Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre 9780761864011, 9780761864004

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Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre

Robert J. Andreach

University Press of America,® Inc. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Copyright © 2014 by University Press of America,® Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Aquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014939719 ISBN: 978-0-7618-6400-4 (paperback : alk. paper)—ISBN: 978-0-7618-6401-1 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Kevin, Jason, and Thelma; George and Elaine; and Jim (in memoriam) and Mary

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Questioning Tragedy’s Vitality and Relevance

ix

1 2 3 4 5 6

Isolation and Loss of Life Loss of Hope and Suffering Eugene O’Neill Arthur Miller Tennessee Williams More Contemporary Tragedy

1 29 69 97 121 145

Conclusion: Questing for Tragedy’s Vitality and Relevance

167

Notes

175

Index

185

v

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Ms. Patty Shannon of The Wordstation, Brick, New Jersey, for preparing the manuscript and Ms. Joanne P. Foeller of Timely Publication Services, Hamburg, New York, for preparing the index. The study would like to maintain the distinction between theatre with -re for the concept, as in the multi-volume The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, and theater with -er for the building, as in the Public Theater. The difficulty is that there is no uniformity among scholars and companies.

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Introduction Questioning Tragedy’s Vitality and Relevance

The 21st-century’s opening decade saw the publication of two books on tragedy that not only provide a comprehensive coverage of the genre’s history but also explore its significance outside the theatre. In short, proving the vitality and relevance of the terms tragic and tragedy, they are books anyone interested in the art form and the experience conveyed by the terms would want to own: Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) and Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). The same decade, however, saw the performance of three American plays that in questioning that vitality and relevance led to the writing of this book that examines tragedy as an art form in the contemporary American theatre. So far as this study knows, the earliest of the five works, the two books and three plays, appeared only in publication in the United States with no indication of an American staging after the 2001 London Gate Theatre production. The playwright is Will Eno, and the play is Tragedy: A Tragedy. It is presented as a telecast of breaking news with Frank in the Studio the anchorperson orchestrating information from sources such as John in the Field covering the event and Constance at the Home supplementing with humaninterest offshoots. The play begins with Frank intoning rhetorical devices. A sound repeated with minute variation: “sun…has set. Settling.” Balance: “outward signs of…inward vitality.” Parenthetical element: “we understand.” Contrast: “glowing…gone.” And the above are delivered in stately cadence creating an authoritative tone repeated by subsequent voices such as John’s with his contribution to the devices: “passersby to the suffering, slowly passing by” and “seen so much so fast, and such sadness.” 1 But what ix

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Introduction

caused the suffering and sadness is not stated. From the devices with their imagery of light disappearing in darkness, the audience concludes that the event is catastrophic: the onset of eternal darkness that augurs the end of the world. The difficulty with the conclusion is the discrepancy between the gravity of the event and the reporting of it. When John next speaks, he reports on the behavior of dogs “licking hands, yawning, circling before lying down, and making their tags and collars jingle” (52). When Constance speaks, to report on a darkened and apparently empty house yet with a lawn sprinkler still rhythmically sprinkling, the language turns back on itself: “What is felt most here is the mystery. The unspectacular mystery. What remains for us to feel—after having knelt down to feel the worn-out welcome mat, looked up at the humble shape of a simple house—is, again, the mystery” (53). The two remaining cast members also contribute to the event’s displacement. Stationed at the Capitol building, legal adviser Michael reports in language expressing his imagination. He will get back to Frank when disclosure comes in a “smoothly delivered speech from a suntanned man with an easy style and a stunning gold watch” (53). Introduced by John with a spate of possible signs foreshadowing the “coming dark,” a Witness replies to the reporter’s question about being “struck by anything striking”: “No…. None” (53). The play increasingly dramatizes not only the event’s disappearance but the disappearance of any attendant action. Instead of trying to gain insight into the event, the characters indulge their concerns, which are periodically interrupted by fragments of television commercials or Frank playing a tape. Wondering whether dogs understand what is happening, John remembers a shepherd-collie being put to sleep while Michael remembers an uncle who taught him how to steer a skidding car and Constance recalls her first romance at day camp. The characters are also increasingly distracted. Frank looks under his desk for a dropped pencil; Constance observes a couple pedaling on a bicycle built for two; John becomes physically ill; and Michael reads the governor’s pronouncements culminating in his welcoming the night—“ ‘Let the looting begin’ ” (58)—before sliding down a statehouse drainpipe and disappearing. With Frank calling upon every source he has for perspectives as he struggles to stay awake hoping for an end to the coverage, the play ends with him asleep at his desk as the Witness finally speaks beyond perfunctory comments. What he says, however, is more of the same disconnected images. For example, he saw a plane flying overhead and heard a band practicing, images that release images from the past. He once saw the governor at a gas station, and he remembers his parents tucking him in and whispering, “‘Good night, sweet dreams’” (71). The play could be a satiric treatment of media news coverage were it not for Eno cautioning against that interpretation in a prefatory note. The title is Tragedy with a subtitle, A Tragedy, the function of which is clarification of

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the title. What is happening to tragedy is itself a tragedy. What is happening is that the form is inadequate for the content. The obliteration of life is the most tragic of events, yet the form dramatizing the content is so attenuated that it renders the event into a non-event and the attendant action into a nonaction. The presentation is not in the classical form of tragedy as defined by Aristotle, an imitation of an action, but the implication is that the traditional genre is no longer vital and relevant; it puts audiences to sleep. As negative as this interpretation is, by the end of the introduction the interpretation may be positive. Gina Gionfriddo’s After Ashley is a satire of the media’s packaging of tragedy. Three years after the homeless man he had befriended by hiring him to do yard work on their property raped and murdered wife Ashley, husband Alden wrote a book entitled After Ashley that the New York Times described as an “American epic tragedy.” 2 The reviews earn him guest appearances on television talk shows such as Profiles in Justice where host David Gavin encourages him to talk not only about the crime’s impact on him but its implication for America’s values. Claiming that Ashley shared his concern for the underprivileged, Alden goes on to relate visiting the homeless man’s mother and dedicating the book to her, a victim with her son of a mental health system that failed him. He also morally isolates right-wing conservatives who by exploiting the tragedy for their anti-welfare agenda would deny the underprivileged the help they need. The satire is on full current. Promoted to producer, Gavin offers Alden the role of host of the talk show renamed After Ashley and focused on reenacted sex crimes with interviews with the victims and law enforcement personnel demonstrating self-defense techniques. Alden seizes the “exceptional opportunity” (63), although the one episode taped for airing re-enacts the crime as a Gothic romance with the victim ravished by a caped stranger. He continues to cling to the opportunity even when his role in the dedication of a shelter for battered women named After Ashley and spawning a corps of volunteers called Ashley’s Angels is a two-minute introduction of the philanthropic family that built the structure. He will not let go because the opportunity accords him celebrity status, which is the ultimate goal of self-invention in America. Neither will Ashley and Alden’s teenage son Justin let go of the opposition. In the one scene in which she is present, Ashley confides in Justin, then fourteen, that she is unhappy with Alden, the root of the unhappiness their sexual incompatibility. A pot smoker who cannot abide children or her husband’s bleeding heart liberalism that is bringing, over her objection, a homeless person onto the property, she advises Justin not to marry before he knows himself, for marrying before she knew herself was her mistake. He in turn advises her to find activities outside of the house in which to discover interests. Unknown to him at the time, she joined an erotic exploration cult, a

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discovery he uses for a collision with reality. Since he objects to his father’s and Gavin’s distorting of the truth that would make his mother a martyr on behalf of liberal causes, he plays a tape of her in erotic exploration at the dedication ceremony. Were the above all there is to After Ashley, the examination would stop with a satire so heavy that a subtitle could be With an Anvil. Although praising aspects of the play, Christopher Isherwood faulted “plotting and dialogue [that] grow increasingly shrill and overstated” and Michael Feingold faulted the creation of characters like Alden “who are all cliché and no humanity.” 3 Gionfriddo’s play, however, is a three-tiered drama. Like the first tier, the second tier has a collision of opposition with reality. Seventeen at the time of the play’s action, Justin directs his anger, which at age fourteen he funneled into drugs, at everything his father and the producer, on whose show he appears with his father, say about his mother or propose as tributes to her memory. The tier is Justin’s resistance to coming to terms with the tragedy, which is coming to terms with himself, for he has his mother’s problem. Not knowing himself, he makes anyone who does not share his perception of reality the opposition, yet the more he resists becoming involved in the two men’s tributes to Ashley, the less they become clichés. Countering his son’s argument that his version of the tragedy is the only truthful one and tired of the hostility, Alden takes the position that each is entitled to his “experience of this event” (91). Gavin is more brutal, telling the teenager that after three years of “act[ing] out” his grief, “it’s time to grow up and act like a man” (87). Justin even makes Julie, the girl he meets in a bar, the opposition until they begin to collaborate on sabotaging the dedication. Years ahead of him in maturing, she admits early in the relationship, “I just have to figure out what I am” (77). The sabotage wrecking the dedication, indefinitely delaying the airing of the television show After Ashley, and cutting him off from his father, Justin collides with reality: what to do with his life—that is, how to create himself—after Ashley. With Julie’s gentle prodding, he begins by admitting that he does not have “any coherent idea of who I am” (105). Having already collaborated with him on securing a tape of Ashley in erotic exploration by consenting to the taping of the two of them in the exploration, she joins with him on the quest for self-discovery, and the play ends with the two leaving hand in hand. The examination cannot stop here either. On two counts the second tier is intermediary between the first tier’s satire on tragedy and the third tier’s debate on tragedy. The first count is making the opposition more sympathetic than in the first tier, and the second count has to do with resolution. In the first tier, Justin resolves the difference between his knowledge of his mother and the false knowledge by sabotaging the dedication. In the second tier, he does not resolve. He realizes that he must quest to resolve knowing himself.

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The third tier is also on full current when Julie, recognizing Justin as the son of the murdered mother, comes on to him in a bar, and he invites her to his apartment, where he plays a tape of a re-enacted sex crime to be aired on the television show. The viewing yields Julie’s opposition to Justin’s position on re-enactment. With the Aristotelian imitation substituted for re-enactment, the two teens debate tragedy’s function with Julie the more thoroughly sympathetic character. He would not have re-enactments. She would, asking him, “So your solution is silence?” to which he replies, “Shutting the fuck up would be a start” (76-77). But if his position is the prevailing one, there would be no tragedy as an art form and no Greek tragedies performed through the ages. If there are re-enactments, he insists that they be absolutely faithful to the original crimes; she would have them modified for entertainment, though with him she opposes glamorizing the crimes as prurient romances. Here too she has tradition on her side. The original crimes in the myths that interact with the present in Greek tragedies are not re-enacted onstage. Messengers report the violence and avengers display it, as Clytemnestra does with Agamemnon’s and Cassandra’s bodies in the Agamemnon segment of the Oresteia. And the tragedies had to have an element of entertainment because they were performed with speech and song, music and dance in festivals celebrating Athens’ prosperity. The final disagreement the two teens have is with the benefit derived from the re-enactments. Believing that suffering cannot be meaningless, Julie suggests that reimagining “sorrows as gifts” is the “only way you heal” (75). If suffering has to have meaning, then for Justin it is revealing the truth, which for him is the truth as he sees it. As he says, the “only way to save” his mother from his father’s and Gavin’s distortions is “to trash her” (90). To do that, however, he must collide with reality. Since the cult leader will part with a tape of Ashley performing only if he can tape the two teens performing—re-enacting Ashley’s performance—they consent. The collision changes them in that Justin realizes that he must have a life after Ashley, and Julie wants to be with him on the quest for self-discovery. They do not resume the debate, however, so that the play ends having raised questions about tragedy without resolving them: without, for example, resolving the relationship between tragedy and self-knowledge. In the way in which the news media, or American writing, covers a tragic event, Tragedy implies that the genre has ceased to be a vital, relevant form. Except for the New York Times describing Alden’s book as an “American epic tragedy” (59) and Julie suggesting that the re-telling lends crimes a “certain tragic beauty” (75), After Ashley does not invoke the genre. This study substituted the play’s word, re-enactment, for imitation in Aristotle’s definition, imitation of an action, to do the invoking. Before coming to a conclusion, however, about contemporary tragedy’s health, the study has to examine a third drama because it not only invokes an ancient tragedy, it

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reimagines it. In the chapter on the Biblical Book of Job in his study, Richard B. Sewall identifies what is central to tragedy as opposed to offering a definition of the genre. Suffering is central: “More than Prometheus or Oedipus, Job is the universal symbol for the western imagination of the mystery of undeserved suffering.” And suffering has a function: “Suffering itself, as the Poet of Job defines it, has been made to yield knowledge, and the way has been plotted. After this achievement by the Poet of Job and after the similar achievement by Aeschylus in what may have been the same era of antiquity (the fifth century), the ‘tragic form’ was permanently available.” 4 Suffering is central to Thomas Bradshaw’s Job. “Is the sense of tragedy palpable?” (52), Frank in the Studio asks John in the Field in Tragedy. Suffering was palpable in the New York production of Job partly because of the venue. The Flea Theater in Lower Manhattan is one of a host of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway venues that make the city the theatre capital that it is. The play was performed in the forty-seat downstairs space where a waist-high barrier is all that separates the audience in two rows of twenty seats each from the actors, making the experience immediate. The play follows the Biblical story in outline, acknowledging in the program that portions are excerpted from the Bible. It differs in specific details and in the excesses in the details. Job opens with the protagonist sentencing to death by stoning a man his son Joshua charges with raping a girl. Joshua then rapes and sodomizes his sister Rachel so that even before the wager between God and Satan to test Job’s faith, one of his sons is a rapist in a very physical scene of thrashing on the floor with Joshua continuing to violate his sister’s body after she dies except for the few moments he stops to masturbate. Another brother enters, sees what Joshua did to Rachel, and in an equally violent and prolonged scene sodomizes him with a broomstick. Job is himself a victim when a man whose hand he had amputated gets his revenge when he and a son on the pretext of friendship blind and castrate him. Violence predominates in the one-hour performance, although there is a ritual dance and there are interspersed comic scenes in which God, His brother Satan, and His sons Jesus and Dionysus take up positions around the space and do nothing but smile for interminable minutes, stopping only to sample wines. While God and Satan are intelligent, Jesus and Dionysus, who come close to fighting, seem somewhat retarded. Neither is every sex scene violent. His losses and health restored, Job enjoys renewed sexual prowess in simulated intercourse with his wife on his lap. Bradshaw’s Job has suffering galore, Sewall’s first point. Whether it has Sewall’s second point, that the suffering yields knowledge, has to be examined. The play ends as it began with Job dispensing justice. He amputates the two hands of a man apprehended stealing, even though the man pleads for mercy in his defense that he has no other means of feeding his starving family. Ben Brantley ended his review commenting on the final scene. “By

Introduction

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the way, Job does learn from his sufferings in this version. The man we see restored to power and glory at the end is more Godlike than ever. That in itself is a cause for Job-like lamentation.” While agreeing with Brantley that Job gains the wrong knowledge, this study prefers to state that he does not learn because the knowledge should be that of his humanity: his bond with and compassion for other humans. For Sewall, the Biblical Job “sees his misfortunes not as unique but as typical of man’s lot. In one phase of his being, at least, he is becoming a partisan of the human race.” 5 Since the contemporary Job does not learn from his suffering, it is difficult thinking of Job as an authentic tragedy. Perhaps that is why Brantley called the play a “vigorously comic tragedy.” 6 Based on the progression from the boring coverage of a tragedy through the media’s exploitation of a tragedy to a non-tragedy, the introduction seems to conclude that tragedy does not exist in the contemporary American theatre. If that were the case, however, no pages would follow, but since they do, tragedies do exist. When the progression is reversed, the approach to them emerges. Instead of evaluating all dramas that aspire to inclusion in the art form according to their conformity to the Aristotelian model, those that want to be appreciated for the conformity should be while those that do not should be appreciated for their new models. The study therefore does not offer a definition of tragedy. It examines the contemporary American theatre’s creation of tragedies that do not put audiences to sleep. The first two chapters divide plays whose experiences are thought of as tragic into four categories depending on their primary focus: isolation, loss of life, loss of hope, and suffering. Although suffering is found in all four categories, in the fourth category it either dominates the action or is the image that overwhelms all of the play’s other images. Since a reader accustomed to traditional tragedies might not engage in the appreciation if thrust into the categories, each opens with a contemporary American reimagining of a Greek, Elizabethan, or Jacobean tragedy. Not a transplanting in another age such as Shakespeare’s Richard III as a 1930s fascist dictator but a reimagining. The engaged reader can then begin to question whether all or some of the plays, six to a category, are tragedies.

