's hand the word "teacher".

=Edward Albee=



Edward Albee (1928-2016) achieved a potent domestic drama in "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962), a title which refers to the English novelist, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), subject to psychotic episodes leading to suicide. “The title is a pun on the song ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?’ with the name of ‘Virginia’ suggesting a woman’s search for consciousness, liberation, or separateness. At the end, “Martha admits her fear of Virginia Woolf, the fear of madness in denying reality” (Simard, 1984 p 39). Being set in New Carthage, the name refers to the legendary tale of the African city, Carthage, said to be so hated “by the Romans that, after its defeat, its fields were...sown with salt so no crop could grow there. The name evokes defeat, sterility and greatness brought low” (Shaw, 2018 p 109).

“Martha has been punishing George for twenty odd years because he stubbornly maintained himself and refused to become the fulfillment of her ambitions...Martha willfully set her identity and self-esteem in the person and life of the man she married and in the career she planned for him...Her major concern was an association with a husband who would make her appear interesting and important in the eyes of other people, particularly her father...She did nothing constructive to help herself to make life bearable for George or for herself. For example, there is little evidence that she ever took pride in homemaking...At her first serious transgression into fantasy, the associate professor of history has no clear plan of action, but he knows that once private myths enter public life they have to be destroyed” (Stenz, 1978 pp 40-50). "Martha equates George’s stagnant position in the history department as failure...She throws the worst light on the ambitious wife for her husband’s sake, turning her aggression against him as a 'flop', part of the 'Humiliate the host' game, which George proficiently replaces with the 'Get the guests' game. When Martha counters with the 'Hump the hostess' game at which Nick fails from her viewpoint as well as 'Bringing up baby', George ends it all with the imagined child’s death. Although critics are amused with the first three failures in one’s profession, ability to entertain, and marriage, the last one makes them ‘restive under the impact’" (Porter, 1969, pp 228-239), critics being unused to thinking of a child’s death as a subject of even a dark comedy. “This is a play about viciousness by a man who is repelled by the world. It ends with the exhaustion of all the characters and by the surrender of Martha to one of her husband’s cruelest caprices” (Atkinson and Hirschfeld, 1973 p 279). “The only approach to an understanding of the child’s place in the drama is to accept it as an effect and not a cause of the couple’s predicament” (Rutenberg, 1969 p 104). In one view, the child “is neither the product nor the means of self-deception, for Martha and George are perfectly conscious of the fact that their son is a fiction...I can’t, whether Albee wants me to or not, accept that human beings may be sustained by illusions they know to be such” (Chester, 1963 p 299). However, it can be accepted if we consider the game approach.

"After Martha's attempted infidelity, George, who had left the house, re-enters with a bunch of snapdragons which he hurls like spears at Martha and Nick: small phalli of his graceful symbolic revenge. In this one scene, George's commitment to imaginary deeds is completely visible" (Baxandall, 1965 pp 32-33). The play is fraught with destructive games and rules such as “taunt the guests” and “adultery”, with only “killing off the child” apt to improve matters (Lewis, 1965 p 92-94). "Their games are attempts to cope with the pain, either as distraction...or as a way of keeping themselves in shape for the battle...A particularly skilful blow is likely to be met with congratulations or mutual celebration, and they refuse to let each other relax and coast...The imaginary son compensated for their sterility, helped to hold them together, and gave them a constant in their lives, but he has become a weapon they use against each other, and therefore must be sacrificed" (Berkowitz, 1992 p 149). "George and Martha have managed the failure of their marriage through a ritualized game of one-upmanship involving humiliation and abuse followed by forgiveness and reconciliation. The centerpiece of their lives is an imaginary son for whom they have created a sequence of stories that connect, in provocative and destructive ways, with events that may or may not have marked their own unhealthy and unhappy lives. The 'Walpurgisnacht' the audience witnesses is occasioned by a visit from a young couple; he is a new member of the faculty, she a minister’s daughter given to hysterical pregnancies and drinking that encourages her to tell tales. During the course of the early morning hours, Martha tells the couple about their son, taunting her husband in the process, until George decides to perform the ultimate act and end their game: in a compelling and heart-rending story, he kills the son in a car crash, hoping to renew the relationship between himself and his wife without the props of illusion" (Schlueter, 2000 pp 310-311). “In the attention and care the child requires, the selfish and very human demands of the parents are turned into selfless giving...Where this transformation does not take place, sex seeks other outlets, searches for excitement, gratifies the normal desire for self-sacrifice in all kinds of perversions...The son-myth [in the play] is the embodiment of that [tendency]...Martha needs victims, and she can pick them out anywhere; but George is the only one who rises to the occasion each time she lashes out. There is some secret understanding between them; she has ruined him with her excessive demands and her domineering ways; but he has not been crushed. His strength reassures her, even when she forces it against herself. George is her conscience and her accuser...Frustration is the dramatic impulse of the play. The invitation to Nick and Honey is a frenzied attempt at oblivion through a kind of saturnalia; the verbal skirmishes are frustrated attempts at communication; the history of the two couples is the story of frustrated love; the accusations are frustrated attempts at understanding; a frustrated prayer celebrates the end of the nightmare” (Paolucci, 2000 pp 47-54). At the end, “the rhetorical gallantries and linguistic attacks are nowhere in evidence. These two connoisseurs of verbal dueling now communicate simply, directly, with no wasted emotion. Once ennobled by their lexical inventiveness, by the very performativity of their performance, conferring upon an illusion the status of objective reality, George and Martha are brought to earth, not merely by sacrificing the kind of language that so animates this evening’s actions. The game-playing now is over. In place of embellished repartee we hear a disjointed, splintered exchange, a duologue whose tonal quality emphasizes their entry into the here and now and into the real” (Roudané, 2017 pp 60-61).

“Where George fails Nick might succeed. He is willful in a petty way, knows exactly what he wants and is callous enough to reach out and grab it. His plans are clear and realizable. He is much more practical and less idealistic than George, but lacks George’s potential to adjust to what the world calls failure...He is unable to share his wife’s fears and hopes. He is absolutely callous to her emotional needs, bent on humoring her in order to get what he wants” (Paolucci, 2000 p 50). It is noteworthy that nobody pronounces Nick's name and that his wife's name, Honey, may merely be a term of perfunctory endearment. Although the older couple win out in sophisticated humor, there is some degree of parallel between the two, since George and Martha invent a child while Nick married Honey as a result of her hysterical pregnancy. As devotees to literature, critics such as Lewis (1965) often have an overly negative view of Nick as a "scientist without vision", a "part of the establishment, the new conformity in charge of rendering the world toward a mechanized dehumanization of the future" (p 91), as if they believed George's assessment of Nick's genetic research: "the ants will take over the world". Likewise, Abbott (1989) is certain that “Nick...”the soulless young man...will move up the rank by ‘ploughing pertinent wives’ and as a biologist he will manipulate chromosomes so that everyone will become like him” (Abbott, 1989 p 175). Others criticize the young couple as leading a "life of debasement and pandering" (Krasner, 2006 pp 81-82). When Nick no longer knows whether George and Martha are telling the truth, George responds: “You’re not supposed to.” “The unavailability of a verifiable reality is fundamental not only to Albee’s work but to 20th century art...Over and over George and Martha accuse each other of being unable to distinguish the facts from the fantasies of their lives, the most crucial of which is an imaginary child who has lived at the center of their marriage...Is Albee showing us that when reality is too awful we retreat into fantasy? Or is he showing us that when fantasy and reality are not kept distinct, despair is the inevitable outcome?...If Martha is, by virtue of her position, the queen of New Carthage, she is the Dido to Nick’s Aeneas, the ‘historical inevitability’ whose new Rome represents the soulless, militarized world George fears” (Zinman, 2011 pp 40-47). “The bitter attack on the college community, on the devoutly bourgeois American professor, is one thing. The professor is enough of a household god so that the dramatist may peck away at him. Man has always delighted to hear the apparently wise, pious, rich, talented educated, successful, or august individual debunked” (Duprey, 1967 p 214).