Chapter One

Isolation and Loss of Life

In the introduction to a volume of three of his plays, A.R. Gurney looks back over his career as a playwright “both testing and celebrating the borders of the form.” He then applies the testing and celebrating to the three plays in the volume, the first of which opens this study’s examination of the category of isolation: “In Another Antigone, I try to work with and against the great Greek tragedy.” 1 Sophocles’ Antigone opens with a prologos in which Antigone informs her sister Ismene that with the invading army no longer a threat to Thebes, the ruler Creon has issued an edict involving their brothers, both of whom died in the combat. Eteocles is to be buried with “full honor,” but Polyneices’ corpse is to remain “unwept, untombed.” 2 Furthermore, she intends to defy the edict and bury Polyneices despite Creon’s decree that anyone attempting a burial will be put to death. Following the chorus’ entrance in a parados, Creon enters to explain the edict. Eteocles died defending Thebes while Polyneices died leading the invading army. When a guard enters with the news that someone is attempting to bury the body, Creon orders him to apprehend the culprit or suffer the death penalty himself. When the guard leaves, the chorus sings the play’s first great choral ode, followed by the guard returning with Antigone to bring her to a confrontation with Creon. Gurney’s Another Antigone opens on a confrontation in a university Classics professor’s office between the professor, Henry, and a student, Judy, in his Greek Tragedy course. He cannot accept the term paper she wrote applying the Antigone myth to the nuclear arms race because it is not on an assigned topic, and she failed to get his permission to submit a paper on another topic. As they argue their positions, they agree that Sophocles’ Antigone is the “classic rebel,” his Creon the “ultimate image of uncompromising political authority,” and their clash “inevitable and tragic” (104) but little else 1

2

Chapter 1

so that their intransigence makes her another Antigone and him another Creon. She needs credit in his course to graduate because she has a job waiting for her in a tough job market; he is sympathetic, but the paper does not meet the course’s requirement. If he will accept a dramatized version, she will convert the paper into a play; he cannot accept that either because she fails to understand the course’s subject: the nature of tragedy. The confrontation and scene end with her determined to put the “play on” (108). Another Antigone has a scene with the Sophoclean great choral ode, but it occurs later in the play. Since Gurney eliminates Ismene, the guard, and the chorus, one has to ask what he does in the scenes between the opening and the ode. Among other things, he tests the form. In one scene, for example, he has a character for whom Antigone has no counterpart, a dean, Diana, come to Henry’s office and light a cigarette, prompting a discussion of the dangers to one’s health that smoking poses. Just when it seems that Gurney is stretching the form to the breaking point, he relaxes the stretching to return to the reimagined play’s action: the risk to Henry’s career that not accepting Judy’s paper poses. Since his courses traditionally are not well attended because few students major in Classics, he risks having them canceled for lack of enrollment if he persists in alienating Judy and other students by not relaxing his requirements. He persists. Meanwhile, rather than submit a new paper on an assigned topic, Judy enlists her boyfriend, Dave, a counterpart to the Sophoclean heroine’s fiancé, in helping her mount the play adaptation of her paper. Locked into their intransigence, the two antagonists bring Another Antigone to the choral ode. By now it should be obvious that unlike the classical play, the contemporary play has comedy. But it also has tragedy foreshadowed in the choral ode. Analyzing the ode as it was originally performed, Raymond Williams finds in three of the closing lines that the “intensity of the dramatic feelings is almost overpowering”: When he honours the laws of the land and the gods’ sworn right High indeed is his city; but stateless the man Who dares to dwell with dishonour. 3

The feelings are overpowering because while singing the lines, the chorus members gesture casting out of the polis the culprit who violates the laws, and as they do, in disbelief they are forced to recognize Antigone, whom the guard is bringing to Creon. Admitting her role in the attempted burial, she justifies it by honoring the “gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws” (454), such as duty to one’s family and reverence for the dead, that take precedence over man’s laws. Creon is equally unrelenting in his position. She must die. The contemporary delivery is not comic, but it is more easygoing than the original until it approaches the closing lines. In the classroom Henry translates portions of the ode. To show that he is aware of the feminist movement,

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3

he adds “woman” to “‘Man,’” and to further show that he is not stodgy, he adds “planes, rockets, computers, laser beams” to the “images on the taming of nature: ships, plows, fishnets, ox-yokes.” Approaching the closing lines, he pauses to comment on the line naming death as the one thing that the human being cannot tame before resuming “grimly” with the something “worse than death” to the Greeks that is named in the three lines. If in pride he/she goes “‘too far,’” he/she becomes An exile without a country, Lost and alone Homeless and outlawed forever (131)

The feeling is not in a gesture. It is in Henry repeating more than once portions of the three lines. He does not have to know that exile is his fate, but already warned about the university canceling underenrolled courses, he must be imagining a life apart from the university and the career to which he has dedicated his life, for his translation confines the original “stateless” to the first line while expanding the feeling of isolation to the second and third lines. As somber as this scene is, Gurney continues to test the form by mixing the characters in witty interactions with the sense of impending isolation in scenes that dissolve into scenes so that no matter how far a scene strays from the original, the next scene recalls the original, although in contemporary terms. In Antigone the heroine’s lover Haemon urges his father Creon to relent and not punish his betrothed for an act that was glorious. In Another Antigone Dave submits a paper he wrote under Judy’s name hoping to earn credit for her so that she can graduate, but Henry recognizes the deception. Yet under questioning Dave impresses the professor with his knowledge of the classics, and unlike Haemon, he does not join the girl he loves in her stand but switches majors from Chemistry to Classics to study under Henry, not realizing the professor’s courses were canceled for insufficient enrollment, dissolving the Classics Department. If Henry took the year’s paid leave of absence the university offered him, he would not be a tragic hero. He is because he removes himself from the university community, explaining in his closing lecture what he always knew but has only come to understand this semester. Addressing the audience, he distills the essence of tragedy in the responsibility that tragic heroes accept, as Creon does for “his commitment to abstract and dehumanizing laws” (170) and he himself does by disappearing. Also addressing the audience, Judy accepts responsibility by not “feel[ing] good about” her “life anymore” (171) before declining to accept the award for her play because the play taught her that her former goals—personal ambition, success, and money— are not that important anymore.

4

Chapter 1

As somber as these monologues are, Another Antigone ends in a lighthearted mood, unlike Antigone, which ends with Haemon joining Antigone in death and his mother committing suicide when she learns of his suicide. Seeing his wife’s corpse after seeing the other two corpses, the stricken Creon orders his servants to “take me away, out of the sight of men. / I who am nothing more than nothing now” (1320-21). The closing lines belong to the chorus, who sing of the importance of wisdom in honoring the boundary separating mortals from the gods if one wants happiness in life. The proud, who do not honor the boundary, gain the wisdom in suffering when they are old. By urging restraint from Henry as opposed to exceeding his classroom authority, Dean Diana takes on the role of the chorus during the contemporary play. Paraphrasing the original closing lines for the dean, Dave becomes the chorus at the play’s end. When he tells her that by the time we gain wisdom, we are “too old for it to make much difference,” the last words are Diana’s in a play that tests and celebrates the classical form: “Then heaven help us all” (173). Henry’s lecture is tinged with a feeling of moral isolation because of his role in the affair with Judy’s term paper, but the play’s amusing ending deemphasizes the feeling and the tragedy. A play that emphasizes the moral isolation and the tragedy is the first of the three plays in Neil LaBute’s bash: iphigenia in orem, the place the Utah city in which the speaker resides, although the setting is a Las Vegas hotel, where he is on business and where he tells his tale to a stranger, a guest he encounters there. The allusion is to the Euripidean tragedy from which it takes its inspiration: Iphigenia in Aulis, the place the port where the Greek army has mobilized for the crossing of the Aegean Sea and the sack of Troy in retaliation for Paris’ wooing of Helen. But with the fleet becalmed, the army, wanting blood vengeance, becomes increasingly unruly. Told by the prophet Calchas that he, the commander-inchief, must sacrifice his daughter for Artemis to provide favoring wind, Agamemnon sends for Iphigenia on the pretext that she is to marry Achilles. He then attempts to rescind the summons only to have Menelaus intercept the dispatch. Too late to be stopped, she arrives with her mother Clytemnestra and her brother Orestes. Duplicitous, shameful, and despicable are some of the critics’ judgments on Agamemnon. Yet no matter what one thinks of him, he had no intention of killing his daughter when he took command of the expedition. Neither was there any intention of killing his five-month-old daughter when his wife and mother-in-law left him, the teller of the contemporary tale, alone in the house with her while they shopped. Identified as Young Man, he recounts the details of Emma’s death twice, the first time as an accident and the second time as murder. Between the two versions, he gives the circumstances that correct the first recounting, starting with the takeover of the company in whose branch office he worked. With all of the employees aware

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that four would be let go, he feared he would be the fourth, a fear that seemed to come true when just before his wife and mother-in-law left to shop, he received a phone call from a friend in the home office that he was in fact the fourth. Standing in the hallway, he heard the baby cry in their bed where his wife had put her and where she had become entangled in the covers. Instinctively he “rushed in there, to the edge of the carpet at the bedroom door and then,” he continues the second version, “something stopped me.” 4 In that split second, he realized that the situation afforded him an opportunity. No company would be so heartless as to let go a parent grieving for a dead child. After Menelaus intercepts the letter rescinding the summons to bring Iphigenia to Aulis, he and Agamemnon have a heated argument with Helen’s husband reminding his brother that he was under no compulsion to send the original letter but sent it willingly. For Agamemnon, however, his daughter’s arrival so changes the situation that he is now under a “compulsion absolute.” 5 He concedes that he has volition, but were he to flee with her back to Argos, the army would follow and raze the royal palace. He sums up his position in his final speech, spoken to Iphigenia: Greece lays upon me This sacrifice of you beyond all will Of mine. We are weak and of no account Before this fated thing (1270-72).

Like Agamemnon, LaBute’s Young Man has two versions to tell of the event, although the first version is not the deception that the Greek commander’s is, for his wife does not expose it. He himself does, beginning, “i wasn’t asleep…i couldn’t of been, i mean, i’ve tried to believe it, make myself believe it, too, but i wasn’t, or i never would’ve heard her” (25). Like Agamemnon, he accepts responsibility for the act, admitting, “i made my decision” (26). And like Agamemnon, he also attributes the girl’s death to “fate” (27). Were it not for fate that had his wife and mother-in-law dallying in the supermarket or caught in traffic, they might have arrived home in time to rescue Emma. Shifting responsibility to fate is the Young Man’s attempt to free himself from the consequence of his decision. Of Euripides’ characters, Agamemnon is the only one who does not come onstage after the sacrifice. Hence he feels remorse for an event that will take place rather than for one that took place. His remorse is genuine nonetheless. The Old Man dispatched with the rescinding letter asks why his eyes are “bulging” with tears (40); moved by “tears bursting” from his brother’s eyes (476), Menelaus retracts his condemnation of the rescinding letter; and Iphigenia cannot help but notice the “libation of tears” in her father’s eyes (650) upon her arrival at Aulis. LaBute’s Young Man also has remorse. He tells two versions of his story, the first one as his way of releasing to the surface the horrific one; he tells

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how he put a pillow over his head so that he would not hear Emma’s cries; and he tries unsuccessfully to put the blame on fate. The most telling details come at the tale’s end, however. Twice he says that he never liked being on the road but preferred working in the office until the end of his narrative when he revises his preference for “driving these days, you know? gives me a lot of time to just…well, drive, just drive and think” (29). Continuing, he explains that he normally does not even take a room. Yet as uncomfortable as he is in the company of others because he feels that his crime has made him an outcast, he has to unburden his gnawing conscience. Hence at a few places in his narrative, the Young Man reacts to the listener’s lack of interest. Early on he remarks, “looks like i’m losing you” (15), and about midway he promises to “be done” (22) by the time the listener has finished his drink. Yet with the tale finished, it is the listener who reacts. Asked to shut the light off on his way out while the speaker stays behind in the dark for “a bit,” he must show concern despite the other’s assurance that he will “be fine” because the Young Man has to repeat the assurance: “I’ll be…fine, I will” (30) before the stranger chosen to listen leaves. The repetition is evidence that the man who was Emma’s father is not fine. Euripides’ Iphigenia is not morally isolated, as is Sophocles’ Electra in one critic’s opinion. In the preface to his translation of the tragedy named for her, David Raeburn argues that by calling upon Orestes to strike their mother a second time and to expose Aegisthus’ corpse to dogs and birds, Electra with her brother is “destroyed morally as the drama progresses” 6 because Sophocles is exploring the tragic implications of retribution for both agents and victims. LaBute’s Young Man is also morally isolated, but physical isolation by itself can be tragic too. In his 1999 memoir, Neil Simon writes that Broadway Bound, the third play in his Brighton Beach Trilogy, “started with one image in my mind: my mother waxing her dining room table. It was a metaphor of all she would be left in a life that still needed her love and attention.… I knew that basically I was writing a tragedy, and that the laughs that came often during the evening were all bittersweet.” 7 The four members of the Jerome family that took the stage in the trilogy’s first play, Brighton Beach Memoirs, are alter egos for the four members of Simon’s family: the father, mother, brother, and himself. That play, which takes place in 1937, dramatizes the family unity during the Great Depression and Eugene’s discovery of himself as a writer. The third play, which takes place in 1949, dramatizes the widening rift between the parents following the father’s infidelity and the sons’ development as a comedy-writing team. With the father’s departure and the brothers’ imminent departure for a career in television writing, the grandfather, who lives with the family, says about his daughter Kate to her visiting sister Blanche, “If she can’t make dinner for somebody, her life is over.” 8

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By having Eugene encourage his mother to relive the evening thirty-five years earlier when she danced with George Raft so that she will have a happy memory to sustain her, Simon converts the tragedy to comedy. Even without the relived scene, however, seeing Broadway Bound as Kate’s tragedy is difficult because her father will continue living in the house until he moves to Florida; her sister, remarried, who lives in Manhattan will visit as will her daughter, Kate’s niece, with her children; and her sons, although moving from the Brooklyn home to Manhattan, will visit. The closing visual image confirms the comedy. It is not Kate alone but Eugene running to join his brother in the cab taking them to Manhattan and a career in television writing. The closing visual image of Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories is that of an older woman isolated in her Greenwich Village apartment. A published author of short stories and professor of Creative Writing, Ruth accepts Lisa as her graduate assistant because she shows promise and wants to learn from the established author’s constructive criticism. Their relationship is mutually beneficial. Lisa has a story published and fills Ruth’s need to be connected to the world from which she tends to absent herself. Answering the younger woman’s question about why she teaches, she says, “It gets me talking about what I do—hell, it gets me talking, period. Otherwise I’d be alone far too much, and remain silent far too much, and I’m alone enough as it is.” 9 As their relationship blossoms, Lisa has a collection of stories published, and Ruth becomes less silent, sharing not only her writing with Lisa, whom she comes to think of as a colleague, but also her life, particularly the time when a twenty-two-year-old new to New York, she ministered to the aging, dissipated poet, Delmore Schwartz. She therefore reacts angrily to Lisa taking the Schwartz story, changing names and details, and making it the basis for her first novel. The final scene has the two women heatedly presenting their opposing points of view. For Ruth, Lisa crossed the line separating moral and immoral behavior by appropriating her life. Lisa counters that she was only doing what her mentor had taught her: to take inspiration where she finds it. But Ruth will have none of her former student’s defense that for her is specious. Accusing her of betraying a trust, she severs the relationship. The 1999 production of Collected Stories with Uta Hagen and Lorca Simons had an unforgettable closing image. The sole light, progressively narrowing, focused on Hagen seated at her desk on the far side of the stage from the door through which Simons exited, her back to the departing student, until the light went out, leaving her “alone” in her apartment (85). Although not an absolute criterion, a closing image can indicate a play’s genre regardless of how the playwright classifies it or does not classify it. A play that based on reviews would seem to be an unlikely candidate for consideration in the tragedy genre is Gurney’s Later Life. A review excerpted

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on the book’s back cover is by Frank Rich for the New York Times: “‘Mr. Gurney strips down his reticent WASPs to the sound of laughter, not sentimental stirrings. Later Life is no exception, offering more than a few lines worthy of New Yorker cartoon captions.’” The play opens on the terrace of an apartment overlooking Boston Harbor. To it Sally, the hostess of a party within the apartment, brings Austin, a conservatively dressed, middle-aged man, telling him that it is time he “took a chance.” 10 When she returns, she brings with her Ruth, who remembers Austin, though he does not remember her. Yet left alone except for other party guests who wander in and out of the terrace, with clues Ruth supplies he begins to remember their meeting on Capri when he was a young naval officer fresh out of college and she was touring Italy with her college sorority sisters. Separated from her husband in Las Vegas and visiting a female friend who wants her to relocate to Boston, she is interested in moving especially now that she has reunited with Austin, who so impressed her on Capri that she never forgot him. The challenge for him is whether he can change his conservative ways dramatized not only in his interaction with her but with the guests who wander in and out of the terrace, all of whom are foils for the two principals. For example, the McAlisters are a couple whose company transferred him to Boston and who feel rejuvenated by the change, becoming involved in the city’s cultural and social life. They invite the two to join them at a highway nightclub where they can perform the “old kind of dancing” and “some new moves” too that they have learned (54). Ruth defers to Austin, who declines the invitation. Entrenched in his WASP ways, he reveals his attitude toward change in the course of the evening. Although opposed to plans to develop Boston Harbor into a theme park, he absents himself from becoming involved in any community protest against the development. With Ruth in the apartment answering a phone call, his friend Walt urges him to seize the opportunity she offers him. He objects to the urgency: “I am a divorced man, Walt! I am a father of two grown children! I’ll be a grandfather any day! At our age we don’t just…date people, Walt. We don’t just idly fool around” (73-74). He sums up his position to the hostess: “People don’t change, Sally. Not at our age. We are who we are, only more so” (83). Austin is not unresponsive to Ruth; if he were, there would be no drama. Learning that the phone call was from her husband, who tracked her to Boston and seeking a reconciliation proposes to meet her with champagne at the airport, he makes a counter proposal. First, though, he dismisses her argument that despite hitting her once, her husband loves her because love and violence are mutually exclusive. His proposal is that after they have champagne in a Boston bar, she spend the night in the guest room in his apartment. Of course, should she wish to join him in his bed, he would welcome her. She declines the invitation. The essence of civility, it is devoid