”These characters are most alive when they are most savage, and their savagery toward each other is combined with an emotional dependency that no amount of disappointment has succeeded in diminishing...Beneath the struggle there is nothing at the core except loneliness- and so they are lonely together when they are not in the close contact of hurting each other. Beneath the intense embrace of the hurting, there is the emptiness of their being- and so they are empty together” (Gassner, 1968 p 594). Despite the drama’s acknowledged power, von Szeliski (1971) complained that the ambitions of tragic protagonists in the modern era are too narrow. “What are the ambitions and goals in the modern attempts at tragedy? In Albee’s 'Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf' and 'Tiny Alice', the characters' dramatic action is to protect themselves from emptiness" (p 119).

"Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?"


Time: 1960s. Place: New Carthage, New England, USA.

Text at https://www.northernhighlands.org/cms/lib5/NJ01000179/Centricity/Domain/243/Whos%20Afraid%20Virginia%20Woolf.pdf

George, a college professor, returns from a faculty party with his wife, Martha, the daughter of the college president, to their house. "What a dump!" she exclaims in imitation of a movie scene. They have invited over a younger couple, Nick and Honey. The after-party develops obnoxiously, as Martha taunts George for his many failures. George leaves, returns with a gun, and fires it, but it is only a stage gun with an umbrella popping out. Nick and Honey grow uneasier as verbal abuses escalate. In disgust,Honey runs into the bathroom to vomit. The men discuss their life-experiences, Nick about his wife's false pregnancy of hysterical origin and George about a friend who accidently killed his father and mother. When the women re-enter the room, Martha mentions George's unpublished autobiographical novel, including the story he had just told. An angry George chokes her, but then desists. They both decide to play a game called "Get the guests". George tells the story of a "mousie" woman, to shame Nick, the very tale the latter told about his wife. Honey feels sick again and rushes out. Martha immodestly attempts to seduce Nick before George's very face, who, undeterred, calmly reads a book all the while. But as Martha and Nick walk upstairs, George throws his book down in anguish. Later, Martha reappears alone, shouting at the others to come out from hiding. She is joined by Nick and then George with flowers for the dead. Martha and George trade insults again, but this time against Nick, too drunk to have made love with Martha. The final game they play is "Bringing up baby", whereby George and Martha speak about their son, Martha accusing her husband of destroying him while he recites parts of a requiem. He then informs her that he received a telegram about their son's death, matching his earliest story. Though Martha screams and collapses, George explains to the bewildered younger couple that they never had a son. After Martha recovers and George sings: "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" she anxiously replies "I am, George... I am."

=Paul Zindel=



Another play of the 1960s worth remembering is "The effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds" (1964) by Paul Zindel (1936-2003).

“The mother, Beatrice, to assuage her guilt over having sent her own father off to a sanatorium, cares for the senile Nancy who with her ‘smile from a soul half-departed’ and her ‘shifting motion that reminds one of a ticking clock’ serves as a personification of death and how affluent Americans...mistreat their aged parents. More compellingly, the once orderly vegetable store now symbolically reflects the clutter and refuse of Beatrice’s psychic and emotional life. With her motto, ‘just yesterday’, Beatrice lives on reminiscences of things past- a word prominently displayed on a placard at the high school science exhibit on would-have-beens and should-have-beens. All her life she has romantically dreamed and schemed, yet she has seldom carried through on her plans, some of them, like turning the run-down store into a neighborhood tea shop, slightly outrageous. Like Willy Loman, Beatrice tends to blame something outside herself for her failure, though she accurately assesses the way that a competitive success-oriented society attempts to force everyone into a predetermined mold, decrying the lack of tolerance and the levelling down to sameness and mediocrity that, paradoxically, is a part of the American system...The cycle of parent destroying child continues in Beatrice’s erratic relationship with her daughters, shifting suddenly between compassion and bitterness- in much the same way that the pet rabbit is alternatively loved and then hurt. Beatrice’s older daughter, the mentally disturbed Ruth who was traumatized by contact with death and violence, tells tales, craves the attention of men by flaunting her sexuality, and appears just as destructive and vindictive as her mother; when she cannot have what she desires, she ruins it for everyone else. The younger, Tillie, in her awkwardness and unprettiness and firm grasp on reality, stands as Ruth’s opposite and a living denial that one need be determined by heredity and environment. Tillie discovers a much-needed father figure in her high school teacher (unfortunately named Mr Goodman)...The notion that everything in the universe, herself included, is somehow connected with every other thing from the moment of creation enthralls her; it provides a fixed point of reference and a feeling of importance” (Adler, 1987 pp 130-131).

The play concludes with Tillie's message of hope from several sectors, including the love of science, an unusual attitude on the part of dramatists in general. The student "wins the science fair, and her narration regarding the project, its demonstration of how a subtle, invisible but powerful force from outside may affect living things is a memorable statement of the scientifically unexplainable assertion of disciplined intelligence and good will in young people deprived of these things in their environment" (Fearnow, 2007, p 426). “By ending with Tillie’s affirmation of life, Zindel tells his readers and himself that it is possible not only to survive but also to overcome maternal toxic radiation“ (Forman, 1988 p 43).

"The effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds"


Time: 1960s. Place: USA.

Text at https://popehs.typepad.com/files/paul-zindel---the-effect-of-gamma-rays-on-man-in-the-moon-marigolds__full-text.pdf

Speaking with a teacher over the telephone, Beatrice denies that she wants to keep her daughter, Tillie, away from school, only occasionally doing so when she is needed at home. Beatrice complains of rabbit droppings found throughout the house, the consequence of Tillie's pet rabbit. The other daughter, Ruth, informs her mother that Tillie was laughed at for appearing with her hair standing on end and "that old jumper with the raggy slip" during a school presentation on the atom. "Matilda, if you can't get yourself to dress properly before going to school, you're never going to go again," the irate mother asserts. Far from being discouraged, Tillie participates in a science competition by exposing marigold seeds to various levels of gamma rays from cobalt-60 radioactivity at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "If you want to know what half-life is, just ask me," Beatrice comments. She nervously consults school authorities to make sure exposure to the plants will not cause sterility among house occupants. The family's main income is to care for old invalids, at this moment a demented woman surnamed Nanny. An added difficulty is ensuring the safety of Ruth, subject to epileptic seizures. Though planning eventually to open a tea-shop, Beatrice often has despairing thoughts. "What's left for me?" she asks Ruth. One day, unnerved about the rabbit in the house, she tells Tillie: "So, by the end of the week, you get rid of that cottontail compost heap and we'll get you a job down at the five-and-ten cent store." But she is interrupted by Ruth, announcing that Tillie has been chosen among the five finalists at the science competition. Uninterested, Beatrice tells the school principal that she does not wish Tillie to participate, "because she is not as careful in her home duties as she is with man-in-the-moon marigolds", but eventually yields. On the day of the finals, Beatrice orders Ruth to remain at home with Nanny. In anger, Ruth calls her mother by the name she was once known by in her school-years: "Betty the Loon". Beatrice suddenly freezes and decides to stay at home herself. With her daughters away, she cancels her agreement with Nanny's mother, the "career woman of the year", and kills the rabbit. During her presentation, Tillie explains that the shape of the marigolds differs because of mutations arising from their exposure to various levels of radioactivity. When Ruth announces to her mother that Tillie won first prize, she sees the dead rabbit and begins to convulse. Intending to open the tea-shop, Beatrice refuses to call a doctor in for her daughter. "We're going to need every penny to get this place open," she specifies. Tillie reflects on the conclusion of her project. "For one thing," she wonders, "the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the moon marigolds has made me curious about the sun and the stars, for the universe itself must be like a world of great atoms- and I want to know more about it...atom...atom...what a beautiful word!"

=Mart Crowley=



"The boys in the band" (1968) by Mart Crowley (1935-2020) appeared as a boulevard-type comedy transformed into deeper dramatic depth.

With the title of "The boys in the band", "the author was referring to a movie cliché in the musicals of the 1940s when the girl vocalist would say to the audience: 'let's have a great big hand for the boys in the band'" (Dresser, 1974 p 205).

The importance of "The boys in the band", "apart from clever dialogue and skillful construction, lies in its bold handling of a subject matter that not many years ago would have struck audiences as infamous- homosexuality...Some of the laughter aroused by the dialogue is due to the unexpected shock of a first encounter...What the play seriously implies is that the homosexual nearly always hates himself. A campy arrogance of boastfulness, which is sometimes characteristic of certain homosexuals, is the mask of self-contempt. This, I believe, is morally unfortunate and unnecessary, as in all aggressive defensiveness among minorities” (Clurman, 1972 pp 19-20).

“When Emory, one of seven gay friends, one attractive male prostitute and a straight acquaintance gathered to celebrate Harold’s birthday, leans out of a window and asks: ‘who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?’ he is loud and proud, but also plays to stereotypes of the ‘swishy’ gay man. But what especially irked viewers then, as it can do now, is the devolution of the party into a battle royal of queens viciously attacking each other and, in the process, exposing their unrelenting hatred for themselves as gay men” (Sell, 2018 p 81). “Despite the play's groundbreaking status, the unflattering portrait of gay identity The Boys in the Band puts forth- a group of unhappy, self-destructive men who attend a boozy party that ends in an emotional bloodbath- did not leave all spectators with a feeling of exhilarating freedom. Infamous lines such as 'You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse' fueled growing suspicions that the play, far from empowering, suggests instead the impossibility of a viable gay identity“(Scheie, 1999 p 1). In the view of Schiavi (2001), "the play demands study as the linchpin of modern gay-male drama and, possibly, sensibility". But this critic noted obstacles in appreciating the play, being particularly disgruntled at the dramatic characters' self-loathing, considering them] "a disgusting group of so-called friends liable to nauseating self-pity" (p 81). Likewise, Dolan (2007) complained that the play contained "retrograde political meanings" (p 490). Moreover, Curtin (1987) wrote that the play concerns “a clique of guilt-ridden, self-mocking gay friends who torment themselves and one another at a bizarre birthday- party...even by many who initially found it amusing and entertaining Crowley’s dramatic guilt-trip was eventually damned as another negative stereotypical portrait of the gay community” (pp 327-328), especially by wishful thinkers blind to history. In matters of gender and sexual orientation, some critics only value a play when positive images of the characters are prominent. In the context of "The boys in the band", self-disgust often appears normal when confronted with the disgust of heterosexual people around them. “Through rifts and self-effacing humor, the characters in the play need one another. One of the characters, Emory, flaunts unabashedly; the others develop a veneer of hetero-masculinity for self- preservation, and only at the party are they able to drop the façade...The play’s neoclassic structure holds up well: one continuous time; one place (Michael’s apartment...and one action, Harold’s birthday party“ (Krasner, 2019 p 111).

The Boys in the Band placed “gay characters and their stories at the center of the narrative in a way that was unheard of on mainstream stages in the United States and elsewhere...The Boys in the Band presents a vision about homosexuality based on the diversity of profiles of the characters on stage. This plurality, in terms of aspects such as race and ethnicity, occupations, ways of being and nature of their relationships, is quite heterogeneous: there are best friends (Michael and Harold), former lovers (Michael and Donald), former roommates (Michael and Alan), former casual lovers (Donald and Larry), a polyamorous couple (Larry and Hank), an effeminate homosexual (Emory), a black homosexual (Bernard), a male prostitute (Cowboy), an ambiguous heterosexual (Alan), and, of course, the circle of friendships itself – wide and diverse, but very intimate...Besides sex, religiosity is also an aspect explored by Crowley in his play, and a New York church, in particular, appears in the text. After the party, Michael’s destination is usually highlighted by critics as an indication of his escape to a place aligned with patriarchal, normative and homophobic social forces, which would reinforce his problematic homonormative characteristics...However, [Michael heads for St. Malachy’s], a welcoming space as much as the character’s apartment. Founded in 1902, St Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church is located on West 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. The service of the church to its community was similar to that of most other Catholic churches in New York City until the mid-1920s. Then the Theatre District was relocated to its surroundings, and with that, actors, dancers, musicians, craftsmen, and tourists began to frequent the church. The priests and leaders of St Malachy’s made adaptations to meet the needs of their new parishioners, including adaptations to accommodate the audience according to the theater and nightclub schedules. With the construction of Actors Chapel below the main church in 1920, St Malachy’s became a haven of worship for the community directly connected to the entertainment business” (Pereira, 2021 pp 27-45).

"The boys in the band"
Time: 1960s. Place: New York, USA.

Text at https://kupdf.net/download/boys-in-the-band_5a6d2b20e2b6f516716cf39f_pdf

Michael is unemployed but skillful at dodging creditors. His homosexual partner, Donald, is a maintenance man and consults a psychiatrist for depression. This experience has helped him gain insight into his mental condition. Every time he fails, his mother responds with love, so that he associates the two together. "Failure is the only thing with which I feel at home," he despondently concludes. At Michael's apartment, they prepare a birthday party for Harold and have invited two homosexual couples: Hank and Larry along with Emory and Bernard. While several dance with abandon, the door buzzer sounds and Hank lets in Alan, a friend of Michael who has sought to prevent him from knowing about his sexual orientation. To tease Michael, an effeminate Emory goes out of his way to show it. Knowing Alan to be upset, Michael retires with him in his bedroom while Donald and Larry, eying each other after having met in the baths once and slept together, talk quietly apart. Alan does not disclose the reason why he is upset and prepares to leave. As Emory continues to joke equivocally, an exasperated Alan hits him on the mouth, Emory shrieking as he bleeds. After vomiting and missing the dinner and the gift distribution, Alan prepares to leave but is intercepted by Michael, who proposes a social game: "affairs of the heart", when the player must call by phone "the one person we truly believe we have loved". Hank refuses to play, but Larry insists he must. Bernard nervously calls up an old flame of his, but cannot reach him. Yet he bitterly regrets the aborted call and tries to dissuade Emory from doing the same. Nevertheless, Emory reaches his high-school love but without being able to reveal his own name. Hank takes the phone from the gypsy-footed Larry and calls up their answering service. To return the favor, though it is understood he will always seek other lovers one at a time, Larry calls up Hank on the apartment's other phone. It is Alan's turn. Michael suggests a friend's name with whom Alan had sexual relations twelve years ago, but he denies being a homosexual and calls his estranged wife instead. Harold wearies of Michael, knowing his aggressive behavior is the result of self-disgust at being a homosexual. Fearing a panic attack, Michael leaves to hear a midnight mass.

=Joseph A Walker=



Also of note in late 20th century American theatre is Joseph A Walker (1935-2003) with "The River Niger" (1972).

"The River Niger" is “a robust play with a joyous relish to life...a homely drama abut a cultured philosopher and a literary man who had to support himself as a house painter. The author’s insights into the details of family life were simple, warm, and humorous. The grumpy grandmother who was a secret drinker and sang Rock of Ages when she was on a bender, the instantaneous enthusiasm with which the son and his torrid fiancée went to bed when they met in the middle of the night: all this was plain and pungent” (Atkinson, 1974 p 502). “Johnny Williams comes to recognize that he has accomplished just about as much as he can reasonably expect to accomplish. Further, he realizes that he does not have much longer to live. So he sacrifices himself to save his son” (Molette, 1985 p 460).

"We find that John is fighting against this conception of black men through poetry...It is the kind of battlefield which will allow him to regain his dignity and to make a positive impact on humanity from his own cultural base...Mattie...turns the burden of her heritage inward toward herself and John; she blames herself for his psychological castration. John wanted to go to law school, but Mattie let her relatives impose so heavily on their relationship that John was forced to give up his career goal and work odd jobs to support the family. Her guilt over John's turning to alcohol, combined with her own mastectomy, lead Mattie to self-destructiveness. She assumes the position of a martyr in her defense of the alcoholism of both John and her mother. Much of Mattie's plight has been created for her by her mother, who is a very color conscious woman. Mattie's mother stands at the midpoint of the tension between John and Mattie, since she has been directly responsible for the abortion of John's career and for Mattie's failure to find fulfillment in womanhood...The forces represented by Mattie and her mother threaten to return John to the Black historical past- to hopelessness and psychological slavery. In an effort to free himself, John turns to fulfilling his dreams through his son, Jeff...He doesn't see that Jeff rejects his intervention in his life...Jeff does not think moving into the world dominated by white people is an accomplishment; he thinks it is selling out. Hw would rather work from within the black community to effect social change. In his rejection of his father's route to manhood, Jeff finds that the black community has its own pitfalls in the form of gangs masquerading as revolutionary organizations" (Fontenot, 1980 pp 43-45).

"The River Niger"


Time: 1970s. Place: New York, USA.

Text at ?