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of her husband’s passion. Ruth leaves, and Later Life ends with Austin alone on the terrace clutching the sweater she left behind in her haste to leave. Gurney prepares for the closing image by alluding to a Henry James novella that he identifies in the introduction, although a theatregoer familiar with James’ fiction would recognize the allusion to The Beast in the Jungle. Convinced as a young man that something is to happen to him, John Marcher waits and broods, turning over the possibilities in his mind. He does not wait alone. The tale’s other character is May Bartram. Smitten years earlier when at a meeting he told her the secret of his fate and meeting again in the present, she chooses to watch with him. The drama contains an occasional echo of the earlier work. In coaxing Austin’s memory, Ruth discloses that at their Capri meeting he confided his conviction that “something terrible was going to happen” to him in his life (40). In the Jamesian counterpart scene, May reminds Marcher of his confidence at their Naples meeting that he was “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen” to him. 11 Yet while similar to each other, the women are also different from each other. May, for example, lets her association with Marcher “give shape and colour to her own existence” (368). Ruth is not dependent on Austin. Despite suffering terrible losses, the death of her first husband after only seven days of marriage and the death of her only child by a second husband, she married twice more, to the same man. He hit her and squanders her money, but with him she has a bonding and a love that Austin is incapable of giving her. Austin is also different from Marcher. Only after May dies does Marcher realize what May came to realize during the years they watched and waited. The momentous something had already happened. Life had passed him by. He has the realization while visiting her grave, where he chances upon a mourner at another grave who when he passes presents him with a face ravaged by grief. In this mirror image, Marcher sees the lack of passion in himself. His consciousness awakened to the knowledge of pain, suffering, and lost opportunity, he flings himself onto May’s tomb. There is a character who cries in Later Life, and his experience is another way Gurney prepares for the closing image of the drama’s protagonist. While Austin was following Sally’s instruction to wait until she returned, a guest named Jim identified himself as “an outcast, a pariah, a scapegoat” (13) for continuing to smoke in an age when people are quitting for health reasons. Tonight, he proudly announces, he too will kick the habit. At play’s end Jim returns to the terrace smoking. He was doing fine, he tells Austin, until the other guests started singing old songs, one of which reminded him of his former partner. The memory more than he could bear, he instinctively reached for a cigarette and then starts crying. Austin stares at him, but whether he sees in Jim a mirror image the spectator has to decide. Sally, who came out onto the terrace moments earlier, speaks, repeating the key word “ter-

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rible” in his sense of his fate told to Ruth on Capri and repeated by her when she coaxed his memory. For Sally, what is “terrible” is not the crying but the inability to cry (86): to express one’s emotions. She and Jim return to the party, leaving Austin dry-eyed and alone on the terrace looking “longingly toward the life within” the apartment (86). He is doubly isolated: from communal life and his emotions, and the longing while clutching Ruth’s sweater indicates his recognition of the loss. In the introduction to the play, Gurney writes about the protagonist that “for the second time in his life, he is given a chance to take a new step, by reaching out to Ruth. Once again he is unable to. His proposal to her is ultimately civilized, but also ultimately lifeless. At the end of the play, he stands like a ghost, outside the human community, clutching a forgotten sweater.… I find Austin’s predicament infinitely sad—a man encumbered by so much baggage from the past that he is unable to seize life, even when it presents itself to him in such an enticing way” (x-xi). Eagleton opens the first chapter of Sweet Violence comparing and contrasting tragedy and very sad, concluding that in the quest for a universally accepted definition of tragedy, “the truth is that no definition of tragedy more elaborate than ‘very sad’ has ever worked.” 12 Gurney’s “infinitely sad” would seem to be sadder than “‘very sad,’” but the study does not know whether by “infinitely sad,” Gurney means a notch below tragedy or tragedy itself. Either way, the examination of Later Life should make the play worthy of consideration for inclusion in the genre. This category ends with a play whose closing scene has the protagonist crying: “Why can’t anyone understand this…that I am alone…all…alone!” 13 The play is Edward Albee’s The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?; its subtitle is (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy). In response to a comment about the subtitle, Albee qualified it as “not part of the title—it’s a parenthetical comment” and “a definition. Not the definition or a redefinition.” 14 This study, however, does not consider The Goat a tragedy because it has a fatal flaw. Martin, an award-winning architect, is being interviewed in his apartment on his fiftieth birthday by an old friend, Ross, to whom he confides that he has fallen in love with Sylvia, a goat. Ross writes a letter to Martin’s wife Stevie, who demands an explanation from her husband for the transgression. A tragedy that features a goat invokes the scapegoat or pharmakos: the person who in being expelled from the community takes with him or her the pollution plaguing the community, thereby ridding it of disorder and renewing order. 15 Oedipus is a pharmakos in Greek tragedy. Francis Fergusson identifies the action of Sophocles’ play as the “quest for Laius’ slayer. That is the over-all aim which informs it—‘to find the culprit in order to purify human life,’ as it may be put.” 16 If Martin is a contemporary American pharmakos, the situation in Albee’s play is different from that of Sophocles’ play. No one has been slain, and no pollution has to be purified. The world

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outside the play’s upscale apartment must have horrors such as poverty and disease, war and genocide, but the world inside the apartment ignores them. A single undeveloped allusion to the “Eumenides” (12) does not conjure a disorder in the apartment’s perfect world. The scapegoat cannot be the disorder brought into the order just so it can be expelled. John Simon points the way to the contemporary play’s action. Reviewing the 2002 production with Bill Pullman as Martin and Mercedes Ruehl as Stevie, he wrote, “One problem with the play is that it makes no sense. Martin, a famous and happily married architect, tolerant of his teenage son’s homosexuality, has just turned 50. While shopping for a farm in upstate New York, he sees a goat making googoo eyes at him, falls in love with her (it’s a she-goat, nothing queer about Martin), has an affair with her, and names her Sylvia.” Responding to an overheard spectator’s opinion that the experience is a metaphor, he continued, “Now, for a metaphor to work, it must first function on the literal level, but one melting caprine glance does not usually induce zoophilia in a 50-year-old enjoying good sex with his attractive wife.” 17 Thus the action is the quest to understand the experience. Pursuing why it happened is a false start. Since Martin professes to love Stevie, to whom he has never been unfaithful or had any desire to be, the marriage contains no hint of a reason. That he is at the “pinnacle of…success” (14) suggests a comparison with Oedipus, but seeking an explanation in the success ends in speculation. The quest has to be in what happened. His erotic nature stimulated, Ross tries to coax from Martin explicit details of his first encounter with Sylvia, presumed to be a woman, while house-hunting in upstate New York. To the question, “Well, did you talk to her?” the architect “laugh[s].” He does not laugh, however, at the characterization of the relationship as an “affair.” His reaction is to be “confused,” for affair implies a sordid extramarital infidelity, and he loves both Sylvia and Stevie and tried unsuccessfully to tell his wife about the other one. Three times he protests that the television journalist “does not understand.” Ross interrupts his fourth attempt after staring at the photo Martin shows him. Now it is his turn to be confused: “YOU’RE FUCKING A GOAT!” (21-23) What the first of the play’s three scenes does is set up the contrast between Martin’s experience and the three other characters’ perceptions of it. We have to return momentarily to the question of why: not why Martin had the experience but why he tells Ross, since he does not have the condition known as zoophilia. He is not like the Young Man in LaBute’s iphigenia in orem, who, feeling morally isolated, tries to unburden his guilt by telling his story to a stranger. Martin does not feel morally isolated. As he tries to explain to Stevie, he attended therapy sessions for people with zoophilia not because he “realized something was wrong” with him but because he “realized people would think something was wrong” (32). Furthermore, while the

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other attendees were “conflicted,” he could not understand why they were “unhappy.” Seeing nothing “wrong with…with…being in love…like that,” he was not unhappy (34). Neither does he think of the experience as an accomplishment—a sexual conquest, for example—for although he admits to the experience’s sexual dimension, he does not think of it as primarily sexual. To the other three characters, the experience is exclusively sexual for reasons that they reveal in the three scenes. No stranger to infidelity, Ross was cheating on his wife before Martin and Stevie were married. No moralist, he accepts infidelity so long as one can “get away with” it (53). The problem with the affair, he tells the architect, is that inevitably someone will catch him with the goat and then everyone will know because the someone will go public with the story, ruining his career and the careers of his circle of friends and associates, including himself. He, television journalist Ross, will be destroyed. Son Billy is already marginalized because he is gay. But being marginalized for his sexual orientation is nothing compared to the humiliation he will suffer when he has to stand in front of his class at school with the story public. These two characters relate their perceptions to their self-images in the public world. Stevie’s perception is private, her self-image formed by her love for her husband. As she says to him, “I fell in love with you? No…I rose into love with you and have—what—cherished? you, all these years, been proud of all you’ve done…and I’ve been…so…happy” (37). That he can therefore say that he loves both her and Sylvia equally when the goat is “so much less” (25) is more than she can bear. Since he has desecrated their marriage, she leaves the apartment vowing revenge. She kills Sylvia. A guide sees in the slaying tragedy’s ritual sacrifice: “In this play, subtitled ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Tragedy,’ the choice of goat as a love object and ultimately sacrificial animal contains mythic and tragic resonance: there is a sense of inevitability in Stevie’s revenge, and a feeling of catharsis when the innocent beast is sacrificed creating the potential for renewal.” 18 Yet bringing a goat into a happy marriage to make the wife unhappy so that she can kill the goat to renew the marriage makes no sense. Miguel de Unamuno offers a definition of tragedy that may help to make sense of The Goat: “For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.” 19 Wallace’s encapsulation of the definition, which she quotes, as the “opposition between experience and understanding” works for The Goat. 20 The opening scene establishes a contrast between Martin’s experience and Ross’ perception of it as a perversion. As the action develops, the contrast widens to a gap separating Martin’s claim from the other two characters’ perceptions of a perversion, which widens the gap separating Martin’s at-

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tempt to communicate and the others’ understanding or lack of it. Now we can understand why he told Ross in the first place. He wants to share with the others, but to mediate between them and the immediate experience that is irrational, he has to rely on rational language. The attempt fails. Unable to get his friend to understand, he knows that his wife, who has read Ross’ letter by the time scene 2 opens, “won’t understand” (28), a conviction repeated more than once until it is not only she who cannot but “nobody understands” (39). Regretting that he tried to tell her before the interview and that he told Ross during the interview, he nevertheless has to keep trying because she demands an explanation, even to blocking him from leaving the room. At the scene’s end, she is the one who leaves. If Sylvia is a naturalistic ruminant mammal and nothing more, Ross is right in telling his friend that he needs professional help, for the experience falls under the purview of a psychiatrist, where the other two characters also put it. For Martin, however, the experience is religious: “And there was a connection there—a communication—that, well…an epiphany, I guess comes closest” (40) is his attempted clarification. If Sylvia is a deity in theriomorphic form, and she should be ambiguous, leaving open the possibility that she is other than a naturalistic ruminant mammal, Martin would have a problem attempting to get others to understand. But he should be changed by the experience. Not being changed is the play’s fatal flaw. No wonder no one understands him even with him crying about being “alone” (54). In the first scene, the sole difference in the architect’s behavior as witnessed by Stevie and Ross is his distraction in not remembering where he put the new razor head or the name of Ross’ son. He and Stevie joke about the distraction, and Ross, who has interviewed him on other occasions, is accustomed to his fluctuating behavior. In the second and third scenes, he is so insouciant that he is impervious to Stevie’s suffering. Before Billy leaves the room, he revises a sentence to clarify his meaning; archly adds “Of comfort and joy?” to Stevie’s reading of the word “‘tidings’” in Ross’ letter and “Poor Dad?” to Billy’s “Oh, Dad!” thereby forming part of the title of Arthur Kopit’s absurdist play (25); breaks down the word “haberdasher” (30) into its two components; and picking up on his wife’s disgust, asks whether he should scar her before or after vomiting on her. To Billy’s remark upon arriving home and surveying the damage his mother wrought that “You guys really had it out, hunh,” he is “almost laughing” as he agrees (44). He also corrects his son for mixing metaphors. Simon’s criticism—that regardless of what happened in the country or what is happening in the apartment, the characters are detached enough to “continually and gratuitously correct one another’s grammar and metaphors” 21 —cannot be ignored. Martin’s insouciance and obsession with correct English detract from his claim to an encounter that drew him across a naturalistic boundary yet has done nothing more lasting than to leave a lin-

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gering caprine odor on his person. Martin changes only when Stevie kills Sylvia, but now the scapegoat’s function is curing his insouciance, and that is applying the tragic genre to a situation or condition that does not warrant it. LaBute’s iphigenia in orem, which takes its inspiration from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, was the second play in the first category. Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia in Aulis is the first in the study’s second category: loss of life. Also the first play in a trilogy, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, it, however, reimagines the classical tragedy rather than takes inspiration from it, and the reimagination is stark. The Euripidean tragedy has eight speaking roles. Between Iphigenia learning that she was brought to the seaport to be sacrificed to Artemis so that the becalmed fleet can sail and her resolution to die to save Greece from dishonor for not punishing Troy, she and four other roles speak approximately 160 lines. Between her resolution and the chorus’ final passage, she and three other roles speak approximately 160 lines, and those lines do not include the spurious ending. Her closing lines tell Clytemnestra not to weep, invite the chorus to join her in a paean to Artemis, and bid farewell to life. McLaughlin’s tragedy has two speaking roles, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra, and they do not speak to each other. The passages are alternating interior monologues spoken in the 1995 Classic Stage Company production by the actress playing Iphigenia seated on a chair facing the audience in a performance space designed as a rocky coastline and the actress playing Clytemnestra pacing behind her. While Iphigenia takes in the bleak landscape, Clytemnestra recalls the journey to Aulis. The daughter does not know what to make of the men staring at her; the mother is annoyed that her future son-inlaw, Achilles, has failed to make an appearance. Aware of her parents thrashing at each other, Iphigenia is increasingly disturbed by the staring while an increasingly agitated Clytemnestra begins to pant. In the closing visual and verbal images, the girl rises from the chair in order to ascend the slope to the cliff where hooded figures await her. Wondering where the sacrificial animals are, she suddenly realizes why she was brought to Aulis. Iphigenia is the first of the three heroines in McLaughlin’s trilogy that reimagines two Euripidean tragedies and one Sophoclean tragedy. The next two heroines suffer more than she does, but they will the suffering to gain recognition not so much for Greece but for their place in history. There is a ritual in A Shayna Maidel, but it is not a ritual slaying. It is a ritual reading of the names of family members, nuclear and extended, who perished in the Holocaust’s death camps. In the playwright’s notes, however, Barbara Lebow writes that the “action of the play occurs before and after time lived in the camps. It is important that any references to life and death in the camps be filled in by the audience. There should be no visual or auditory images suggesting a concentration camp. Any temptation to play tragedy, sentiment, or melodrama, must be avoided at all costs.” 22 She does not deny

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the tragedy. It was real, but with the Holocaust behind the characters, A Shayna Maidel dramatizes the recovery of life from the tragedy. Scene 1 is the play in epitome. In a Polish shtetl in 1876, with the husband praying, a mother and a midwife assist the daughter and wife in the birth of a son, Mordechai Weiss, as silently as possible to avoid detection by galloping Cossacks. In scene 2 Mordechai, now seventy, refers to the family’s ability to survive the campaigns by Cossacks and Hitler “to wipe out everybody” (9). The difference between the two enemies of the Jews is that Hitler’s campaign was systematic. Hence the gap between scene 1 and scene 2 is the loss of the family members—its tragedy—but not its annihilation because scene 2, which takes place in New York in 1946, opens with Mordechai, who lives with relatives in Brooklyn, bringing the news to his daughter Rose, who has an apartment in Manhattan, that her older sister Lusia survived a camp and will join them in a few weeks. Although happy to hear the news, Rose tries to talk him out of his insistence that Lusia live with her while being nursed back to health. The apartment with only one bedroom is too small, for example, but Mordechai tells her to sleep on the sofa. Her final objection—“We don’t know each other. We’re strangers”—provokes his rebuke. “Shvesters!” he yells at her before leaving (11). The two women are sisters, but Rose was four when she and her father immigrated to America, leaving behind Lusia, who had contracted scarlet fever and could not travel, and Mama, who stayed with her. The scene ends with Mama’s voice singing a Yiddish lullaby: a trace of the life that once filled the gap. The recovery of that life is progressive and dramatized in different ways. The sisters interact in a small apartment with Lusia, who speaks mostly oldworld Yiddish, learning the language and creature comforts like bubble bath of new-world America. Since Rose has no memories of Poland, the focus is on Lusia retrieving in two forms of mental activity. A fantasy projects life in the past such as snuggling against her husband Duvid into the future. A memory relives life in the past. The fantasy with Duvid dissolves into a nightmare in which she cries for her mother and her and Duvid’s daughter, both of whom did not survive. Gradually, though, the memories become pleasant such as the scene in which she and her girlfriend Hanna, having taken without permission pieces of cake that Mama baked, talk about boys. Lusia also gradually tells Rose about life in Poland until the deportation to the death camps. Act 1 ends with two culminating scenes. In the first in answer to Mordechai reading from his list the names of family members whose fate is unknown to him, Lusia reads from her list the years and camps in which they died. The second fuses Lusia’s memory of Duvid being romantic despite her concern that her mother would come upon them embracing with her fantasy of him being romantic despite her concern that her father and sister will come upon them embracing. The act’s final image is therefore

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of a smiling Lusia telling Rose that she is “remembering…something…that is gonna happen” (41). With memory the initial vehicle for recovering the life in the gap, the play prepares for the recovery by establishing the first of Mama’s sacrifices. In 1928 when the four family members were set to sail to America and Lusia contracted scarlet fever, Mama stayed behind believing that when Lusia recovered, she and her daughter would sail. Neither she nor her husband could have foreseen that by the time he had the money to send the fare, Hitler would be in power and genocide underway. Nevertheless, Mama could have sailed, leaving Lusia with relatives until she recovered and could sail with other families. The above history Rose learned from her father and the Brooklyn relatives, for she admits to her sister that she remembers nothing of their mother. Lusia does remember in act-1 scenes that progress after the nightmare. On her first night in Rose’s apartment, Lusia’s cries awaken her sister. Although it is difficult for a non-Yiddish-speaking audience to recognize each sound, and the sounds become a “continuous wail,” any audience can hear in “Nein” and “Ma-maaaa!” (19-20) that she is reliving the last time she saw her mother and daughter alive. Subsequent scenes dramatize Mama holding her half of the family together in Poland and even more important getting Lusia to understand that though she has been separated from her father and sister for years, the four of them are still a family. The understanding is important because Lusia confides in her friend Hanna that she does not remember her father. Hence when she blames him for not doing more to get them to America, Mama reproaches her: “Your own father?” (37) Lusia’s presence in the apartment and her memory of life and death in Poland so impact on Rose that she begins to recover the past. Lebow dramatizes the recovery in an act 2 that repeats act 1 but differently. Act-1’s first scene in 1946 had Rose hearing Mama’s lullaby; act-2’s first scene in 1946 has her hearing a child’s voice crying “‘Mama’” (45). The implication is that she is the child crying for her mother. There follows a scene not involving Rose but that also repeats a scene in act 1 in such a way that it may revise the interpretation of the earlier scene. Lusia relives her and Hanna’s liberation from the death camp. Disoriented, they disagree where to go with Lusia holding back on entering a house that German soldiers occupied. As Hanna reminds her that her mother and daughter were not frightened when deported, Lusia tells her to “Stop!” because not only does she not want to remember but also because she wants “to be cold like the dead ones” (48). Now it is Hanna’s turn to stop her friend, telling her in effect that she must live. Hanna was prophetic because she died shortly thereafter from typhus contracted in the camp. In act-1’s nightmare, Lusia relived a scene in which voices call “Nein” and “Ma-maaaa!” while she is begging to go with her mother and daughter. If the voice calling “Nein” is not Lusia’s, and it would not have