John Williams, housepainter and part-time poet, and his friend, Dr Dudley Stanton, a medical practitioner, are surprised at the sudden arrival of Ann, the intended of John's son, Jeff, a lieutenant in the United States Air Force about to follow. John’s wife, Mattie, greets her kindly but not her alcoholic mother, Wilhemina, who considers Ann a brazen woman. Originally from South Africa, Ann is a nurse from Quebec, Canada, who attended to Jeff after he broke his ankle in a skiing accident. At the door, Ann greets Chips, a street-gang member who wants to know whether Jeff has yet arrived. He leers, smacks her buttocks, and threatens her with a switchblade after she slaps his face. The gang-leader, Mo, enters next with his girlfriend, Gail, along with another gang-member, Al. Mo is determined to stay until Jeff’s arrival, but at length is persuaded by John’s M1 carbine to come back later. Without telling anyone else, Jeff arrives at night in Ann’s room. The next morning, John sneaks off with Dudley from housework duties. Mattie explains to Ann that she is indulgent about John’s lapses in view of his harboring her two sisters and mother over several years some time ago. “Child, Johnny was painting houses all morning, working the graveyard shift at the post office, and driving a cab on his days off,” she explains. Ann is alone as Al and Skeeter, another gang-member, arrive to find out whether Jeff has arrived, which she denies. Al is looking to avenge the murder of Buckley, a police officer who provided drugs to schoolgirls in exchange for sexual favors. Skeeter thinks it is someone outside the gang. After desperate coaxing, Skeeter is relieved to obtain scag (phencyclidine) from Al. They are joined by Chips, eager to cajole Ann to bed with him until threatened by Jeff's sudden appearance. Mo arrives to protect Chips, but fails to convince Jeff to join their gang. John and Dudley come back drunk. John is elated to see his son but wants to see him in his uniform. Jeff refuses. Harassed about that subject, Jeff finally admits flunking out of aviator school. Disappointed, John goes off on a bender for six days. Mo returns to asks Jeff a favor: surveying a bugged public phone to be used by one of their gang-members suspected as a police informer. Jeff reluctantly agrees. John returns only to learn that Mattie has cancer and will be admitted to a hospital in three days. He is devastated but nevertheless completes his poem on the River Niger for her sake. Mo and Skeeter are hindered on their way to plant dynamite inside a government building when the latter is told by a police officer to halt. Instead, he runs and receives a gunshot wound. After bringing the officer down with two sticks of dynamite, Mo drags Skeeter away to the Williams house, where they are joined by Al and Chips, but the house is quickly surrounded by police officers. Jeff accuses Al of being the man he heard over the public phone, but he denies it. To coax him into admitting it, Jeff falsely confesses himself as Buckley’s killer. Incensed, Al pulls out a revolver while, to protect Jeff, the band of Mo, Skeeter, and Chips cries out that they killed Buckley. When John, also armed with a gun, tries to intercede, Al whirls around and mortally wounds him, but dies immediately when he returns fire. To protect his son, John orders the gang-members to hide their guns before the police officers charge inside and then put the blame on him after wiping Al’s gun and putting his fingerprints over the handle.

=Lonne Elder III=

Another play about the black experience includes Lonne Elder III’s (1927-1996) “Ceremonies in dark old men” (1969), a work inspired by Sean O’Casey and Jean Genet, a “quietly tragic study of the generation of urban blacks who were too old and tired to dream of revolution” (Berkowitz, 1997 p 61).

“Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is a thought-provoking study of conventional Negro society harassed by the specter of white racism and the pressures of living in an urban system...Russell B Parker’s pursuit of love may shock some readers. But it is a necessary element in the dramatic development of his character. The Parkers are real people caught up in the problems they cannot solve. The real tragedy of Russell B Parker is his inability to face life as it really is” (Conner, 1970 p 593). The play's “principal character is a negro in his fifties, once a hoofer on the vaudeville circuit, now a barber without customers, and without much hope. His wife has died a few years before, but in a sense he has died first, failing to find a place in the mire of lackey jobs, the only ones he would be offered. Around this central figure are several children, now grown to adulthood, two shiftless sons who can accept their place in society no more than their father, and an older daughter, the mainstay of the deteriorating household, and archetypal in her role as matriach to these men wounded in their pride. And as it turns out, the only way out leads to disaster...[The play] is suggestive enough to be memorable, never more so than in the characterization of the father” (Long, 1969 p 72).

“Success separates the two brothers. Bobby's recently launched career of stealing brings him a new independence. Theopolis, realizing that his business is destroying his family, wants to end it, but it is already too late” (Miller, 1971 p 396). "Bobby's death while participating in a robbery attempt for Blue Haven's gang returns Mr Parker and the rest of the family to the moral world where they see that Blue Haven's offer was not a viable choice, but only the appearance of one. Blue Haven has simply inverted the world, overturned societal values, not for the good of black people as a whole, but for his own selfish purposes...Blue Haven's character is drawn in such a way that his presence dominates the play...When the play ends, there is still the feeling that Blue Haven is going to come back to the barber shop to collect his money only to find that the family has rejected his business and has destroyed his equipment" (Fontenot, 1980 pp 47-48).

In “Ceremonies in dark old men”, "Elder creates a sister who is a surrogate mother. Adele is a success in her job, energetic, and wretched. She nags, she threatens her brothers and her father. At first, she does not see that all her humane impulses to nurture and to support have been distorted by the economic structure of ghetto life. But she comes at last to the weary acknowledgement that if she cannot save her family's men from the ghetto, surely she must not participate in their destruction. And if there is very little can do to support them, then that much she must do" (Potter, 1972 p 252).

“Ceremonies in dark old men”
Time; 1960s. Place: Harlem, New York, USA.

Text at ?

In an abandoned barber-shop serving as their home and paid for by Russell Parker’s daughter, Adele, he and his friend, Jenkins, are in the habit of playing checkers, the former never having won a single game in three years. Russell’s son, Theo, urges him to do something else than play checkers because his sister is tired of paying for the upkeep of two brothers and a father out of work. Nevertheless, Russell wants to continue his game and convinces Jenkins to hide under the bed as Adele arrives to remind her father that he should go out to look for a job. Instead of doing the same, Theo has his own idea: illegally bootlegging corn whiskey, which, to his father’s surprise, has a good taste. Since his father regales the family with stories of his past life, Theo suggests to his brother, Bobby, that he should rob a typewriter from a store as a birthday gift so that the man can write them down, although their father does not know how to type. Bobby reluctantly accepts. Theo next explains his association with Blue Haven, a leader of a group of burglars intent on running the white man’s insurance companies out of business. The two convince Russell to fix the barber-shop as a front for whiskey sales and gambling, eventually to remove the white man’s influence out of Harlem. Blue sets up a white man’s face on a board so that customers can throw darts at it. An able thief, Bobby returns with the typewriter. Two months later, Theo complains that he is the only one working. He prepares whiskey for the customers while Russell and Bobby are out enjoying themselves. Russell has also been dipping his hand in the till. Adele warns Theo of the danger of associating with Blue, since he once killed a man in a bar. After a 2-day jaunt, Russell returns with Jean Genet’s “A thief’s journal” as a businessman’s book. “It is my logicalism,” he pronounces, “that you’ve got to become a thinker and then you become a crook.” Bobby specifies to his father that Blue’s murder was in self-defense as a response to a man insulting his girlfriend with a child by him, and served a 2-year sentence. “Going around bumping people off and getting away with it, too!!” Russell exclaims in disgust. “What does he think he is, white or something?” Theo admonishes his father for stealing $400 from their business and worries for his sister out every night with a boyfriend. He wants his father at least at the shop so that the front can be viable. Also included in the venture is Jenkins, out looking for Blue late with his money, but Russell convinces him to sit down to play their regular game of checkers, this time with a $20 wager on the line, convinced that Jenkins will fold under the pressure. But Jenkins wins as usual. At last Blue arrives with their money. Jenkins informs him that he wants out. Although two white businesses have recently been driven out, it is due not to the shop’s activities but to robberies that Bobby has been involved in. Russell insists on knowing more about the organization. Blue agrees, even announcing that he can be named as president. Blue confronts Theo about his account book, immediately discovering that money has been taken out. Blue also informs him about who Adele has been out with, a man named Wilmer, and that Russell courts a girl whose boyfriend has been trying to ruin his business. He admits to permitting Bobby’s robbery with his gang. But when Theo tries to convince his brother to stop raiding stores, he refuses. Russell invites his girlfriend to the shop, inching her towards the bed. But she refuses to cooperate, leaving abruptly with his money as Theo enters complaining of her presence. “You can call me a fool, too,” his father retorts, “But I’m a burning fool. I’m going to marry that little girl.” Theo notices Adele’s wobbly walk as she enters. She is not drunk but was beaten by Wilmer for lying about who she was with. Tired about the complications, Theo wants to quit Blue’s business at the moment Jenkins enters with news that Bobby was killed during a robbery. As the group hesitates about how to announce such news to Russell after being locked out from the apartment of his girlfriend, he sits down to play checkers with Jenkins and wins. “Jenkins, you said that the day I beat you playing checkers,” he declares, “you said that it could be the unluckiest day of my life. But after all that happened today- I’m straight- I feel just great.”

=Leslie Lee=

Another family drama about social issues for black people is “The first breeze of summer” (1975) written by Leslie Lee (1930-2014).

“The first breeze of summer”
Time: 1920s-1970s. Place: North Carolina, USA.

Text at ?

Because Lucretia believes her parents will insist on her giving back to Sam a gift of a pearl necklace, he admits they are only imitation and on furthermore admits to having lost his job as a porter at the train station while defending a black fellow worker against a white customer’s verbal abuse. Because the fellow worker spoke of him as a disgruntled worker, Sam is unable to find a job and must leave town to find another, though promising to return, all the more so because she is pregnant. But he never does and so she finds a place as a servant in a rich house in Roanoke, but is harassed by the stepson, Briton, who with promises and threats succeeds in getting her to bed. When Briton discovers she is pregnant again, he wants to leave the house until she decides to leave in his place, heading for White Rock, where with two children to provide for she attempts to seduce Harper, a minor with an opportunity to become the preacher of a church in Greensborough. Elated at obtaining the job, Harper sleeps with Lucretia before marrying, only to feel guilty afterwards, eventually rejecting the pregnant woman after discovering her unmarried relations with Sam and Briton. The mother of Milton and Edna, progeny respectively of Harper and Briton, Sam’s child having died, eventually settles with her son and his wife, Hattie, along their sons, Nate and Lou. In the hope of entering medical school, Lou wants to obtain a summer job more commensurate with his aspirations, but his father forbids it, forcing him instead to continue helping him as a junior plasterer along with Nate, who quit school justb for that purpose, abandoning his own aspirations of entering the teaching profession. Disgruntled at being turned out of a job, Tom throws a rock through the window of Milton’s residence. Milton is incensed and readies himself to attack Tom, but Gremmar Lucretia persuades him to stay. She, Milton, and Hattie enthusiastically respond to Reverend Mosley’s feelings of gratitude for what life has offered them so far. To Nate’s astonishment, Lou also responds enthusiastically, though in a rather incoherent fashion. Lou admits to his brother that he thinks something is wrong with him, especially after citing an event in which the boy vomited when a girl encouraged him to make love. Nate dismisses this as a temporary lapse, that needs only be countered by more such attempts. “Just keep moving,” Nate advises, “and you don’t get hurt.” While looking over his father’s estimate of costs for fixing up a house, Nate challenges his father to increase their charges from $1,500 to $2,000. Milton reluctantly agrees, but on facing Joe Drake’s reluctance to agree to the contract, Milton reduces the sum to $1,600, to Nate’s disgust. Milton next meets the challenge of facing Tom’s wife, Gloria, who requests that he hand over money owed to her husband in the last few weeks of his employment. Milton denies owing him any back-payment and sends her off, but is persuaded by Gremmar to offer a gift to the struggling family. Frustrated that Gremmar no longer visits her, Edna blurts out that she is the child of a white man, a revelation that shocks Lou, who calls her “nigger” as she slumps sick in bed. Gremmar responds to Lou’s continued terms of abuse by encouraging him to get in touch with true feelings, but the effort provokes her demise and death, at which Milton blames his son. As Lou cries and shouts on the porch, Nate knocks him down. ”I’ll make you remember this night, nigger,” Milton cries out. While Hattie tries to mollify Lou’s confused feelings of grief and pain, Nate rises relieved. “Oh, man!” he exclaims.” It’s about time, it’s about time” as the first breeze of summer wafts over him.

=AR Gurney=

Albert Ramsdell Gurney (1930 -2017) achieved success in a slice-of-life drama, "The Wayside Motor Inn" (1977). The play has affinities with Schnitzler’s “The roundelay” (1897), both containing ten characters, except that the latter is organized sequentially and the former simultaneously. Gurney also wrote “What I did that summer” (1983) a story on Charlie, an adolescent whose family, Grace, his mother, and his sister, Elsie, worry over the influence exerted by Anna, the so-called “pigwoman”, for having taken over a property once used as a pigsty. Anna tries to wean Charlie away from common middle-class values but is unable to.

"The Wayside Motor Inn"


Time: 1970s. Place: Near Boston, Massachussetts, USA.

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After a tiring drive, Frank and Jessie arrive at the inn, he more exhausted than she because of his heart condition. At the same time, Vince arrives with his son, Mark, a candidate to enter Harvard University next fall, the father being more enthusiastic than the son, who has diarrhea at the thought of this project. Soon after, Phil enters with Sally, a young couple living in dormitories who have had no sexual intercourse for six months and plan to sleep together at a special place, he more enthusiastic than she, who worries over whether Phil gave the impression at the reception desk that she was a prostitute. “I just paid, Sal,” Phil retorts. “They don’t care as long as you pay.” “Have you told your roommates to move out so I can move in?” she asks. He has not, so that she accuses him of being “scared of personal commitments”. To improve his son’s appearance in regard to a Harvard alumnus, Bill Baldwin who may help his candidacy, Vince has bought Mark a shirt. It is pink, Mark dislikes it, but feels forced to wear it. Andy, a medical doctor now with mostly administrative duties in running a hospital, arrives and calls up his estranged wife, Ruth, to settle material details of their divorce. Having felt cornered with medical duties, a wife, and five children, he accepted a better position in Pittsburgh, but Ruth refused to follow him. She agrees to come over. Still irritated about the shirt, Mark wants to take a year off and work in a garage. “I love cars, dad,” he states. “You’ll love Harvard,” Vince responds. Ray arrives and calls up a wife who likes to check up on him on his travels. He next calls Marlene, but is angry after discovering that a woman he slept with does not even remember him. Jessie dislikes the inn as much as Sally, suggesting that she and Frank should drive five more miles to stay at their daughter’s house. But he is too exhausted and so she goes off alone, frantic to hold her daughter’s baby. When Ruth arrives, she and Andy immediately bicker over who gets what in the matter of furniture and books. They leave for the house so that he can “repair the damage” she inflicted on their children while talking about him. Ray calls room service but is unable to enjoy his meal when the waitress, Sharon, wearing a corny, updated Pilgrim uniform, constantly criticizes the quality of the food of her own employer. He has seen her before but does not remember where. With Jessie out, Frank feels ill and asks at the reception desk for a doctor, but Andy’s phone rings with no one around to answer it. On their way to meet Baldwin, Mark replaces the pink shirt with a working man’s blue shirt, at which Vince is offended. “When I introduce you, what’ll I say? my son the hood, my son the mechanic?” he asks sarcastically and then rips it down the front. Jessie is unable to follow the road directions correctly, getting stuck around the turnpike, and so is forced to drive back. When Sharon returns for the tray of food, Ray suddenly remembers where he first saw her, at a protest rally as he was going off as a soldier; she does not remember him but they agree to meet after her work-day is done. When Frank reveals his mild attack, Jessie calls up their daughter to reach a doctor. Ruth is incensed on seeing Andy in possession of photo albums she feels are hers. They squabble, fight over them, and lie huddled in each other’s arms amid torn pictures. Feeling guilty over the torn shirt, Vince randomly knocks on Jessie’s door for needle and thread and by chance gets them. Still unable to get into the mood for sexual activity, Sally enters the bathtub to wash; Phil follows her. After being fired when a customer reported her negative comments about the food, Sharon returns to Ray's room, but she and Ray are unable to decide where to go. Andy wants to stay with Ruth awhile. “If you want to come home, Andy,” she warns, “I want more than one night.” They go out together. When Ray admits to having a wife, Sharon balks. “I happen to want a more personal relationship,” she announces on her way out. In the bathtub, Sally giggles and squeals while Vince triumphantly presents Mark with his shirt sewn up. “Do you want to check it with Bill Baldwin?” Mark asks. “Touché, pal,” Vince responds as they go out together. Jessie tells Frank that their daughter and husband have arrived to take him to a doctor. Phil and Sally are elated at having made it in the bathtub and want more of it in bed. Jessie exuberantly carries a baby in her arms while Frank is paralyzed in pain.