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been that of a German rounding up Jews for deportation, it could have been that of Mama telling her daughter that though they are separated, she has to keep the family alive. The revised interpretation may overstate Mama’s role in the relived scene, but even so, not sailing with Mordechai and Rose was not her sole sacrifice. Mordechai arrives with family photos for his daughters and a package containing letters from Mama delivered to him by a Polish countess, a non-Jew friendly with his wife who with other non-Jews opposed to Hitler left Poland. As he mentions the letters, Lusia relives another scene in which she pleads with her mother to go with the countess, who had space for her, but Mama refuses because she cannot abandon her with a child, her granddaughter, and without Duvid, who had been arrested. Staying, she lost her life. Repeating act 1 but differently, act 2 also ends with two culminating scenes. Along with a letter to Mordechai and Lusia’s graduation and wedding photos is a letter to Rose with her baby spoon that Lusia reads. The first culminating scene contrasts with the act-1 scene in which Rose was “tearful and angry” (13) knowing that she had to share her apartment with a sister she had not seen in almost twenty years. After her father and sister leave the apartment, alone Rose intones “Mama!” (61) and then draws a number on her left forearm, mimicking the camp number on her sister’s arm. In act 1 Rose remarked to Lusia on the irony in the younger sister caring for her older sister. When Lusia, who became a surrogate for their mother by reading the letter written to her younger daughter, returns to the apartment and sees what her sister did to her arm, she takes her in her arms “cradling her, comforting her, stroking her hair” (62). She becomes Mama as Rose is transported in her memory and imagination to a reunion with her mother. The second culminating scene, which ends the play, is as simple as it is powerful. Earlier in act 2 Lusia confronted her father for failing to bring her and Mama to America. He is quick to defend himself. There was no money to send for the passage during the Depression, and by the time he had it, Jews were not allowed to leave. He is guilty for putting principle over life, refusing to borrow money for the passage, and he knows he is guilty. Yet he redeems himself when in showing his daughters the photo of their mother at age sixteen that he carries in his vest pocket, he speaks these words: “A shayna maidel,” which translates as “A pretty girl” (60). He never stopped loving her. Now reunited with Duvid, who survived and followed her to America, Lusia imagines their wedding with all the family present had there been no death camps. Since there was a Holocaust, however, reality replaces fantasy. But reality is positive, recovering what can be recovered from what was lost in the death between act-1’s scenes 1 and 2. To Mordechai and Rose, she introduces her husband: “Duvid…I want you should meet…mine family” (66). Thus A Shayna Maidel is life affirming, for although memory is

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a curse in that it retains tragedy’s suffering, it is also a blessing in that it retains tragedy’s sacrifices, and sacrifices keep alive the hope of renewed life. David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole has a family divided as the result of a tragedy, and that is only one similarity it has with Lebow’s play. Calling his play “sad,” he advises the director and cast to avoid “sentimentality” 23 : the “sentiment” or excess of feeling that Lebow ordered to be avoided. In place of excess, his play creates, in Brantley’s review, an “anatomy of grief.” 24 The anatomy does not begin by denying the tragedy, although a theatregoer who had not read any reviews might conclude from the opening scene that Rabbit Hole was a comedy. On a Saturday afternoon, two sisters, Becca in her late thirties and Izzy in her early thirties, are in the former’s kitchen where Izzy tells a story so convoluted about being forced to hit a woman in a bar who became confrontational that only when a confused Becca forces her to clarify certain details does the truth come out. The woman accosted her because she is carrying the child of the boyfriend with whom the woman was ending her relationship. Another truth does not come out. At one point Becca interrupts the story to accuse her sister of using “him” (8) to justify her barroom behavior, an accusation Izzy rejects. The person’s identity, and it cannot be the boyfriend, is not clarified. Izzy does refer to a Danny in relation to the clothes Becca is folding and has offered to her pregnant sister rather than give them to Goodwill, the reason she is folding them, but as the sisters maneuver through this momentary awkwardness, they realize that having someone else wear Danny’s clothes would be “weird” (12). What is clarified by scene’s end is the unspoken agreement between the two not to deny the second truth but not to bring it out in open discussion either. Scene 2 identifies Danny as the child of Becca and her husband Howie but not details about him because the scene identifies the reason why they, like Becca and Izzy, dodge bringing the details into open discussion. Danny is dead, but his parents do not mention the death. Talking instead about the death’s effect on them, they identify the play’s action as their struggle to deal with their grief. After an eight-month abstinence, Howie would like to try intimacy again, but Becca is not ready. Neither is she receptive to his proposal that she return to the support group. Her proposal that they sell the house because no matter where she looks, she sees reminders of their son receives his rejection. Needing reminders, he watches a video in which he and Danny are playing a game as the scene ends with a sinister image. Becca retires to the bedroom before Howie puts on the video. Hearing the sound, she in the form of her shadow appears at the top of the stairs before retreating, unable to join her husband. The struggle threatens their marriage. A scene intervenes before the next scene with the couple. A birthday party for Izzy, it provides laughter, which as Lindsay-Abaire explains is “important” to prevent the play from becoming “pretty much unbearable”

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(64). The scene is important for another reason. It confirms what scene 2 established: the way in which Becca grieves. She resents her mother’s attempt to smuggle into the party a discussion of Danny’s death by talking about accidental deaths in famous families and Becca’s brother’s death. Despite the mother’s defense that she is only trying to comfort her older daughter, Becca tells her to stop the comparisons, and in so doing she gives the hitherto repressed details about Danny’s death. The four-year-old was hit by a car while chasing the family dog into the street. That detail releases in act-1’s final scene other repressed details in the parents’ grief, continuing the release begun in scene 2 of details that reveal the differences in the way they grieve: differences that threaten their marriage. Howie’s discovery that Becca inadvertently erased from the video the game he and Danny played triggers a series of accusations and recriminations of leaving the lawn gate unlatched and leaving the boy unattended to answer the phone: charges and countercharges immediately retracted and apologized for but nonetheless revealing the core of their differences. Howie accuses her of trying to get rid of all reminders of their dead son, and Becca accuses him of trying to get her to grieve as he does. Act 1 ends with him heading upstairs, leaving her alone in the living room. Act 1 ends differently from act-1’s end in A Shayna Maidel. In that play a smiling Lusia imagines a reunion with Duvid. In Rabbit Hole the couple are on the verge of separating were it not for other forces in their lives. In act-1’s final scene, Becca reads a letter from the teenager, Jason, who was driving the car that killed Danny. Ha ha’s punctuate his letter, but they are the seventeen-year-old’s attempt to express his condolence, an attempt Gionfriddo’s Justin, who is the same age, does not make, the difference being that Lindsay-Abaire’s teenager turns inward before turning outward in writing the letter. Sister Izzy and mother Nat stop by on a regular basis but only manage to irritate Becca. The testiness lessens, however, as she packs a box of Danny’s toys for pregnant Izzy’s baby and types a recipe her sister can prepare now that she is moving in with the father. The testiness lessens with Nat when in deciding what of Danny’s things to keep and what to give away, she allows her mother to talk about her, Becca’s, brother’s death, a comfort she resisted in act 1. The couple have friends: Rick and Debbie, for example. Angry in act 1 that Debbie did not phone to express condolence, Becca relents in act 2 and phones her. Accepting an invitation, the two will join Rick, Debbie, and their kids at a cookout and while there wait for their friends “to bring up Danny” (61). Believing that he got all that he could from the support group, his recommended therapy for his wife, Howie stops attending. Rejecting her husband’s conception of therapy, Becca joins a continuing education class just to get out of the house and be with people not grieving. Even Jason contributes to the healing by visiting Becca and talking about his interest in the scientific notion of parallel universes, prompting her

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insight, “And so this is just the sad version of us” (57). Although LindsayAbaire warns against seeing in the final scene a traditional happy ending, Rabbit Hole closes with the couple holding hands, the implication being that together they can discover a version that is not sad. Although in the introduction to his 1992 play, Jeffrey, Paul Rudnick refers to the protagonist’s “justifiable despair” that “pursues him at every turn,” 25 the study includes the play in the category on loss of life rather than in the category on loss of hope. Visiting a friend dying of AIDS was the impetus for writing the play, the specter of death looms larger than that of despair for the characters, and one does die. The justifiable despair is that by engaging in sexual activity with an HIV-positive partner, the protagonist runs the risk of contracting the dreaded disease, for Jeffrey is a play about the AIDS plague attacking the gay community. Another reason for including Rudnick’s play here is that it completes a progression begun in A Shayna Maidel. Rose and Lusia share a laugh when Lusia relates how to her amazement a New York City policeman gave her directions in Yiddish. Rabbit Hole has in Lindsay-Abaire’s words “funny parts” (64) to keep the play from becoming unbearable. Jeffrey, however, reveals the playwright’s fascination with the “idea of exploring the place of laughter in tragic situations.” 26 In language and attitude, dress and behavior, each scene is more over the top than the preceding scene. For example, toward play’s end the action takes Jeffrey and his friends to the annual Gay Pride parade in New York’s Greenwich Village. Also present is a reporter from a television news channel who feels uncomfortable interviewing participants he perceives as weirdos but must cover the event if he wants to keep his job. Seeing what he thinks is a mother with her daughter, not recognizing that daughter Angelique is really son Anthony undergoing a gender change, he relaxes, concluding the interview by asking what the ladies plan to do after the parade. One of Jeffrey’s group, all of whom have crowded around the reporter to be on television, answers for the pair: “Angelique is going to remove her penis” (57). The hilarity begins in the opening scene when Jeffrey’s condom breaks while he is performing in bed with another man. He is identified only as Man #1 because Jeffrey is not in a committed relationship with a partner but is sexually active. Very sexually active is more accurate because compared to him “gay men who’ve had over five thousand sexual partners” are “shut-ins” or “wallflowers” (10). Another reason the other man is identified only by number is that as soon as he declines continuing with the condom broken, one by one five men identified only by number sit up in the bed “in the manner of clowns piling out of a tiny circus car” (8). They too decline because in a world in which the AIDS epidemic decimates those who engage in unsafe sex, the six numbered men either reject encounters or impose absurd conditions such as requiring daily medical reports or wearing Saran

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Wrap that rob the activity of pleasure. The bedroom scene, however, activates the play, for a rejected Jeffrey vows that since “sex wasn’t meant to be safe, or negotiated, or fatal” (11), he will abstain from it. In an interview Rudnick related how he and others visited a friend dying of AIDS in a hospital who “‘instead of facing the disease nobly’” 27 so complained about everything from the disease to the hospital staff that upon leaving, the group burst into laughter, giving him the idea for combining AIDS and laughter. To the impelling idea, he added the Aristophanic device in Lysistrata in which women withhold sex from their men until they stop waging war. Jeffrey’s abstinence upsets no one more than Steve, who, falling in love with him, keeps making overtures in wildly farcical scenes dramatizing the strange forms of expression sex can take. Yet the protagonist remains steadfast in his vow, although he finds himself falling in love with Steve. The turning point comes when a friend dies from the disease, and Jeffrey is made to understand that despite his suffering, the friend died happy because he had lived life to the fullest in the time he had. The play ends with Jeffrey committing himself to Steve, even though the latter is HIV positive and honest about the virus: “So—it doesn’t go away! It only gets worse!” (61) Characters in many plays realize that to live life to the fullest, they must take risks. These plays are not included in the study. Jeffrey is because of the connection Rudnick made in the interview when he acknowledged that the AIDS plague was the cause of the tragedy: “‘But my feeling was that if you give in to darkness and despair, somehow despair wins. If, instead, you can find hope and laughter in tragedy, it’s a victory’” (37). Jeffrey completes the three plays in another way too, not as a progression but as a unit in which tragedy even with its darkness and despair has the power to connect a family, partners, and lovers. It is so powerful that it can also make other connections, though not necessarily with other people, as in the next play. A line in the 1976 publication’s front matter of a Milan Stitt play reads, “THE RUNNER STUMBLES was suggested by an actual turn of the century trial for the murder of a nun in Michigan,” 28 but although the play is set in April 1911, a theatre audience is not viewing a re-enactment of an actual trial or murder. The play is a fiction, a drama that Stitt created in which the tragedy develops from the action. Produced on Broadway in 1976, it was revived in a 2012 Off-Broadway production. The Runner Stumbles opens with a Roman Catholic priest awaiting trial for the death of a nun four and a half years earlier whose body was buried in the garden of the church in a remote Michigan parish to which he and then she were assigned. No mention is made of how long it took the authorities to discover the body. Townspeople may have thought Sister Rita was transferred; a fire in town commanded their attention the last night that anyone saw her; and that same night Father Rivard left the parish. He was arrested at

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some point while working on an assembly line in Detroit and brought back to the town to be defended by the peninsula’s lone lawyer, whom the circuit judge appointed to take the case. Scenes in the present have to do with Fr. Rivard in his cell or the courtroom. Scenes in the past have him and Sr. Rita interacting with each other and at times with the housekeeper, Mrs Shandig, or a parishioner. These flashbacks come haltingly at first because although the priest protests his innocence to his lawyer, he does not want to remember his relationship with the nun, which began awkwardly and deteriorated fairly rapidly. In their initial conversation, she senses that she angered him by speaking openly; he insists that he is not angry. When she bursts in upon him unannounced, he reminds her that the church’s other two nuns request permission to speak with him. She sees the school where she teaches as her “responsibility.” He sees her “life in Christ” as his “responsibility” (24). The relationship so deteriorates that act 1 closes with her slapping him and him slapping her before the two kneel to pray the rosary with Mrs Shandig, who enters unaware of the preceding interaction. Since their personalities are so different that they clash because they are thrust together in a remote parish in a largely Protestant area, each attempts to explain the self to the other. The more outgoing Sr. Rita explains first. She never mentions her parents. An aunt who was paid, presumably by the state, “to keep, take care of” her blamed her for accidentally causing her husband’s death and punished her verbally by telling her that no one “would ever love” her and physically by imprisoning her until a priest forced the aunt “to unlock” her. He took her to a convent where nuns “watched over” her until she became a nun (28). What she expects from life, seeks from life, therefore is self-esteem. As she says to Fr. Rivard early in their interaction, “I am a person who is a nun, not a nun who used to be a person” (11). That Fr. Rivard’s attempt takes two stages is significant because the first, a tale about falling in love as a teenager with a merchant’s daughter that reveals more about the men in his family and church who “sent” the girl “away” (29) than about him, indicates a reluctance to have a personality—to be personal. Much later he tells Sr. Rita and a parishioner how as a boy he witnessed diphtheria decimating his family—father, brothers, and sisters— and how he could not stop crying until he realized that only with strength could he confront evil. “I have not cried since then,” he tells them (47). Between the two stages, he reveals where he found the strength: in the priesthood in the Church. The priesthood gives him a structure that renders personality unnecessary, and the Church is “perfectly logical and divine. Making absolute order from absolute chaos. The Church makes my life, any life possible” (30). Their images of God are consistent with their self-images. Sr. Rita prays to a loving God, the New Testament God; in act 2 Fr. Rivard reveals that the

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God he thought he knew was “God, the Vengeful. The [Old Testament] God of Job” (53). Had the two been assigned to an urban parish with responsibilities that allowed for only marginal interaction, nothing might have come of the difference. But the rural parish’s situation thrusts them together. She is assigned to the church’s school because consumption confines to their quarters the two nuns who were teaching there, and the infectious disease prevents her from living with them. Renting a room over the blacksmith’s shop in the town’s somewhat hostile environment is also not advised. Breaking the Catholic Church’s rule prohibiting priests and nuns from living under the same roof, Fr. Rivard has Sr. Rita stay in the rectory with him and Mrs Shandig, assuring daily contact in which they air the difference. When, for example, in a typical conversation she injects her feelings into the conversation, he objects: “It is not for us to worry how we are feeling. We must be separate from the world. All that chaos,” eliciting her response: “God isn’t separate. Not from the world. Not from things people do and feel” (30). The conversation that provokes them into slapping each other occurs when he criticizes her for not showing proper humility by kneeling at prayer. She screams at him, “Stop it.… Have you ever been human? God is perfectly aware I respect and love him, Father” (41-42). Mrs Shandig’s entrance brings act 1 to a close but not the difference, for their responses to it cause the tragedy. The difference determines act-2’s first flashback when Fr. Rivard asks Sr. Rita’s help in his pastoral role comforting a parishioner whose mother is dying. He expects her to second his idea of comfort, accepting God’s will, but when the woman starts crying, she encourages the crying because it is “human,” provoking his condemnation of it as “personal destruction” and an “affront to God.” To give an example, he relates that only by overcoming crying when diphtheria decimated his family did he become “useful to God.” When the parishioner apologizes for her weakness, Sr. Rita tells her not to apologize for “feeling” (46-47). Interpreting her defense of the grieving woman as an affront to his authority, Fr. Rivard rebukes the nun after the woman leaves, initiating a period in which the two communicate only when necessary and only perfunctorily. Their relationship would seem to have deteriorated beyond the low level ending act 1 were it not for two indications of a change to come. He asks her for her help when he does not have to, and he does so in language indicative of a change in his self-image. “I can learn, or relearn. I can change,” he tells the nun whom he sees as helping him “make a new start” (44). The new self-image aborted in the scene with the grieving parishioner, Fr. Rivard tries again by approaching Sr. Rita, only this time not to ask for help in learning but to tell her that he has learned because she so “taught” him that the change in self-image and image of God has taken place. He no longer knows only “God, the Vengeful. The God of Job” (53). He does not speak of