=Bernard Pomerance=

Bernard Pomerance (1940-?) won plaudits with "The elephant man" (1977), based on the life of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890).

This "drama of twenty-one short scenes, each with just such a philosophical or moral punctum often piercingly put, examines the abnormalities of society more than those of the irregular prophet in our midst. Throughout the play the issue is one of ethics, as the outcast protagonist learns to deal with the reality of the doctor's puritanical world. The text is spare, trimmed of every excess word; issues are introduced just enough to lead us to reflect on what we do and who we are. The plot takes its predictable existentialist turn when the patient examines the dreaming doctor, ironically inverting the words of the doctor's own diagnosis back upon him to illuminate the shadow sides of our so-called normalcy- only to find it gross. Perhaps we are the circus in which the 'elephant man' remains indeed only the side show, a minor character? And we thought we came to the theatre...to stare at the freak" (Brown, 1980 p 434).

Simon (1979) criticized Pomerance because he “minimizes or omits many of the decencies that were, in actuality, shown Merrick even by some very ordinary people, and he makes virtually all of Merrick's prosperous, highly placed friends and patrons appear suspect: either they profit from the Elephant Man directly or indirectly, or they can project their private problems onto him and, seeing him cheerful in adversity, feel purged through him...To drive home his anti-societal stance, the dramatist starts out with a Treves who is much more smug and Victorianly hypocritical than the real Treves was, and ends with a Treves profoundly shaken by doubts such as his real-life counterpart never had...As the play progresses, Treves' hatred for social success, and thus also for himself, grows in intensity, till, toward the end, the man who taught Merrick that we live by rules, and that rules make us happy, laments: ‘I am an extremely successful and respected Englishman in a successful and respected England which informs us daily by the way it lives that it wants to die. I am in despair, in fact.’ What has happened in the play to warrant such a change of attitude? Little if anything. At one point, Treves seems to have become embroiled in the shady financial speculations of an aristocrat- Lord John, an obviously fictitious character- who has feigned interest in Merrick. All this is barely hinted at, yet it is meant to imply that Treves has somehow abused his patient. Also, Mrs Kendal, whom Treves summons to bring feminine grace to the deprived Merrick, becomes ever fonder of that gifted unfortunate. One day, during one of her frequent, friendly visits, she feels so strongly for this youth who worships women without ever having seen one of them naked, that she lets down her hair and disrobes to the waist for him. Merrick is ecstatic, but Treves enters and, scandalized, chases Mrs Kendal away. We don't know what would have happened without this intervention; as it is, Mrs Kendal never returns and Merrick goes into a decline from which he never recovers...We simply do not see the reasons for Treves' moral and political change...Merrick begins to win over Mrs Kendal with his critique of Romeo and Juliet which he has just finished reading. Had he been Romeo, says John, he would not just have held the mirror to Juliet's breath. To which the experienced actress, who has played Juliet, replies: ‘You mean the scene where Juliet appears to be dead and he holds a mirror to her breath?’...Nowhere in Shakespeare's play does Romeo hold a mirror to Juliet’s breath, which Mrs Kendal, with Juliet in her repertory, must clearly know” (pp 404-408).

“Treves is well intentioned but somewhat dense. He represents the virtues and limitations of an earnest Victorian medical culture. In several scenes his inhibitions and official pieties are punctured by Merrick's greater honesty and clearer logic” (Kerrane, 1993 p 122).

The play has been poorly imitated by many. “We should...disabuse ourselves of the notion that a sick character is more interesting than a healthy one. The assumption that perversion or mental disturbance automatically qualifies a character for rapt attention has virtually become an article of faith” (Gassner, 1960 p 163).

"The elephant man"


Time: Late 19th century. Place: England and Belgium.

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Dr Treves, a surgeon who works at a London hospital, goes to a freak show starring Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man". He wants to study his pathology, consisting of abnormally large bone size. The owner of the show, Ross, agrees to sell his star to him. After being examined, Merrick returns on stage but is not allowed to present himself in Brussels, because the sight of him is judged to be indecent. Ross sends him back to London, where Treves can study him further. He is about to hire a nurse when she sees Merrick naked in a bath and refuses the position. When Bishop How learns of his existence, he decides to teach him the Christian religion. Due to his letter printed in a newspaper and subsequent donations, Carr-Gomm, administrator at the hospital, has secured his case for life. Treves protects Merrick in various ways, including firing an attendant for peeking inside his room. He hires Mrs Kendal, an actress, more capable than most at hiding the revulsion the sight of him usually inspires, to converse with Merrick as a companion. She is surprised on hearing him discuss with sensitivity Romeo and Juliet despite having no practical experience in matters of love. Under the bishop's influence, Merrick builds a model church. But yet the problem of sex crops up again. Derrick tells Kendal he longs for a mistress. In sympathy with his desires but unwilling to sleep with him, the actress undresses so that he can at least see a woman's naked body for the first time, but they are interrupted by the shocked Treves, who dismisses her. Ross wants Merrick back, but Merrick's medical condition worsens so that he follow. The more normal Merrick pretends to be, the worse his condition becomes, and yet he is able to finish his model church before dying. Carr-Gomm reads to Treves another letter meant for the newspaper, which describes Merrick’s stay and death at the hospital. After asking him whether he has anything to add, a distressed Treves at first can find nothing. When he returns to say he has found something at last, the letter has already been sent.

=Beth Henley=

Beth Henley (1952-?)'s drama of three sisters, "Crimes of the heart" (1979), touched a chord.

"Crimes of the heart" “emerged from a deep southern tradition…one thought of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, whose novels and stories chronicled the eccentricities of thwarted lives…But Henley had her own special flavor, mixing compassion with dark humor as the sisters squarely faced the violence within them” (Gussow, 2006 p 48). Henley “begins and ends [the play] with a ritual; in the opening, the solitary Lenny unsuccessfully tries to put one candle into a birthday cookie; at the close, the three sisters together celebrate Lenny’s being born with a dance and a huge candle-laden cake. Now reluctant to hurt or judge one another, they are interdependent and supportive of one another” (Adler, 1987 p 46).

In much of the play, the serious is juxtaposed with the trivial, as when the sisters' flighty-headed first cousin, Chick, reacts to Babe’s crime thus: “It’s just too awful. How I’m gonna continue holding my head up high in this community I do not know.- Did you remember to pick up those pantyhose for me?” (Demastes, 1988, pp 136-139). Lack of feeling more seriously marks the event when Babe mentions that she served her husband lemonade after shooting him, presumably because he appeared thirsty while losing blood and from her habit of attending to him at table. In both cases, a woman’s wish (pantyhose) or role (serving at table) appears in the context of a man’s pain, as a sort of gallows’ humor against the offending opposite sex. The sisters sympathize more with the fate of animals than that of men, death of a cat or horse more than their grandfather's coma, even laughed over by Lenny and Babe. In the view of Craig (2004) "by the play's end, the sisters reunite as three stronger and feistier women who are family created anew. Their jubilant, golden last scene becomes a group awakening and catharsis" (p 159). “The play ends with a moment of celebration as all three dig into a huge birthday cake for Lenny, and the curtain falls on a picture of them locked in a transitory moment of familial bonding and love” (Kachur, 1991 pp 20-21). In another point of view, “Henley leaves the three sisters in an ambiguous state of affairs, refusing to reinstate the status quo” (Gupton, 2002 p 134). In other critics' views, the "golden last scene" appears more trivial. "The basic joke of Crimes of the Heart is a moral and emotional displacement that makes the sisters' response to events always somehow off-centre...The play ends with the sisters laughing over the pleasure of eating birthday cake for breakfast, their inherent innocence guaranteeing them happiness" (Berkowitz, 1992 p 200) or resistance to unhappiness. "There is madness, stark madness; and that the only factor that keeps these characters out of asylums (insofar as they are kept out) is their mad humor about themselves, which translates almost chillingly into our looking at them as comic" (Kauffmann, 2021 pp 87-88).