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love in this scene, the first of his changed self-image scenes, but in an intervening scene, his lawyer questions him about a letter he wrote but did not mail to the bishop in which he thinks he is “‘loving’” (54) the nun. He tells Sr. Rita the night of the fire, “I love you,” a confession that makes her happy because it gives her the self-image she has always sought: “But with you I’m not nothing, am I?” Loving her makes him “happy” because he discovered the emotions he repressed through the years but also “miserable” (57) because he cannot act on them. She would renounce her vows to have children by him, but he cannot bring himself to renounce his vows to marry her. Since he also feels that he can no longer perform his priestly duties, he leaves that night, the night she is murdered. The Runner Stumbles introduces for this study one half of a force that driving a play’s action creates tragedy. The study encountered the force in Later Life but did not introduce it at that point because Austin declines the invitation to act. In chapter 2 another play introduces the other half of the force, and beginning in chapter 3, the study develops the theme in selected plays by O’Neill, Miller, and Williams and then examines it in more contemporary plays. The force is creating a new self or in Fr. Rivard’s words a “new start” (44). Before he asks the nun’s help in making a “new start,” the priest was secure in his self-image, his image of the Old Testament God, and his Church that gave him “absolute order from absolute chaos” (30). Yet even before he confesses his love, Fr. Rivard told one of the school’s students in the course of a conversation that “love between a man and a woman is unordered” (32). Falling in love with Sr. Rita casts him into that unordered universe in which he cannot reconcile his love for her and his commitment to his vows. That is why he tells Sr. Rita that he hates “myself” and “God,” for he sees himself not experiencing the “resurrection, life” but experiencing the Crucifixion: “It’s the nails. My salvation. Only the agony” (59). Making a new start awakens him to suffering, which is why he walks away from her, his priestly duties, and the suffering but not into a new self. Whereas she finds happiness in not being nothing, he tells his lawyer that he was happiest being nothing: “No past. No future. Just a very small present” (13), performing a repetitive task on an orderly Detroit assembly line. And that is why he resists having to remember his relationship with Sr. Rita so that his lawyer can defend him. Since he is brought back to the remote town to stand trial, however, he is forced to remember and to suffer, which is dramatized visually in the play’s closing image. In the graveyard where Sr. Rita is buried, the lawyer asks him what he plans to do with the case against him dismissed. “Mourn her,” Fr. Rivard answers, dropping to his knees and beginning “to cry” (63). Accepting suffering is his tragedy, but it is also the beginning of a new start. Relating how he overcame crying as a boy, he took pride in not having “cried since then” (47). Crying now releases him from the self-imposed years of

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repression so that he can learn from the suffering and begin to grow as a human being—to connect with himself as a person. Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek was also inspired by real events, though not by another turn of the century murder trial, although a teenage boy is in prison awaiting trial for the death of a teenage girl. A friend told her about “kids from a poor white neighborhood” in Kentucky, the state in which Wallace was born, who would get drunk and “run this train.” 29 In the same interview, while discussing her conception of character, she identified a source of tragedy in her theatre. “Someone who hits their child, like Chas in The Trestle—that’s inexcusable. But how does someone become that way? That’s where I find the tragedy. Chas became the way he did not because he was a bad father, but because he didn’t have anything to give his son. He felt inadequate in his world because he had no future to give in terms of labor” (462). Since Chas does not appear until the play’s second scene, the examination begins with the two teenagers in the first scene. About the same age as Chas’ son Brett, they plan on taking the challenge that killed him. Arriving at the dry creek one hundred feet below the trestle, the girl, Pace, explains the challenge to the boy, Dalton, two years her junior. Knowing the time the train approaches the trestle and the time required for them to cross it, at her signal they will start running toward the train, clearing the other side just before the train comes barreling across. With no margin for error—because once started, there is no turning back; there are no sides to the tracks on which to take refuge until the train passes or water below to dive into; and should he trip, he must spring to his feet immediately and race—the longer Pace talks, the more Dalton decides not to run. Furthermore, he does not believe her story that she has run the trestle twice or even once in her revised version. Inexperienced in matters of sex yet at an age when they are curious, they are awkward with each other. Needing each other while not wanting to be with each other, they have a love-hate relationship. She prevails, however, by alternately threatening and cajoling until he reconsiders, and she assures him that they will return to the creek for practice runs before running with their lives in the balance. Since the play takes place during the Great Depression of the 1930s, predating a drug culture, the two are not hippies. Neither are they suicidal or rebelling against authoritative parents. Then why run the trestle? Pace answers when she tells Dalton that the challenge is their sole excitement. She deflates his rebuttal that he “might go to college” 30 by citing their families’ lack of finances to pay the tuition. And not only are they not going to college, they are not going anywhere in life. Situating the characters in a futureless world, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek creates a philosophically naturalistic play. It is also naturalistic in mode of presentation in that the actors should not try to make the language sound poetic—that is, “pretty” (457)—and neither should their clothes be

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Hollywoodish—that is, “Ma and Pa Kettle outfits” (281). But it is the philosophical naturalism that the action seeks to overthrow. In philosophical naturalism, or the naturalism of Émile Zola, for example, characters’ lives are determined by forces over which they have little or no control. In the play’s world, Depression-era economics so determines the characters’ future that it is no different from their present. Pace is the spokesperson for the teens. When Dalton tells her that he plans to get a job and “move up,” she tells him that he will be violating the “laws of gravity” (294). In another scene she mimics the sound of a conch shell held against the ear: “Our future. You and me.… Empty. No more, no less. Just. Empty” (304). Of the play’s three adults, Chas, the town’s jailer, delivers monologues ostensibly to prisoner Dalton, but since he does not respond, to the audience informing them that the town’s Plate Glass Company closed, depriving the employees of jobs and paychecks. Gin, Dalton’s mother, expects that she, like the other women, will be laid off where she works. It is Dalton’s father, Dray, though, who best verbally and visually images the effect of losing one’s job and with it one’s place in the world: in his case, at the foundry where he worked ever since he was old enough to work. Hearing that a company was hiring, he showed up with fifty-four other men, only three of whom were hired, leaving fifty-two to stand “there watching the door that’d been shut” (307). Having given up trying to find work, he sits at home with the lights off making “shadows on the wall with his hands” (311). Finally, Gin confides in Pace that she and her husband are no longer “close.… Like we used to be” (317). Having lost his ability to provide for his family— failing a man’s fundamental responsibility—he has lost his manhood. The above verbal and visual images establish the philosophical naturalism, but they are not dramaturgy’s sole elements. Structure is also an element. A structure in which scenes in the present issue from scenes in the past and repeat it is naturalistic. A structure that disrupts linear movement from past to present and/or changes the present so that it does not repeat the past is non-naturalistic. Wallace’s play has both structures. Act-1’s scenes 1, which was discussed above, 4, 7, and 10 are in chronological order in the past in that each scene takes the two teens closer to the time they plan to run the train, but they are not in consecutive order. The play opens with a prologue in which Dalton sits in a prison cell making hand shadows and Pace is “there but not there” (283). Act-1’s scenes 2 and 5 are Chas’ monologues in the present trying to get Dalton, who remains silent, to answer questions about Pace’s death. The most startling four words are the prisoner’s confession repeated by the jailer: “‘Yeah, I killed her’” (296). Between these two sets of scenes that are chronological but not consecutive are act-1’s remaining scenes that are either concurrent with scenes 2 and 5 or take place at different times between the past set and the present set, and they are not all in chrono-

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logical order. For example, the stage directions for scene 7 specify that it takes place a few days earlier than the time of scene 6. The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek is dramatizing disconnection in the characters from one another that allows the past to repeat itself in the present and the future, dehumanizing them. They blame themselves or surrender themselves to what they perceive as an inevitable, hopeless situation. Here are two of many illuminating passages in the Wallace interview from which the study quotes: “So when I wrote The Trestle, it was about a basically sound family that has been torn apart by pressures from the outside” and “In my work, I attack a system, never its people. You will never find ‘evil’ people in my plays, just evil systems” (452, 471). Chas has little to say about son Brett beyond the fact of his death. Gin confesses to Dalton that at age fifteen she knew that she was not going anywhere in life and is resigned to being laid off. Dray has given up fighting and given up trying to connect with his family. He does not visit Dalton in prison, and when Gin, who loves him, understands his despair, and tries to comfort him, reaches out to touch him, he says, “Don’t touch me, Gin. I could kill you” (307). Yet the presence of the non-naturalistic structure within the naturalistic structure offers the characters hope for breaking the naturalistic force’s control over their lives. Thus the play’s action is the characters discovering what they must do to effect change, ending the tragedy, for finding the moment when characters “changed, when they still could have become someone else” is “what excites” Wallace (471). The moments come in act 2 when the characters connect with one another. Exasperated that Dalton offers no defense for his statement that he killed Pace, Chas tries to goad him into talking, even to offering the teen a knife with which to kill him, his jailer. Dalton will not oblige him yet welcomes him as a surrogate father teaching him how to make hand shadows. Dray allows Gin to touch him, and the touch feels “nice” (325). Despondent because he has become “Nothing” (324), he asks his wife to kill him. She refuses, instead offering him the choice to be something by going with her and other women into the closed Plate Glass Company, reopening it, and working it themselves, an act that invites trouble because it subverts capitalism’s subordination of workers. He accepts the choice. He also for the first time visits Dalton in prison and there asks his son to touch him, bringing them together as they had not been “in a long time” (329). When Dalton reveals to Chas that he knew Brett hit himself, Chas reveals that he started the hitting because he “didn’t have anything to give” his son (335). Once the jailer unburdens himself, the prisoner talks about the night Pace ran the trestle and was succeeding until she slowed down to check that he was watching; trapped, she dove to her death, which is why he blamed himself. During rehearsals for the premiere production, someone recommended reversing the final two scenes so that the play ends with the more powerful

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scene in which Dray does not die but elects to go with Gin into the factory. Wallace decided against the recommendation because the scene is one of the “most irresponsibly positive things” she has ever written; it is “too upbeat” (453). She prefers the more low-keyed scene in which Dalton tells what happened at the trestle. Reunited with his father and listening to Chas relate his relationship with his son, he realizes that he and Pace loved each other and that the love changes him, freeing him from the prison of the disconnected self. Responding to Pace’s presence in his memory, he discovers by touching himself that she is inside him as no one else is. “Freed ” from prison (338), he is free to create a new future. In the change in visual and verbal images, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek prepares for chapter 2. When the play opens, Dalton sits with his back to the audience, making hand shadows by the light from a candle. When Dray first appears, he sits with his back to Gin and Dalton, making hand shadows and ignoring his wife’s request to touch her. At play’s end, however, Dray accepts Gin’s offer to go with her into the factory, and together Dalton and Pace’s ghost blow out his candle, implying that he will no longer sit by himself making hand shadows.

Chapter Two

Loss of Hope and Suffering

The third category, the loss of hope, is the most controversial of the four categories. In a 1963 study, George Steiner kindled an ongoing debate when he wrote, “Tragedies end badly,” and then a half-dozen lines later, “Tragedy is irreparable.” 1 A few years later, without mentioning Steiner, Raymond Williams agreed with the statements as they apply to the hero but went on to argue that tragedy is more than the hero’s destruction: “When we now say that the tragic experience is of the irreparable, because the action is followed right through until the hero is dead, we are taking a part for the whole, a hero for an action. We think of tragedy as what happens to the hero, but the ordinary tragic action is what happens through the hero.” 2 Mentioning Steiner many times, Eagleton quotes Williams, even to adding italics: “Williams is right to insist that ‘the ordinary tragic action is what happens through the hero.’” 3 For Jennifer Wallace, however, what happens through the hero of King Lear “is most powerfully disturbing” in the “bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays.” 4 This study finds support for both positions, but before it examines plays in detail, it isolates the opposition chapter 1’s conclusion established. Trying to explain what happened to him, Dray tells Gin that when he and the others worked at the foundry, they were “making” themselves; they had “movement.” With the foundry closed and out of work, he is “Nothing” (324) with no place to go; he no longer has a reason to move. In the interview Naomi Wallace related an anecdote in which she wanted to delete a word from something Dray says to Dalton when he visits him in prison but was overruled by the actor speaking the word. Dray tells his son that he cannot go on living “Unchanged” (330). Wallace thought the word was unnecessary because the play is obviously about discovering change. The opposition is immobility and movement or change. In the introduction to his Orphans’ 29

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Home Cycle, Horton Foote refines the opposition when he states the cycle’s theme: “And these plays, I feel, are about change, unexpected, unasked for, unwanted, but to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or a hopeless longing for a life that is gone.” 5 The opposition is despair imaged as immobility and change imaged as movement. Tom Donaghy’s Northeast Local illustrates the refined opposition. The play, which spans three decades, opens in the 1960s with a couple, Mickey and Gi, in their twenties about to be married and looking forward to a good life together because he is a welder in the steel industry and she sees options that did not previously exist opening for women. Before long, however, with steel plants closing he is out of work and sinking into despair because he cannot fulfill his role as the family’s breadwinner. He does nothing but drink during the day while Gi works; at night too drunk to navigate the stairs, he sleeps in the recreation room. On those rare nights when he joins her in the bedroom upstairs, she complains that “Nothing” happens. 6 He leaves her, but since the play is not a tragedy begins to recover by learning how to work with computers. Reunited at their son’s wedding, Mickey tries for a permanent reconciliation by telling Gi that everything he has been doing is “FOR YOU!” only to have her tell him that time has not stood still for them: “But everything’s changing, Mick. Whole world’s changing” (97). Northeast Local ends with the two having sold their house going their separate ways though remaining friends. Holding this opposition in suspension until it is embedded in the structure of a category play, the study resumes with a contrast between two contemporary American plays that reimagine two Jacobean tragedies. Since chapter 1 ended with a hopeful play, chapter 2 takes up the hopeful reimagining first. The title page of Migdalia Cruz’s Salt names the play that inspired it: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Responding to the question in what way did John Ford’s drama inspire hers, Cruz said, “There are twins in both plays, and the twins are in love.” 7 The Jacobean tragedy’s opening scene has Giovanni confessing to a friar his love for his sister and the friar counseling him to pray for seven days in the hope that the unholy desire will pass. Yet in the second scene, he and Annabella declare their love for each other so that act 2 opens with the two having consummated the love. As Giovanni says to her, “Come Annabella, no more sister now.” 8 The incest, however, is idealized when compared with the play’s other relationships. For example, believing her husband dead, a woman, Hippolita, expects a nobleman, Soranzo, to honor his vow to marry her made while they were unlawfully intimate. Since he is courting Annabella, he spurns her, provoking her resolve for revenge by poisoning him. Salt opens with a prologue. Belen, the twin sister, appears in act-1’s first scene. Her brother, Guadalupe or Lupe, does not appear until the fifth scene, and although he is warned that if he and his sister are intimate their “babies’ll

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come out retarded,” 9 the sister is not named. The play’s published text identifies the characters in a cast listing preceding the text, but since I have never seen a performance and the only productions listed were in workshop, I do not know whether an audience would recognize the twins’ relationship before act-1’s ninth scene when the two are together for the first time. In this scene they bathe together, she “shyly” turning away from him to wash her “genitals” (206) before washing his back. In subsequent scenes they kiss, declare their love for each other, and plan their escape, but it is not until the play’s penultimate scene that they consummate their love. Cruz gives a better connection between Ford’s drama and hers when she continued responding to the question about the inspiration. “I’ve always wanted to write a modern Jacobean drama.… I’ve always thought that I had an affinity for Jacobean writers. They were literally blood and guts, and I was more metaphorically blood and guts. I liked that they weren’t afraid to show viscera” (130). Vasques is Ford’s villainous servant. He deceives Hippolita into believing that in return for marriage to her, he will assist in her resolve against his master Soranzo, only to switch the poison to have her drink it. Pregnant, Annabella is married to Soranzo. When he realizes he was duped, he threatens to kill her unless she reveals the father’s name. Vasques intervenes, promising to extract the information from another source. Tricking Annabella’s servant into naming Giovanni, he has her removed from the court and blinded. In the prologue to Salt, Vasques, the twenty-year-old son of Belilah, a former prostitute, is preparing for cremation the dismembered body of Arlene, one of the children in the family that Belilah controls by exploiting them sexually. Lupe and Belen are two of them and like the others were abandoned, sold, or stolen because they are damaged. Belen, for instance, “has a deformed right arm—like thalidomide children do” (157). Although Belilah has an apartment where she resides, the children call home the salt mounds Chicago’s public works department stores on the city’s outskirts to use to clear roads in the winter. The children do not go indoors in the winter because Belen can still feel the “chills from last year” (211) living under the area’s bridge. They cannot leave for a variety of reasons. Vasques and his half-sister Grace keep guard on them in the sense that they report back to Belilah if they suspect any are becoming independent, one possibility for Arlene’s death. Other possibilities that Vasques considers are that she ceased being “useful” or that she violated the prohibition against “crying” (161). Since the children cannot read or write, they are isolated from an outside world. When the local priest to whom Lupe goes for confession asks what grade in school he is in, he says, “I’m—I’m supposed to be in seventh, I think” (218). He and his sister want to escape but can only talk about their hope of escaping because they do not know where they are or how to read the maps he finds in the trash deposited for the incinerator. And the customers