“Lenny sees herself as rapidly approaching spinsterhood. Her chief defect, in her mind, is the fact that...she cannot bear children...Her self-worth is determined by her value to men, which in turn is measured by her fertility...The beautiful Meg...has lived her life trying to please old Granddaddy...Babe...has also been shaped by the dictates of a patriarchal society...(In particular], Zachary...has emotionally and physically abused Babe for years...Ultimately, the play fails to challenge patriarchal structures or even acknowledge that they have been the root of the problem...Lenny returns to Charlie, who she discovers doesn’t want children...Meg’s breakthrough comes after she begins to sing again following her night with Doc...Babe’s situation...is resolved...as she pairs off with Barnette Lloyd, her young lawyer” (Porter, 1999 pp 197-198). “Henley uses domestic realism to offer a gendered reading of the American family, which retains its identity as a patriarchal institution, even when women want roles other or more than conventionally prescribed. The risk, of course, is to dismiss the Magrath sisters as weird and wacky and not ask questions that a full reading demands” (Schlueter, 1999 pp 15-16).

“Meg mistakenly defines strength by the ability to view head-on the most gruesome or pitiful images of other human beings” (Chirico, 2005 p 6). “Meg’s reaction...has resulted in a narcissistic personality disorder...Narcissists seek to be loved than to love others...The first example of Meg’s lack of empathy for others through oral satisfaction is when Lenny tells her of Babe’s shooting of Zachery, and Meg’s response is to get a soda. When Lenny mentions that Billy Boy was struck by lightning, Meg lights a cigarette...Lenny’s response...is...depression...The play opens with Lenny pathetically trying to stick a candle into a crumbling cookie she has substituted for a cake...Lenny has become overly self-critical and guilty about her shortcomings, refusing to seek love because she may be rejected...Babe also represents...anxiety and anguish...Zachery abused her physically and mentally, forcing Babe to enter a relationship with Willie Jay...Thus, the battered female...bonded with...another outcast. Babe is...the one who insists that ordering the largest cake...will cure Lenny of her loneliness on her birthday” (Plunka, 2005 pp 74-82).

"Crimes of the heart"


Time: 1959. Place: Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/henley-beth-crimes-of-the-heart-pdf-free.html

Babe is out on bail after shooting in the stomach her husband, Zackery, a senator, who lies in critical condition at the hospital. "Don't worry, Meg, jail's going be a relief to me," she assures her older sister. "I can learn to play my new saxophone." Babe further reveals she had an adulterous relation with a fifteen-year old black boy, Willie Jay. Her husband had pushed the boy down a staircase, after which she shot him, made a pitcher of lemonade for herself, and offered him some as he lay bleeding. She first thought to shoot herself, but was then reminded of her mother's suicide by hanging herself along with the family cat after her father left the family. Thinking this over, Babe cuts out and pastes newspaper articles of her mother's case. She is considerably more upset, to the extent of banging her body against the furniture, after learning from her lawyer that, suspicious of Babe, Zackery's sister hired a private detective who took pictures of her and Willie Jay copulating in her garage. However, her lawyer obtains compromising evidence of Zackery's adulteries and is confident of striking a deal so that she can get off with a lighter jail sentence. Nevertheless, Willie Jay, being subject to possible violent retributions on the part of white racists, must leave town. The thought of losing Willie Jay and her husband's threat at committing her in a psychiatric institution on his way to recovery at the local hospital are sufficient reasons for her to hang herself, but the rope she hangs from breaks. Another suicide attempt fails when Meg arrives in time to remove Babe's head inside a turned-on gas oven. Joining the two sisters is the eldest, Lenny, who may renew relations with an old flame of hers. The two sisters buy Babe a birthday cake, though one day late. The three enjoy each other's company despite the uncertainty of Babe's eventual fate.

=Marsha Norman=



The subject of "'Night, Mother" (1982) by Marsha Norman is the psychological impact of a daughter's wished-for suicide on herself and her mother.

"'Night, Mother" "investigates a philosophical intersection of Midwest and South, though the regional poles are never identified as such or specifically grounded in either history or tradition...Like many Midwestern characters- from those of William Dean Howells through Susan Glaspell and William Inge to David Mamet and beyond- Jessie is someone who 'doesn’t feel much like talking'. She comes to language slowly and imperfectly. In trying to justify her intention to commit suicide, she confesses, 'I can’t say it any better' as if to underscore the inadequacy of language, a common feature of Midwestern literature and culture...Mama, by contrast, seems Southern in noticeably conventional terms. She 'speaks quickly and enjoys talking'; “she is chatty and nosy, and this is her house'. Unlike Jessie’s sometimes blunt plain speaking, Mama’s words sugar-coat reality—made concrete through her extreme love of all manner of sweets. In the great Southern tradition of story-telling, she enjoys creating narrative that at least in some instances bears marginal relation to the truth. According to her most elaborate tale, 'Agnes Fletcher’s burned down every house she ever lived in. Eight fires, and she’s due for a new one any day now'. Mama goes on to claim that Agnes lives in a 'house full of birds' and that Agnes’s constant eating of okra 'two meals a day' has 'made her crazy'" (Radavich, 2011 pp 116-119).

"Jessie wants to commit suicide not because her life is worse then Thelma’s but because she refuses to accept it...Jessie says that if she could help her son, she would not do it. She feels helpless to help him or her mother, but is not helpless in regard to suicide, so that her suicide, being under her control, has more meaning than her existence. In her whole life, she suffers from the loss of something worse than the loss of father, husband, son, her own self, 'somebody I waited for and never came,' she says, 'and never will. I’m what was worth waiting for and I didn’t make it'” (Bigsby, 1999 pp 233-237). Although Jessie denies that her purpose is motivated by anger, she responds angrily several times, as when Thelma suggests calling her brother over in this emergency. She is also angry when referring to Cecil's handiwork skills, because although he can build houses he cannot build happiness. Jessie's present condition resembles that of Thelma's friend, Agnes, who several times burned down derelict houses as a reaction against the men she lived with. Jessie approves of her pyromania. Likewise, Jessie wants to strike down the house of her body as a final gesture of autonomy...In destroying houses, literally and symbolically, women paradoxically experience growth and [it becomes a] cause for celebration" (Paige, 2007 pp 395-396).

“The mother moves from grief and alarm to outrage and pity, culminating in a kind of weary acceptance” (Hosey, 1984 p 38). “Thelma’s perspective is characteristically one of resignation, but she sees her condition as universally human rather than personal. ‘Things happen,’ Thelma says. ‘You do what you can about them and you see what happens next.’ Jessie, on the other hand, is unremittingly personal. Her justification for suicide is: ‘I’m just not having a very good time and I don’t have any reason to think it’ll get anything but worse’” (Dolan, 1988 p 24). “Before she goes, she needs to relieve her mother of any sense of guilt or responsibility...What Jessie is also hoping for- and what eventually transpires- is their first evening of a mother-daughter relationship which neither has ever enjoyed” (Kachur, 1991 p 29). “It is the mother-daughter relationship between Jessie and Thelma that stands as the central mystery of ‘Night, Mother’. In order to achieve the self-fulfilment she craves, Jessie has to get away with her symbiotic relationship with mama...Throughout the play, Jessie keeps rejecting the junk food Thelma offers,...milk in particular” (Brugnoli, 2014 p 233-234). “This is a play about of female empowerment...[in that] it tells the story of a single woman who finds the courage to write the last chapter of her life story in her own way” (Porter 1999 pp 205-206). Jessie’s methodological way of getting through this last night of her life might seem too emotionally distanced, almost somnambulistic, yet her outer control is no mask but a reflection of her inner assurance” (Adler, 1987 p 7).