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who come to the salt mounds do not befriend them; they come to use them sexually. One example of the exploitation has to suffice. It is so representative of the abuse the children suffer and so sickening that in the volume’s afterword, Priscilla Page confesses that she walked away from Salt the first time she tried to read it. The fingering that a customer administers to Belen so hurts her that she loses feeling in her legs and wonders whether being dead could be “different from this” (169). The play’s power is in the children maintaining their belief in God and hope for the future in such a hopeless situation. The challenge is in having them maintain in such degradation the “innocence” (110) that Cruz wants the audience to see in them. One way of balancing the power and the challenge is in calling these characters children, even though “man-boy” Lupe and “woman-girl” Belen are thirteen (157): physically developed but educationally and socially arrested. A second way is in having them comfort those needing comforting. Belen tells stories to Lucia, a castrated ten-year-old boy who dresses as a girl and talks to his constant companion, a doll. Lupe, however, perceives him as a “freak” (212). A third way, then, is in not having them angelic. Grace, who desires Lupe, metaphorically poisons by insisting to him that she and not his sister loves him and by attempting to trap Lucia into saying something about Belen for which she can be punished—perhaps even suffering Arlene’s fate. A fourth way involves the twins that were inspired by the twins in Ford’s Jacobean tragedy. As mentioned, that play opens with Giovanni seeking a friar’s blessing so that he can marry his sister. The corresponding scene in Cruz’s contemporary tragedy is act-1’s tenth scene with Lupe in the confessional seeking the priest’s blessing so that he can marry. Religion is not of his upbringing because never having been to confession, he does not know how to proceed, but since Grace told him that marriage would be a sin, he thought he “should ask” (221). Thinking the issue his age, the priest does not ask for any further explanation, and Lupe does not volunteer any, not even that he wants to marry his sister. There is no indication, though, that he is being deceitful. Leaving with the priest’s blessing so long as he waits until he is older, days later he proposes to Belen that they marry. When she tells him that they cannot, he disagrees: “I already asked God and everything. He said it was okay” (278). In another scene as Lupe is falling asleep, Grace lies next to him and slides down his body to fellate him, an act that alienates Belen, who witnesses it. Reconciled only after Lupe convinces her that he thought she was lying next to him, they cross the boundary in the play’s second-last scene that Giovanni and Annabella cross between acts 1 and 2 of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Their uncovered lovemaking reveals Belen’s “virgin blood” (342). Apparently to maintain their innocence, the children construct a world in which only completed intercourse constitutes a giving of oneself to another. This construct enables them to survive the suffering with customers,

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for they do not give of themselves in that experience. Having completed the intercourse, Lupe tells the priest, “You can marry us now” (343). The consummation of the twins’ love is the last connection that the contemporary play has with the Jacobean play. In Ford’s play Annabella repents her sins. Giovanni does not repent his. Moreover, he ignores her warning about attending her husband’s birthday feast because it is a trap for both of them. It is not that he doubts her warning, but by stabbing her to spare her from Soranzo passing judgment on her, he foils her husband’s plot. He then enters the feast with her heart upon his dagger and kills Soranzo and is himself killed by Vasques and his men. He dies welcoming death because it reunites him with his beloved Annabella. Salt takes place between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. On Christmas Eve a stranger named Rocket arrives in the nearby Slide Inn Tavern speaking language that is suggestive to say the least. He drinks a clear liquid that “looks like water” but “tastes like wine” and that he recommends to the bartender because it will “save your soul” (168). For creatures who cannot drink it, he sprinkles it—on a rat, for instance. For Lupe, who faints after drinking it, he pours it into the twin’s deformed ear while reciting a prayer. The liquid is holy water that he takes from the local church whose priest invites him to attend mass, an invitation he declines because he makes his “own mass.” He also professes to know secrets about God the Father: that He wears a hat to keep under wraps “so much love” that unwrapped “it would explode” (205). Cruz identifies him as the Messiah in a play that a scholar praises for its “poetic and allegorical achievements,” 10 but his story is not an allegory within the children’s realistic story. Rocket’s story fuses the allegorical and the realistic. He does not look, dress, or act differently from the others; he earns his living working for the city’s public works department and voluntarily cleans the church on his free time. One scene in particular illustrates the fusion. Act 2 opens with Belilah applying for the church’s after-school program for “kids” (235). Given the business she conducts, she may be looking for recruits. Whatever her motive, on her way out she meets Rocket. Attracted to him, she offers to buy him a drink, an offer he declines because he is working, but reciprocating, he suggests a date at the Slide Inn, the site of act-2’s closing scene. Now her offer is her apartment, accompanied by her hands starting to “feel him up” (288). Also declining this offer, he pushes her away from him, although a gentleman, he tells her he will walk her home. Realistically the date is a seduction rejected; allegorically the date is a temptation to form a partnership rejected. Rocket’s narrative and the children’s narrative are interwoven, simultaneously culminating in the second-last scene, prepared for in the preceding scene. Rocket asks the priest to baptize him, recalling Jesus’ request of John the Baptist to baptize him in preparation for His mission. Invited to Belilah’s

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New Year’s Eve party, Rocket brings the priest with him where they witness the result of the twins’ lovemaking and Lucia’s suicide. Hugging the boy’s dead body, Rocket proclaims that he has “one more miracle” before calming the priest with his pledge, “Don’t despair. I’ll be back.” As he leads the children into the water, Belen intones, “In the water, they were purified and the dead rose and the blind saw…” (344-46). They are healed in a new future. The rite is baptismal. “To baptize (Greek baptizein) means to ‘plunge’ or ‘immerse’; the ‘plunge’ into the water symbolizes the catechumen’s burial into Christ’s death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him, as ‘a new creature.’ ” 11 Though Cruz does not state that the play proper—it is followed by an epilogue—ends in baptism, she does state that “in death” the children “find rebirth,” for although her plays contain her “dark” vision of the world, they also “maintain hope in hopelessness” (110). The contemporary American play contrasted with Salt is Melanie Marnich’s Tallgrass Gothic. According to the title page, it is an adaptation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. The Jacobean tragedy’s main plot is set in a Spanish castle elaborately fortified with “goodly munition,” “ordnance,” and “sconce” 12 and with secluded passages in which a murder can be committed undetected. The comic subplot takes place in a Spanish madhouse, but the contemporary tragedy ignores it, setting the sole plot in various locations in the Great Plains, described as “rural, stark, beautiful and violent.” 13 The same difference obtains for the language in the former’s double entendres, for instance, and the latter’s stark images. The difference, however, and it is the same one, that has the greatest impact on the tragedy is in the plots and the characters who set the plots in motion. The Changeling opens on a nobleman, Alsemero, alone onstage rapturously musing on Beatrice, whom he saw in church, and therefore canceling a planned sea voyage. Encountering her, he so expresses his love that she is so smitten that she regrets her upcoming marriage to another nobleman, Alonzo, and asks her father to invite him into the castle. When act 2 opens, she controls the situation by giving Alsemero’s friend a message for him specifying the time and place for a meeting, appealing to her father for a three-day postponement of the wedding, and having her waiting-woman, Diaphanta, escort Alsemero to the rendezvous. When she protests that her marriage prevents them from being happy, he proposes challenging Alonzo to a duel. As she objects on the ground that if he wins the law would punish him, keeping them apart, she has an idea that she does not articulate. Escorted from the rendezvous by Diaphanta, he does not reappear, except for a moment with the father in act 3 and with the other cast members in the dumb show that opens act 4, until act-4’s second scene, though following the reappearance he has an important role in the action. When the first of the 26 scenes of Tallgrass Gothic opens, Laura, Beatrice’s counterpart, is alone onstage but only momentarily because Daniel,

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Alsemero’s counterpart, enters. Whether the meeting was arranged is unclear. What is clear is her response to his declaration of the effect of seeing her “for the first time” (313) because they embrace and alternate lying on top of each other. This balanced control splits, however, when toward the scene’s end he takes control. Promising her that they can be happy together, he invites her to “come out and play.” Pausing before taking control, she “makes her decision” (316). It is to commit adultery with him, for she is a married woman. In the adaptation she is not bound to the “command of parents” (2.2.20) as Beatrice is, and in the Great Plains rural culture, divorce is not an option. As Mary, Laura’s friend in whom she confides that she is cheating, says, “But here we marry for life” (317). That scenes do not occur in corresponding places in the unfolding actions should also be noted. In his musing Alsemero likens Beatrice to “man’s first creation, the place blest” (1.1.8). It is not until scene 5 that Daniel likens Laura to someone “biblical.” When the one to whom he is speaking asks, “Like Eve?” he replies, “Like all of fucking Eden” (324-25). Since Alonzo does not appear until act 2 and then only to learn that Beatrice’s father consents to the wedding postponement, there is practically no interaction between the couple. Middleton uses his brother Tomazo to convey the tragedy’s foreboding. Seeing “small welcome” in Beatrice’s greeting and “dulness” in her parting, Tomazo tries to warn his brother that his faith in her is “strongly cozened” (2.1.106, 125-28). Alonzo, however, disagrees, even to telling Tomazo that anyone else who thinks of her as unfaithful is his enemy. He is murdered at act-3’s opening. Since Laura is married, scenes dramatize her interaction with her husband Tin. Although an early stage direction states that he is “not that bad of a guy” (319), there has to be a reason why she would gravitate to Daniel. Tin “scares” her (318). When he is in the mood for sex, he expects it, even if it is a “near rape” (319). To compensate for her resistance, she has to perform fellatio. Neither will he tolerate her disaffection, demanding that she tell him that she loves him, and when she will not, he becomes physical, stopping only when he sees that he has drawn blood. Where he is like his counterpart in The Changeling is his refusal to believe that Laura is cheating on him. The language is similar. For Tomazo, who warns Alonzo that he is making a mistake marrying Beatrice, since her “heart is leap’d into another’s bosom / … / She lies but with another in thine arms” (2.1.132-35). In Tin’s friend’s warning, “If the woman you’re sleeping with is thinking of another guy while you’re sleeping with her, it’s like she’s really sleeping with him” (340). But he too fails to heed the warning and is dispatched, though much later in the action: in number 23 of the 26 scenes. The principal similarity between the two plays is in the tragic heroine’s use of a stalker for the dispatching with the difference of elaborate and stark still operating. De Flores, a servant, makes his presence felt in the opening

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scene of The Changeling when he tells Beatrice that her father is approaching, which to her is “unnecessary blabbing” (1.1.95) by someone she considers repulsive and tells him so whenever he obtrudes himself. Yet though she rails at him, in act-2’s first scene he vows to continue to devise ways to “see her still” (2.1.78) for the passion she excites in him. It is in the next scene when Alsemero proposes challenging Alonzo to a duel that Beatrice has an idea for using the servant to get rid of Alonzo so that she can marry Alsemero, who does not waver in his love for her until the play’s final act. A character named Filene appears in scene 5 of Tallgrass Gothic with others drinking in a barn at night, but he wants to walk a drunken Mary home. Only when Laura, joining Mary on the walk, waves him away because she finds him “disgusting” (325) does one suspect that he is the servant’s counterpart, a suspicion confirmed by his sudden appearance in scene 11 with the explanation that he is “stalking” her (333) and the confession after she lets him lift her skirt that just touching her “foot” (335) would please him. Yet it is not until scene 17, more than halfway through the action, that she asks, “Help me?” (344) Just as Beatrice is afraid of losing Alsemero, so is Laura afraid of losing Daniel. The contemporary situation is different, however. Daniel’s scene-1 declaration of love to Laura and their looking at each other in church a few days later are the high points in their relationship. From those points on, he slowly but gradually distances himself from her, though she never wavers in her love, telling him, for example, that his body causes hers to “melt” (327). At first he complains that he does not like having to share her with her husband. Then he objects to the secrecy that prevents them from being together as a couple. This is the scene that ends with Laura raising the possibility of Filene helping her, a possibility that becomes more real as the distancing continues. He does not return her look in church, is not in the mood for intimacy, and does not show up for a rendezvous. He does not reappear in the play. Scenes intervene between Laura raising the possibility of Filene’s help and specifying the help she wants. In those scenes she realizes that she is losing “control” (347) of Daniel when he will not return her look in church and of Tin when he draws blood because she will not tell him she loves him. The scene with her husband therefore wins sympathy for Laura whereas Beatrice wins no sympathy for the killing of Alonzo. Yet another set of counterpart scenes restores the balance between the two women. The scene in The Changeling in which Beatrice secures De Flores’ help is extended with each character revealing in aside and dialogue what each expects from the killing of Alonzo. Beatrice does not gain sympathy, but in the discrepancy between each one’s understanding of the expected reward, she money and he sexual favors, the audience is disposed toward her. The corresponding scene in Tallgrass Gothic is short and straightforward with Laura simply asking Filene, “Can we get away with it?” and he assuring her that he will be

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her “super hero” (349). His reward is not an issue. She must know what he expects after she allowed him to lift her skirt before parting at an earlier meeting. The scene that brings the two conspirators together after the murder is one of the great scenes in Jacobean tragedy, for showing Beatrice the severed ring finger as proof of the deed, De Flores expects to claim his reward, and it is not money despite her doubling the amount. Telling her that they are both guilty, he tries to kiss her, but she resists, finally understanding, however, what he wants. Though she begs him not to take her “honour” (3.4.122), even offering all of her wealth as recompense, he will have his way, forcing her to accept the price to be paid. The counterpart scene is uglier but not because of Filene. He brings Laura the severed finger, forces her to accept her role in the murder, and rejects her offer of money. She does not double the amount because she knows what he wants so that after the obligatory pushing of his hand away, she lets him slide it under her skirt. And when he kisses her, she does not resist. On the contrary, she tells him to kiss “harder” (353). Since they are going to engage in sex, she may as well enjoy it. A harder kiss therefore will arouse her passion. The Changeling scene ends with De Flores assuring Beatrice as they leave for the bed, “Thou’lt love anon / What thou so fear’st and faint’st to venture on” (3.4.170-71). The Tallgrass Gothic scene ends with Laura in control as they dress in the car’s back seat. “Feel better?” she asks Filene (354). Caught in a web of deceit and murder, the two heroines compound their guilt by having their co-conspirators murder others, Beatrice her waitingwoman Diaphanta and Laura her friend Mary, because they can expose them. But the two experience the guilt differently. Ghosts do not figure prominently in the Jacobean tragedy’s final scenes. Alonzo’s ghost startles De Flores in the act-4 dumb show and again in act 5, but he dismisses it as a “mist of conscience.” Beatrice does not even recognize it as Alonzo’s ghost. Although it gives her a “shivering sweat,” she can only think of it as an “ill thing” that “haunts the house” (5.1.60-63). On the other hand, ghosts dominate the contemporary tragedy’s final scene. In scene 26 Laura enters the barn looking for Daniel to be met by Tin’s ghost, terrifying her. No mere mist of conscience, he claims to be able to see everything, and he repeats images from Daniel’s declaration of love to her in the opening scene. Running out of the barn, Laura encounters Mary’s ghost, terrifying her into praying to pass the night. Yet there are “no such things as ghosts” (360) for Filene, who says that he just happened to pass by at daybreak, not looking for her after she left him to meet Daniel, who does not show up for the rendezvous. The presence of ghosts is an interesting difference between the two plays. Another difference is even more interesting. Confronted by Alsemero with the accusation that rather than despising De Flores she is on intimate terms with him, Beatrice confesses her role in the servant’s murder of Alonzo but

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defends herself on the ground that she did it for his sake: to marry him. Before she dies from a stabbing by De Flores, who defiantly confesses that he committed the murder for love of her, she apologizes to her father for defiling the family name and asks Alsemero’s forgiveness. Dying first from a self-inflicted stabbing, De Flores looks forward to their being “in hell” together (5.3.163), but whether her contrition spares her from damnation is not part of The Changeling. The implication of the adaptation’s closing visual and verbal images is that Filene and Laura are in Hell. Although she tells him not to look at her, they share the “silence of recognition” (360) so that whether alive or dead, by their being in Hell, the realm where hope is abandoned, Tallgrass Gothic ends as a tragedy denying hope—denying a new future. By completing the contrast with Cruz’s tragedy, Marnich’s tragedy removes from suspension the opposition that this chapter’s opening section refines. Salt ends with the sound of Belen’s intoning as the children follow Rocket into the water, their immersion heralding the change that issues from rebirth. Tallgrass Gothic ends in the silence and immobility of Laura’s despair coupled as she is with her co-conspirator. Ethan Coen is the author of the trilogy Almost an Evening. In the trilogy’s context, the middle segment, Four Benches, may be more satiric than tragic, but in or out of context, the one-act play compacts the opposition. Four Benches consists of four scenes. The first takes place in a darkened sauna lit when the second of two characters enters and only long enough for the audience to see that he is naked but for a cowboy hat, unlike the first, who is seated and fully clothed with a briefcase that he grabs to conceal his face. With the light switched off, the two conduct a rudimentary conversation in which the seated man, identified as One, explains to the naked man, identified as Two, that the nature of his relationship with a man named Potts requires clandestine meetings and guarded identities. He assumed Two was Potts. The entrance of a third character not only interrupts the conversation but also ends Two’s life. Assuming he is Potts, the third character kills him with automatic-weapon fire so that the scene closes with One’s cry “in which despair and self-loathing mingle.” 14 In the second scene, Two’s father, granted an interview with the last man to see his son alive, criticizes One for his formal language in extending condolence. For the father, he is no “people person” (44). Stung, One bows his head and remains seated as he was in scene 1, the lone difference being that he is on a park bench. The third scene is significantly different in that One is on his feet pacing while informing a seated man, identified as Control, that he is quitting government service that sacrifices human contact for abstract principles. Although he stops pacing, his movement continues internally in that he wants to recover his true self repressed under the disguise that the service requires.