"'Night, Mother" “is a stunning play. Uncompromisingly, relentlessly and painfully, it dramatizes Jessie Cates's attempt to rationalize her suicide and her mother Thelma's attempt to forestall it...Her decision reflects her need to control what her epilepsy so aptly symbolizes, life out of control...Armed with reason, ridicule, threats, diversionary tactics and sheer will, Thelma struggles to gain control of the situation and of Jessie...Unprepared for her mother's sensitivity, tenacity, fear and guilt, Jessie tears herself away from Thelma's literal and maternal grip without the promised farewell kiss...Norman's magnificent play confirms the cathartic power of drama and her own talent as a playwright” (Kane, 1984 p 168). The degree of control is open to question. “When mama protests that Jessie doesn’t have to kill herself, Jessie illustrates her feeling of elation at gaining such self-determination by saying: “no, I don’t. That’s what I like about it.” Restrained in the past by her roles as dependent child and wife, and hampered by her illness, Jessie now exults in being able to decide what she will do, in controlling her own destiny. If she cannot change her life, cannot make it better, she can, she asserts, ‘stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there’s nothing on I want to listen to. It’s all I really have that belongs to me and I’m going to say what happens to it. And it’s going to stop. And I’m going to stop it’ Yet Jessie experiences a profound sense of dissociation from self, signaled in her speech about the picture of herself as an infant. Is the control she thinks she exercises a chimera?" (Burke, 2002 p 120).

“Jessie’s suggestion of suicide brings on three crises for Thelma. First, Thelma is worried about how she will manage the day-to-day functioning of her life without Jessie’s help. Jessie understands this, and for weeks leading up to the play’s action she has been working hard to organize the household so that Thelma can manage it. Secondly, Thelma is afraid that somehow her own inadequacies are the cause of Jessie’s despair and her motive to kill herself, especially her handling of Jessie’s epilepsy in her youth. Thelma does not want to have to take on this guilt. Jessie also works throughout the play to establish her own autonomy and separation from Thelma, reassuring her, sometimes angrily, that the suicide ‘doesn’t have anything to do with you’. The third crisis, however, is the most devastating for Thelma and is the source of Thelma’s own tragedy...Jessie’s plan for suicide destroys Thelma’s comfortable sense of self. Jessie and Thelma have shared a life of letting time drift by and trying to deny disappointments, such as the lack of fulfillment in Thelma’s marriage to Jessie’s father. Thelma does not want to take on the self-examination that Jessie has been enduring” (Palmer, 2018 p 182).

"'Night, mother"
Time: 1980s. Place: USA.

Text at https://pdfcoffee.com/x27night-mother-by-marsha-norman-pdf-free.html

Jessie announces to her mother, Thelma, that she intends to commit suicide. Knowing Thelma to be helpless over most household matters, she has written down notes on how to manage food deliveries and laundry and where everything is. To dissuade her from suicide, Thelma promises to change the nature of their relation, in particular not rely so much on her. She acknowledges that allowing Jessie to come back to her house after the latter's divorce from Cecil was a mistake. In desperation, Thelma probes into possible reasons Jessie might want to kill herself, hoping to counter them and not be left alone. Jessie hates the state of the world, feels she cannot work at anything worthwhile, is tired of it all. Thelma probes into the past, admits she never loved her mostly silent husband, now dead, though he appeared to have loved his daughter. Jessie is aghast on learning that her mother never sought medical help for her husband's absence seizures or her daughter's while still a child. To encourage her to lead a healthy outdoor life, Cecil and she took up horse-riding, but she fell off of one and has been subject ever since to generalized seizures, though well controlled. Thelma blames Cecil for leaving her, to which Jessie replies sarcastically: "Mama, you don't pack your garbage when you move." More desperate than ever, Thelma attempts to distract her daughter by talking about mutual acquaintances and food items once liked, but with no result. She next tries pity as a motivation to shake her resolve. "Jessie, how can I live here without you?" she asks, and lets her know about her overwhelming feeling of failure as a mother. "How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?" she further asks. But Jessie does not bother to argue about any reason to remain in this life or feebly changes the subject. She has arranged for her widow's dress to be cleaned, the one she looked so well in. Thelma starts to give up, especially after hearing her daughter consider matters relating to the funeral ceremony. "You'll probably see people you haven't seen for years, but I thought about what you should say to get you over that nervous part when they first come in," Jessie says, always the practical one. Jessie next instructs her on how best to handle the aftermath. "Now, when you hear the shot, I don't want you to come in," she advises. "First of all, you won't be able to get in by yourself, but I don't want you trying." She then tells her mother that she will leave her brother a list of Christmas gifts meant for her, spread over many years, and shows her boxes containing her belongings to be distributed to her drug-dependent son and to herself. Thelma calmly looks over the stuff, but when Jessie rises to go, she panics and tries without success to prevent her. Jessie says: "'Night, mother," locks the door in her room, and shoots herself.

=Donald Margulies=



in "Dinner with friends" (1998), Donald Margulies (1954-?) wrote on a neglected subject: what happens to the friends of a divorcing couple?

“Two couples face dark existential fears as one undergoes a divorce. Gabe and Karen are grief-stricken when they learn Beth and Tom have given up on their marriage. After more than a decade of weekends away, raising children, and gourmet dinners as a foursome, Gabe and Karen totter at the edge of a chasm over their own relationship. Stylishly rendered by Margulies, Dinner With Friends avoids the quicksand of domestic drama with dialogue that is edgy, honest, and, at times, painfully funny. However, flashback scenes slow the play's momentum. In choosing to go back in time, Margulies allows the play to idle when it should drive forward” (Jenkins, 1999 p 82).

“In Gabe and Karen’s world, there are no supports outside themselves to sustain their marriage. They aren’t religious or propped up by doting parents. Society no longer cares whether they stay married or not. The spiritual and cultural void the two couples live in is key to their predicament. So when the wheels come off the marriage of Beth and Tom, their friends and alter-egos for a decade, Gabe and Karen recognize their own precariousness and momentarily lose their equilibrium” (Patch, 2002 p 283). “When the marriage of Tom and Beth falls apart, Gabe and Karen lose their equilibrium as well. They have no religiously defined moral code or doting parents setting an example and trying to provide guidance...Disturbances and dissatisfactions in their own marriage break through the suburban middle-class and well-kept surface like little cracks, barely noticeable and anxiously hushed away” (Schmidt, 2014 pp 177-178).

“Out of sheer friendship, Gabe and Karen try to help Beth and Tom cope with their current predicament, but their behavior makes Dinner with Friends resonate with Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism: a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing…Karen’s support of Beth as an artist, as well as her and Gabe’s desire to help Beth become an acceptable cook, are blatant “obstacles to [her] flourishing.” For Beth- but this is partly true for Tom as well–, Gabe and Karen provide life-models that are inherently harmful since both implicitly deny alter- native views, which leads to the fallout. Interestingly, because it gives more depth to the play, Margulies draws a positive portrait of Gabe and Karen as gracious individuals. Still, despite their being congenial, their cruel optimism, which, for years, had been an ongoing process, unexpectedly comes to light and leads to a final crisis“ (Dubost, 2020 p 277).

"Dinner with friends"
Time: 1980s-1990s. Place: New England, USA.

Text at ?

While entertaining Beth over dinner, Gabe and Karen receive the unpleasant news that she and her husband, Tom, intend to divorce. Tom is upset that Beth revealed this information in his absence, thereby serving a biased version of their troubles to their best friends. A distressed Gabe tries to determine whether the divorce may be prevented, but he finds Tom adamant. This is no act of madness. Instead, Tom says: "I've gone sane." In part because Tom rejects Beth to have a relation with another woman, Karen takes her part, finding his behavior typical of men. "It's like men get by for years without really talking to you and then, one day, when they finally do, it's to tell you they're leaving," she asserts. But then Karen is stunned and much less sympathetic towards Beth on learning that she quickly finds another man, an old lawyer-colleague of Tom's. When Karen further learns that Beth intends to marry him, she thinks her friend might give the matter more time. However, Beth has no wish to reflect further on this matter and resents her friend saying that. "I'm finally feeling whole, finally feeling I'm on the right track for the first time in my life, and what do you do? You undermine me," Beth accuses her. She further accuses her friend of being unhappy at not having a chance to feel superior at all times. "I was the Mess, the Ditz, the Comic Relief," she specifies. "You got to be Miss Perfect: everything just right." Gabe's view of his friendship with Tom is also given a serious blow on finding out that all that time he was never really happy with Beth. "Wait a minute," an irate Gabe interrupts Tom. "You were faking it? You mean to tell me that all those years- all those years, Tom!- the four of us together, the dinners, the vacations, the hours of videotape, you were just being a good sport?" When Gabe informs Karen that soon after their marriage Beth engaged in an adulterous relation with her "new man", she becomes dejected. "What does this say about our friendship?" she wonders. "What were all those years about?" Both consider that they are unlikely to remain close friends with them. Instead, they settle in to concentrate on their own marriage.