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The change that scene-3’s movement heralded appears in scene 4. One is seated waiting as he was in scene 1 because he wants to reproduce scene 1 but differently; he wants to redeem the past. He is therefore in a location that is the “same as the old ” sauna except that it is a “new sauna” (48), and he has shed the uniform that the service requires. In the first three scenes, he wore a conservative suit with a “severely knotted tie” (35). In scene 4 only a towel separates the true self he wants to express from another character’s true self. Hence when a stranger enters the sauna and sits, One begins a conversation, not guarded as before but open and revealing of his previous existence that had become “intolerable.” The past is “history,” however, or so he says in the flush of the “new life” that he is discovering as a “people person” showing his “human heart” and inviting the stranger to reciprocate. Not only does the stranger not show his heart, he puts his cowboy hat on and exits the sauna, leaving One as he was in scene 1 in a state in which “despair and selfloathing mingle” (49-50). In a world in which the past repeats itself with no hope of change, despair is the reigning spiritual state. Wakako Yamauchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance adds to the opposition of despair and change an alternative to the sinking into immobility. Two Japanese-born Issei immigrant families farm leased land in Southern California in the 1930s. Since Masako, the preteen daughter of Murata and Hana accidentally burnt down the bathhouse, neighbor Oka comes to their home to offer them the use of his and Emiko’s bathhouse until they can build a new one and while visiting fills in a background they did not know. His first wife died; he has a daughter in Japan by that marriage joining him; and Emiko is his late wife’s sister, also married to him by arrangement. As the first scene ends, Oka seems likable with Emiko, based on what Hana says to Murata about her experience with the wife, unfriendly. When Murata and Hana with Masako accept his offer, Emiko’s behavior supports Hana’s perception. She seems haughty, ignoring her husband’s request to bring cups for sake and sitting by herself smoking a cigarette, a response or a lack of a response the opposite of Hana’s in the scene in which Oka came to her home. When Murata told her to bring cups and sake to welcome their neighbor, she obliged without questioning the request, and she served the drinks. Yet with the adults inside the house, Masako plays a recording of “The Soul Shall Dance,” which draws Emiko out of the house to confide in Masako that the song expresses her dream of returning to Japan. Privy to Emiko’s secret, Masako is witness to Oka, out of sight of her parents, slapping his wife. Yamauchi is progressively changing the audience’s perception of the characters by changing each scene’s perspective in the play’s kaleidoscopic structure. With the guests gone and Oka confronting Emiko about her behavior, they bring their mutual hostility into the open. For him, a woman is expected to provide comfort to her man by satisfying his needs. For her, that relation-

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ship is a master-servant relationship, and she is no servant. Provoked, he says that her father “palmed” 15 her off on him to get rid of her for disgracing the family’s honor. The family had groomed her with training in dance and other refinements for marriage to a nobleman, but she forfeited the opportunity by becoming involved with another man. “I’m not a whore” (150), she defends herself by referring to her relationship with that man in Japan as a loving one. The accusations and recriminations continue until he gives up and goes inside, leaving her to deliver a monologue beginning: “Because I must keep the dream alive…the dream is all I live for” (152). To surrender to her husband’s demands that her role is provider of his comfort is tantamount to denying her life before the arranged marriage and to accepting the futility of her suffering in the loveless marriage. To survive in the harsh environment, she has to keep alive the hope of reunion with the lover, despite Oka’s taunt that he is “probably married with ten kids” (151). With the monologue closing act 1, Emiko wins the audience’s sympathy. The drama, however, is only at the halfway mark in the kaleidoscopic structure. In commentary on the play, Yamauchi made two points that underscore the structure’s changing perspectives. Responding to questions in an interview, the playwright agreed that her plays have a strong cultural and social background. Rather than being an ogre, Oka is the product of a culture in which women are property to be routinely beaten. He is also a good neighbor and a loving father showering his daughter with gifts, and Emiko provokes him. The second point is that Yamauchi did not want “to make her a victim.” 16 She has an indomitable spirit so long as she has her dream to sustain her, and she is culpable, resisting the stepdaughter’s loving overture and stealing from Oka. An act-2 scene reverses the act-1 scene in which he in effect accused her of being a whore in Japan in that he could not corroborate the charge. When she discovers that he took the money she was saving for passage to Japan, he accuses her of stealing it. She claims she has a right to the money as compensation for her years of suffering with him, a claim that he dismisses as ludicrous. She then claims she brought money with her from Japan, but she cannot corroborate the claim that he dismisses as a lie. With his daughter with him, he no longer cares whether she stays or departs, leaving her destitute and preparing for the final scene. Unable to sell her sole possession, kimonos she brought from Japan, she has no hope of gaining passage and therefore faces a future that will be the present servitude repeated until death. The dream, which is the hope of change, shattered and her spirit broken, Emiko takes the alternative action to the immobility of despair. In the continuation of her act-1 monologue, Emiko justifies not surrendering to Oka’s demands: “Because if I give in, all I’ve lived before…will mean nothing…will be for nothing” (152). To surrender would be a denial of the love in Japan and the suffering in Southern California. Her justification

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unites her with a character in classical drama reimagined in contemporary American drama. In Sophocles’ Electra the chorus enters at the conclusion of Electra’s lament for her father, Agamemnon, murdered by her mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, upon his return from the Trojan War to ask the daughter why she continues to mourn for the dead man. On the simplest level, her answer is that it is her filial obligation. In Anne Carson’s translation, Elektra’s answer is “I cannot not grieve.” 17 As Carson explains her, the murder and subsequent subjugation have so deprived her of a normal life that she “has no choice, because she has no other self than the one that mourns” (77). In Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation, Electra has a rope attached at one end to one of the boots she wears and at the other end to a stake she inserts in the ground outside the palace where she was a princess but under the rule of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus is a servant. To her sister Chrysothemis’ advice to yield to the rulers’ demands, she defends her refusal: “What I have suffered has meaning only if I continue to suffer it.” 18 Hence whenever the stake comes loose, she secures it where she digs to secure a role for herself in the making of history. These heroines’ dreams are realized when Orestes with companions returns to kill Clytemnestra and her lover. Since Emiko’s dream cannot be realized, she commits suicide. In And the Soul Shall Dance, Emiko’s suicide defeats the immobility of despair in future servitude to Oka. Suicide also defeats the immobility of despair in ’night, Mother, but the character’s despair began in the past and not in servitude to another person but to her own person. Marsha Norman’s naturalistic play is therefore different from Wallace’s naturalistic The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, where the primary force over which characters have little or no control is economics, a determinism they overcome not in death, as Dray requested, but by the women opening a closed factory and working it themselves. The primary force over which Jessie, Norman’s character in her late thirties or early forties, has had little or no control is biological. Having suffered from epileptic seizures ever since childhood, she informs her mother, Thelma, the play’s other character in whose house Jessie has been residing following her divorce, not only of her resolution for overcoming the determinism but that she started thinking about suicide “off and on, ten years.” Her reason is that she is “tired.” To Mama’s question, “Tired of what?” she answers, “It all.” 19 Jessie elaborates. Divorce ended her marriage to the man she loved. Her relationships are blighted: with her son, who is in trouble with the law and has disappeared; with her brother and sister-in-law, who have never made an effort to know her; and with her mother’s friend, who does not visit because her presence upsets the friend. She is unable to hold a job. But Mama did not ask just to satisfy her curiosity. She wants to dissuade her daughter from her resolve. For example, she pleads with her to try to reconcile with her exhusband because something may have changed in her situation with him. For

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Jessie, however, “Nothing’s changed” (41), and not only with him but with all of the elaboration. Earlier she gave her mother the same answer, projecting it into the future. If she were to ride a bus for fifty more years, when she alights she would be exactly where she is alighting today. Mama is as unrelenting in her pleading as Jessie is in her resolve. She makes the argument that “something might happen…that could change everything.” Jessie’s answer is “No” to something happening that could affect any of the elaboration: a “No” that includes the “hope” of any change (49). Seizure free for a year, the time has come to act. Had she felt better in the past, she would be “gone already” (45). She gave the crux of the resolve when her mother told her, “You don’t have to,” and she said, “No, I don’t. That’s what I like about it” (21). By committing suicide now, she is taking control of her life, wresting it from biology’s control. Had she committed suicide when suffering seizures, the act could have been interpreted as being driven by the disease; she would have been the victim she always was. But the death cannot be so interpreted, since she is in relatively good health, has planned down to minute details, and shared the planning with her mother. For the first time in her life, she is acting from volition, and by taking responsibility for the act, she defeats naturalism’s determinism and the accompanying despair. Suicidal Jessie connects with Emiko in the preceding play and the protagonist of the succeeding play, but her play also connects with a play in chapter 1. The Runner Stumbles introduced for this study one half of a force that driving a play’s action creates tragedy; the force in that play is creating a new self. ’night, Mother contains the other half; the force in this play is creating a self. The study encountered the force in After Ashley but did not introduce it at that point because the play ends with Justin not having “any coherent idea of who” he is (105) embarking with Julie on the quest to discover himself. The study has not encountered the force’s other half since then because creating an initial self—discovering who one is—is a teenager’s goal, and the questers for selfhood in most contemporary American plays are adults seeking reinvention. Mama assumes that her daughter created a self as a girl suffering seizures but an initial self nonetheless. She says so when in reminding Jessie that since she has not had a seizure in a year, she is “starting all over” (45), language similar to Father Rivard’s “new start” (44). Jessie corrects her. She “started out” as an infant but lost that life: “Who I never was. Or who I tried to be and never got there. Somebody I waited for who never came. And never will” (50). Since she never created a self to begin with, she has no intention of starting over. Her intent is to “stop” (26) the life that continues without a self, which she does at play’s end. And the Soul Shall Dance and ’night, Mother have recognizable settings. The action of Norman’s play, for instance, takes place in a kitchen with a

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refrigerator and a counter, utensils and ingredients for making hot chocolate. Not so in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. As soon as a woman crosses the stage in front of a curtain, the curtain opens on the funnyhouse to reveal two women, Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, who do not move, their faces fixed in the stillness of death. When the protagonist, identified as the Negro, enters, she relates how when she is the Duchess, she sits opposite Victoria and when she is another self, she is either working in a library or writing poetry. Yet she also admits that the “only” place for her is her “funnyhouse.” 20 The directions of the play’s action anchor the examination. The action’s direction in Coen’s play is linear until the final scene, which is recursive in that it repeats the opening scene’s end. The action’s direction in Yamauchi’s play is linear, ending in Emiko’s suicide, as is the action in Norman’s play, ending in Jessie’s suicide. This “modern revisiting of Greek family tragedy” in “race and kin relations in America” 21 is linear and recursive with the opposing directions reflecting a pattern of oppositions within the protagonist’s state of mind. The examination singles out two of the sets, the first her relationship with her mother and the second with her father. The first time that Sarah, the “Negro,” speaks, she refers to herself as an integrated, unitary self: “Part of the time I live with Raymond.… I live in my room” (4-5). But she is a fragmented self. Since in the page following the text of her autobiography, Kennedy identifies her plays as “states of mind,” 22 four of the characters, each “one of herselves” (1), represent states within Sarah’s mind. The multiple masks or selves express the oppositions and conflicts within Sarah, although they are in agreement in the first set’s first half. Two of the four speak before Sarah does. The Duchess of Hapsburg says, “My mother looked like a white woman, hair as straight as any white woman’s,” an assertion partially repeated by Queen Victoria, “She looked like a white woman” (3-4). When the four selves appear in the penultimate scene, they repeat the complete assertion. The four agree that Sarah’s mother is a light-skinned woman of mixed heritage whose father “was a white man” (11). Since they make no statement about his wife, Sarah’s maternal grandmother, being white, she obviously was not but must have been a product of the “strange mesh of dark kinship between the races” that Kennedy found reinforced in Faulkner’s novels (98). Queen Victoria’s assertion that Sarah’s mother was the “lightest one” (4), a statement repeated throughout the play and by the four characters in the penultimate scene, means that she was the lightest of the three, the other two being the “darkest” father and Sarah “in between” (11). The first set’s second half begins the opposition in the sense that the characters are not in agreement before Sarah speaks her opening monologue. Funnyhouse of a Negro opens on the mother crossing the stage in front of a curtain described as “ghastly,” “frayed,” and suggestive of the “interior of a cheap casket.” Parted, the curtain reveals Sarah’s room. With its ebony ra-

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vens, lurid lights, and Duchess and Queen Victoria with faces resembling death masks, the set invokes an Edgar Allan Poe haunted palace, and the Duchess refers to the room as the “castle” (2-3). Since the mother does not join them in the castle, based on what one of the four selves says the audience assumes she returned to the grave because according to the Duchess, “she died” (3). Yet within moments the mother reappears to reverse the stage crossing, this time speaking about how her skull is shining because of what her husband, Sarah’s father, did to her and thereby contradicting the Duchess’ claim that not only is she dead but that her husband “killed” her (4). In later scenes the audience learns that she “went” (15) to an asylum where she still “is” (11). Finally, the contradictions compound in the penultimate scene when the four selves repeat the accusation that she “died” (20) because of her husband, and Sarah imagines a scene in which the “smiling” (22) mother comes into the room to witness her bludgeoning her father. The opposition is the certainty about the mother’s color and the doubt about her fate. The second set has a similar opposition with the first half certainty about the father’s color. From the opening scene through the penultimate scene, he is the “darkest one,” the “blackest one of them all” (3). The second half is a welter of contradictions creating doubt about his fate. He “should die.… But he is dead” (4). He tried to hang himself; he did hang himself. He shot himself; Sarah killed him by bludgeoning him. “He is a doctor, married to a white whore” (23). Thus the certainty about color reveals Sarah’s self-loathing while the doubt about her parents’ fate reveals her unreliability as a narrator of the events and motives. Recalling the period of her life between 1953 and 1960 when she often found herself staring at a miniature statue of Beethoven on her desk and a photograph of Queen Hatshepsut on the wall, Kennedy writes, “I did not then understand that I felt torn between these forces of my ancestry…European and African…a fact that would one day explode in my work” (96). Sarah wants to be a white girl in the dominant culture. To that end she writes “poetry filling white page after white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell” and dreams of eating her “meals on a white glass table.” Her “friends will be white” (6). Her color frustrates her desire, however. She blames it on her father and exonerates her mother, who, like her, is a victim. The “wild black beast” (3) raped her mother, a violation that sent her to an asylum and “haunted” Sarah’s conception, diseasing her “birth” (4). But the rape is also a metaphor for the father’s imposition of his African ancestry on his wife’s European ancestry, just as his always coming “through the jungle” (3) to find Sarah is his attempted imposition on her. Whether dead or alive, the black man with his “evil” (5) values is forever encroaching. And that is why Sarah keeps killing him: to prevent further violation. At least that seems to be the explanation in the opening scenes.

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There is something else going on in the play that changes that explanation, and although it is in the text, reading Funnyhouse of a Negro does not bring it out as a production does, as the 1995 spellbinding Signature Theatre Company production did on a double bill with A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. The aural images are as important as the verbal and visual images. The play takes place in Sarah’s mind imaged as a funnyhouse, but the father keeps knocking on the door of her room. If he were a rapist, as alleged to be, he would break the door down. He knocks because he seeks to be admitted, and when he is, he is the assassinated Patrice Lumumba, who suffers the same hair loss as the wife and daughter and who repeats a portion of the latter’s opening monologue. Merging her father and Lumumba, who “represents the quest for African origins,” 23 changes the violent imposition to a quest that displaces her quest for European origins. A germ for a better explanation for the father always coming through the jungle is Kennedy’s admission of her deepening and depressing feeling that in Africa, to which her husband’s career had brought the family, she was “acquiescent to another person’s desires, dreams and hopes” (123) and not fulfilling her aspiration to be a writer. Thus Funnyhouse of a Negro is not only the drama of a divided self but also the drama of a divided family. The merger of the two men therefore introduces a shift in the narrative and the action’s direction. The verbal images are as hypnotic as ever, the visual images as disturbing as ever, and the aural images as jarring as ever, but since the slain spokesman for African independence from colonialism was a heroic figure for Kennedy, identifying him with Sarah’s father makes the father heroic and changes his mission in Africa and his motive for forever returning. He was in Africa to discover the origins of his race: “Genesis in the midst of golden savannas,” a dedication to his heritage that he so wanted to perpetuate in his family that he impregnated his wife, procreating the Negro Sarah, an act for which his daughter nailed “him on a cross until he bled” (14). Knowing she detests him, he keeps returning to beg for her “forgiveness” (18) for being black. According to the Landlady, he even tried to hang himself. The play, however, is not the drama of his guilt. The drama is in Sarah’s dealing with her guilt for denying her father. His persistent knocking for admission is her ever-encroaching pangs of conscience that will not be silenced. Her repeated bludgeoning is her repeated attempt to kill her conscience, but to no avail. Hence her guilt drives the action’s directions, shaping the drama. With the entrance of the merger of her father and Lumumba, the action moves linearly, ending in her suicide. The Landlady’s comment that her father hanged himself and boyfriend Raymond’s contradiction that he is alive and “married to a white whore” (23) should not be interpreted as objective clarifications, for in earlier scenes the Landlady “laughs like a mad

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character in a funnyhouse” (8), and Raymond as the “funnyman of the funnyhouse” (9) interacts with the Duchess. They too are unreliable narrators. With Sarah’s entrance in the narrative, the action also moves recursively, ending in her suicide. When Sarah appears to deliver her opening monologue, she has a “hangman’s rope about her neck and red blood on the part that would be her face” (4). Her funnyhouse her “only” place (7), she is in Hell, where the condemned, abandoning all hope of change, repeat in death what they did in life. In the play’s penultimate scene, the four selves repeat the father’s pleading for forgiveness from the daughter he calls a “nigger of torment” (21-22), an appropriate appellation because Hell is the place or state of torment. So racked by guilt and with One’s self-loathing magnified and Emiko’s and Jessie’s solution multiplied that she eternally hangs herself, Sarah is an infinitely more tragic figure than those three. Since it is “suffering that lies at the heart of King Lear,” 24 a contemporary play inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy is a good first play for the fourth category, for although the plays in the preceding three categories have suffering in them, it lies at the heart of this category’s plays. Young Jean Lee’s Lear is the contemporary tragedy. Once Lee burst upon the theatrical scene, that she had been a doctoral candidate in literature before switching to playwriting became common knowledge, but Lear going into production brought out the fact that the dissertation she never finished was on Shakespeare’s play. An interview brought out the shift she made in the suffering. “‘I conceived this work at a time when my dad and friends’ parents were starting to battle illnesses, so it seemed to make sense that this would be more about how the children—Cordelia, Goneril, Edmund, etc.—deal with mortality.’” 25 Since an audience unfamiliar with King Lear would have difficulty following the shift, the theatre program contained a synopsis of the Elizabethan tragedy’s two parallel plots through act 3. The first plot is Lear’s disinheriting of his daughter Cordelia in the division of his kingdom between his other daughters Goneril and Regan; her marriage to the king of France; and her sisters’ betrayal of the father that drove him into the storm. The second plot is the betrayal of Gloucester and his legitimate son Edgar by the illegitimate son Edmund that drove Edgar into the storm and blinded Gloucester. The synopsis concludes with the statements that the show begins at this point and that “nothing else that happens in Shakespeare’s text is necessarily relevant.” 26 Some of what happens is relevant, however, as a comparison of the plays’ first two corresponding scenes demonstrates. In the first scene of act 4 of King Lear, Edgar, disguised as the beggar Tom, is jolted out of his selfabsorption by the sight of blinded Gloucester. Taking the place of the old man who was guiding him, he volunteers to guide his father to Dover. In this scene self-absorption yields to pity and compassion. In the second scene of act 4 of King Lear, Goneril is also self-absorbed but differently in that she

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encourages Edmund, the new Earl of Gloucester, to think of himself as replacing her husband, the Duke of Albany, whom she despises for being “cowish.” 27 His berating of her for the “vile offenses” (4.2.47) to her father only solidifies her contempt for him. A messenger’s news that the Duke of Cornwall’s death at the hands of a servant who tried to intervene in sparing Gloucester from the blinding also solidifies but this time her self-absorption, for now she has to worry about her sister Regan, Cornwall’s widow, becoming a rival for Edmund’s affection. In this scene self-absorption yields not to pity and compassion but to greater self-absorption. With Lear opening in a luxurious Elizabethan throne room whose occupants are dressed in sumptuous Elizabethan costumes, a spectator would be hard pressed not to connect the contemporary play with the Shakespearean original, though the comparison reveals two distinct plays. The occupants of the first of the two scenes are Goneril and Regan dancing with “real pleasure” (61) to Elizabethan music. Edgar and Edmund also wearing sumptuous Elizabethan costumes enter and join the women dancing with “real pleasure” (62). The dance concluded, Edmund stands apart from the other three who, seated, engage in Edgar’s self-absorption detailing the meal he and his brother had until Edmund’s self-absorption interrupts. “I betrayed my father,” he confesses. Edgar, however, does not consider the blinding a betrayal: “Our father was a traitor!” (63) In Shakespeare’s play Cornwall refers to Gloucester as a “traitor” (3.7.3) after Edmund tells the duke that his father, who took him into his confidence, supports the invading French army. But the shift to the children, Edmund in this case, is only part of Lee’s shift in emphasis, for except for a momentary mention of Buddhism as a religion that teaches acceptance, the self-absorption yields to greater self-absorption. The four discuss how weight, hair, and erotic clothing—physical appearance—affect one’s self-esteem and the impression one makes on others. The brothers having exited the throne room, the second scene begins with Regan’s confession that she did the “bad thing to the old man with the gouging of the eyes and so forth” and Goneril’s attempt to get her to “Shut up” or change the subject (65-66). In King Lear although Goneril urges Cornwall to “pluck out his eyes” (3.7.5), she is not present in the torture scene, and although Cornwall does the actual gouging, Regan urges him on after he has taken the one eye: “One side will mock another, the other too” (3.7.71). In Lear the scene appears to duplicate the first of the two corresponding scenes of Shakespeare’s play when Goneril in the closing monologue confesses that she feels her father’s “suffering as if it were” her “own.” Yet the self-absorption does not yield to pity and compassion as Edgar’s does after seeing his blinded father. Just as in the contemporary play’s first scene, self-absorption yields to greater self-absorption with Goneril presenting herself as a person worth knowing: “I am a lavish tipper,” for example, and “I will love you as you are serving me” (66-67).

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Lee does what Gurney does in Another Antigone. In the introduction to the play, he writes that he tries “to work with and against the great Greek tragedy” (x). Lee works with and against the great Elizabethan tragedy. She works with it by retaining five of the original characters and the basic events: the disinheriting, the banishing into the storm, the gouging, and so forth. She works against it by shifting the suffering to the five who are the children but whose suffering is not as unrelenting as that of the two parents. And the reason it is not is because they are young. Take Goneril and Regan, for example. With no mention of the original husbands, they are single women caught up in the dating game and therefore in personal appearance and the impression they make on others. As Goneril says immediately after acknowledging that Lear is abandoned, “But what am I to do? My needs are essential” (66-67). For all of its lavish Elizabethan details, Lear is contemporarily realistic in that it dramatizes the divided allegiances of offspring to parents suffering the illnesses of aging and to their own romantic involvements, careers, and so forth. Their suffering breaks through, however, in each of the two scenes, as it will in subsequent scenes because no matter how the focus wanders, and the wandering can be tortuous, it always returns to their feelings of guilt, their pangs of conscience. Had Lee chosen a naturalistic presentation, the suffering could have become cliché laden. By choosing King Lear as the vehicle for the presentation, she splits the focus between the Elizabethan suffering and the contemporary suffering and divides the allegiance between another’s pain and one’s own needs. In King Lear Cordelia leaves with the King of France in 1.1 and does not reappear until 4.4, where her first words are her concern for her stricken father. She directs French soldiers to search for Lear and bring him to her so that the doctor can attend to him. With Cordelia’s entrance in Lear, the cast is complete and the double vision or dual perspectives are in full force, for Goneril and Regan speak first, asking their married sister about her experience with her husband France and in the country France. When she introduces a topic, she says she has “forgiven” their father for disinheriting her but then in the next breath asks, “Where is the old bastard?” If ‘suffering’ is substituted for “banishment,” Regan’s question leads into the heart of Lear: “Cordelia, how did you survive your banishment?” Cordelia’s earlier comment is more concise than the sentences in which she frames an answer to Regan’s question. “I have learned acceptance” is the concise position that she repeats in the ensuing dialogue. To Goneril’s recognition of Lear’s “suffering,” she says, “That’s life.” To Regan’s recognition that suffering is their lot too, she says, “You have to embrace it” (68-70). The suffering they have to accept is initially the knowledge that they abandoned their fathers: feelings of guilt that keep breaking through the surface in every monologue and dialogue of any length and that drive them into the storm looking for their parents. At one point, for example, Edgar tells

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Edmund that he guided their father to a cliff where thinking he was jumping from a height, Gloucester landed on the ground and died, a claim that Edmund disputes. The suffering they subsequently have to accept is the knowledge that Goneril found while searching unsuccessfully for her father: “Nothing can protect you from nothing.” In a monologue in which “nothing” is repeated seven times (81-82), she relates that she once thought God protected her, but she has to relinquish that consolation of religion. This recognition is the play’s core, and it is presented not only in a monologue but in scenes in which the characters reminisce about childhood experiences; declare their love for one another kiddingly and seriously; and compulsively talk and act in images violent and gross: the brothers grappling, for instance, or the sisters arguing about whether their bedbugs are real or imaginary, or Goneril accusing Cordelia of “fucking all the horses” (84). For Shakespearean editor G.B. Harrison, there is a devastating irony in Lear’s “Nothing will come of nothing” to Cordelia’s “Nothing” as her requested profession of love (1.1.89-92). “He is wrong—from this one word ‘nothing’ begins the whole devastating tragedy” (1139). In Lee’s play the recognition that life is a journey to the nothing that is death is the tragedy. Life is purposeless, and existence is therefore absurd. Bereft of traditional goals and supports, contemporary humans do not have to suffer the tragedy alone, however. They can take solace in other goals and supports; they can share the journey with loved ones. When Paul, for the actors now “‘play themselves’” (87), removes the mustache and beard he wore as Edgar, the shift visually signals the end of the Elizabethan tragedy as a vehicle for suffering. The delivery of Okwui, the actress who played Goneril, of Lear’s act-5 threnody carrying the dead Cordelia just before he dies is the verbal signal. The new vehicle is a reimagined episode from Sesame Street in which Big Bird, played by the actor who played Edmund, struggles to cope with the death of Mr Hooper in a monologue that can be interpreted as the response to Goneril’s “nothing” monologue and is the antithesis of all the self-absorption monologues. The “nothing” at life’s core does not change because Mr Hooper, who disappeared in it, will never return, yet “something” (94) can come from it, redeeming the suffering of the guilt for not being more caring when one’s aging parents were suffering illnesses. Memories of loved ones can, such as the wonderful story of the father who while in eighth grade was recruited to play the piccolo in the high school marching band, but since no one taught him how to play it, he would pretend to play it when the flutist played the flute. He stayed in the band pretending to play only because the members were treated to noodles after performances. “I’ll miss you” (98), repeated nine times, closes Lear, a play that Lee dedicates to the memory of her father. About himself a character, Nissim, in Harry Kondoleon’s Christmas on Mars says, “I’m a tragic character and the tragedy of it is I have to go on

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living.” 28 He does not say that, however, until the last scene, and neither is he in the first scene, which has to be examined nevertheless because not only is it an introduction to the play’s action, it is an introduction to Kondoleon’s theatre. An unmarried couple, Bruno and Audrey are admiring an apartment he discovered. To secure it, though, in a city where available apartments are a premium, they need her mother, Ingrid, with a credit rating they lack to sign the lease that day. Audrey is hesitant about involving her mother because of physical abuse she claims to have suffered as a child, but Bruno, who wrote to Ingrid asking her to join them, persuades her to agree. All that she has to do is smile while he does the talking. Giddy with the realization that they will have an apartment, he tickles her and they kiss, at which time she reveals her pregnancy. Now they are euphoric because with the baby they will be starting a new family and with it a new life. Deciding to marry, they hear a knocking at the door. The arrival is Nissim, Bruno’s roommate, who tracked him after reading the letter he wrote explaining that he expected to be married and would be moving out of the apartment they share. His purpose is to prevent the marriage by getting Audrey to understand that she is making a mistake. His first reason is that he and Bruno are gay lovers. He is gay, but Bruno, who is not, is shocked by the “infantile lie” (63). Yet Audrey is not shocked because once having had a lesbian relationship, she is tolerant of various forms of sexual expression. Momentarily stymied, Nissim, turning to his second reason, produces letters written by his roommate’s “dick-crazy girlfriends” (66). For a second time, she is not shocked because she assumes that people like themselves in their late twenties have had numerous affairs, even though he professes not to have had them. Becoming hysterical as he reviews what he considers the couple’s lies, compromises, and doubleness, Nissim faints and lies on the floor as Ingrid arrives. At this juncture the fun and the pain move into high gear sending the characters over the top. Kondoleon’s theatre combines the naturalistic and the surrealistic, the realistic and the fantastic, the normal and the bizarre with the modes sometimes clashing and sometimes fusing. Regaining consciousness while remaining on the floor, Nissim asks Ingrid to light his imaginary cigarette. Although he stopped smoking, he continues to simulate the act by inhaling and exhaling. Rising, he asks her that should she leave the building to buy him a pack of cigarettes but not in the lobby because the price is inflated. Bruno asks what difference it makes where she buys them because they are imaginary. “That’s no reason to get gyped” (78), Nissim replies. He has also just been fired as an airline steward. Upset by Bruno’s letter, he screamed during a takeoff. Yet he does not care about losing his job because stewardesses always having sex with the pilots forces stewards to double up on the responsibilities, doubling their hostility because stewards “wanted to be stewardesses in the first place” (70). For the pain, he assumed that the

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bond formed by years of being roommates in college and the city would keep the two men together. His hope therefore was that by seeing the beauty in him and the relationship, Bruno would come to love him. To the other’s accusation that he is not being realistic, he retaliates by blaming the accuser: “You not loving me” (64) causes the ugliness. Pursuing Bruno because he feels rejected, Nissim is Bruno’s inescapable past. The relationship of Audrey and Ingrid duplicates somewhat that of the two men minus the comedy. Unable to restrain herself, Audrey breaks the agreement made with Bruno to simply smile while he talks and verbally attacks her mother for rejecting her. Despite the latter’s plea for a second chance, the daughter screams at her, “Get out! You didn’t want me as a baby and I don’t want you now: get out!” (75), before bolting into a corridor. With her out of the room, Ingrid, shocked by the charge that she physically abused her, denies it and proceeds to tell what really happened between the two. It is her story of rejection. With Audrey’s father, whom she never married, gone, she fell in love with a man who wanted her without the child to go away with him. She therefore left Audrey with a sister, only to have him reject her after squandering her money. Since today is the first time mother and daughter have seen each other since then, each is the other’s inescapable past. Christmas on Mars is not a series of monologues delivered by one speaker after another. Even before he faints, Nissim, the play’s central character, begins his story of rejection. As a baby he was aware of adults’ duplicity; as an adolescent he invented characters to keep him company in his lonely “misery” (66). Regaining consciousness, he continues, periodically breaking in on whatever is happening and whoever is speaking. Reared by faithless parents, he was shunted off to racist aunts when they committed suicide. As an adult he married for the sole purpose of adopting a child, but the children agencies sent to him and his wife ran away as soon as they could, and she too disappeared. Nissim’s story of rejection, duplicated by Audrey’s and Ingrid’s stories, becomes the story of abandonment that Kondoleon’s theatre tells, and it is a more terrible story of abandonment than those of other contemporary American theatres. God abandoned humankind by absconding in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. God abandons by not wanting to be bothered with prayers that interrupt His sleep in John Guare’s The General of Hot Desire. God abandons in Kondoleon’s theatre by creating humans with needs that He frustrates for His enjoyment. As a character in The Houseguests describes Him, He is a “vicious host.” 29 Since He is not a loving God Who redeems life through self-sacrifice, humans are trapped in their old selves. As a character in Love Diatribe describes his condition, it is the human condition: “I’m sick of me and until I get over being sick of me I fear I’ll be forever sick of everything else too.” 30 Yet love remains the hope throughout Kondoleon’s theatre for rebirth. That is, when one is loved, another sees the beauty in

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one’s soul, sees the potential in one for discovering a new self: for being reborn in a new life. With no divine model as a guide, however, rebirth into a new self through love is elusive. In Kondoleon’s early plays, vampirism is one way of gaining a new self. A woman in Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise tells another woman that her husband is a “bloodsucker” who attached his name to her literary creation. “I wrote The Motel of the Heart and he stole it! Right out of my head!” 31 In later plays theatre not only replaces vampirism, it becomes the divine model. “For Mr. Kondoleon, who died of AIDS [in 1994] at 39, theater was quite literally divine. The idea of plays, as they figured within his work, allowed mere mortals to recreate the world, to give form to voids, to transform anger into ecstasy and to speak like angels, or how angels might sound if heaven were a penthouse with views of the park. Hatred, illness and mortality could be turned into song and sunlight and then back into darkness again, with an arbitrary snap of the playwright’s fingers.” 32 Theatricality that fills the vacuum left by a benign divinity’s abandonment of humankind does not nullify reality; it opposes reality. Characters like Nissim, who are thrust into their old selves, continue to seek for love. “We must believe in love, Audrey—human love—I do, I must, that’s all there is on this planet and when there isn’t any there’s nothing” (99). Audrey grants that one can experience tenderness and empathy, for example, but denies love. Although she does not define it, she must mean an experience that changes a person. Without love therefore characters are their own inescapable pasts suffering their existential torment in a life that in the words of Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise is a “torture chamber” (21). Christmas on Mars unfolds within this framework of opposition. Act 1 ends with theatricality in ascendancy. Learning that Audrey is pregnant, Ingrid has her mood swing from depressed to euphoric. She offers to do anything to be part of the new family, giving her the second chance she seeks: a rebirth proving she has overcome her past and discovered a new self in the new life that the baby’s birth symbolizes. Nissim follows her mood swing with his own euphoria, claiming the baby is his because Bruno once promised him anything he wants for saving his life when a burglar attacked him. He verbalizes the birth’s significance: “The baby will love me in the way no one and nothing has ever loved me” (90). Yet when act 2 opens months later, reality has set in. Audrey is overdue so that the new life has not begun; Ingrid, who has been supporting the family, hints that she has limited funds; and Nissim tries Bruno’s patience by refusing to leave and not only because he awaits the birth of his child but also because Bruno spurns his love. He gets his revenge by telling Audrey that her fiancé and her mother have been intimate, a revelation that sends all four characters back to “zero” (95) or the time when the two visitors arrived. With love denied the four hurl accusations and recriminations at one another.

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Audrey breaks off her engagement to Bruno, and Ingrid announces that she is flying to a vacation island with a man she met on the subway, prompting Nissim to cry out, “DON’T ABANDON ME!” (104) Kondoleon must have snapped his fingers, in the image in Brantley’s review describing his theatre as divine, because the two forces’ interaction shapes the play’s final scenes with the theatricality opening the future for the couple and reality closing it for the uninvited visitor. In a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation, Ingrid lies on the floor and invites her daughter to walk on her as a way of relieving her hatred. The strategy works. Bruno proposes again to Audrey, who accepts. Resolving to marry him, she feels her first contraction, and as she leaves, carried by him to the car for the ride to the hospital, she calls Ingrid “Mommy” (109). With nowhere to go because he cannot continue living in the apartment and the landlord evicting him from the apartment he shared with Bruno, Nissim climbs into the cradle purchased for the baby. There is no new life for him, however. Here he speaks the lines, “I’m a tragic character and the tragedy of it is I have to go living. If only I knew there was some curtain to be drawn or light that could go out and I could go home and be someone else it would be bearable but I have no place to go and no one else to be” (109-10). He must suffer in his old self until death ends his misery. Death claims the next play’s protagonist but not until the final scene. The protagonist is Troy Maxson, and the play is Fences, one of August Wilson’s ten-play cycle, each play representative of a 20th-century decade of AfricanAmerican life. Suffering is more intense in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for example, in that its protagonist, Herald Loomis, was forcibly separated from his family and held in servitude for seven years. Released, he searches for his wife, only to discover when they finally meet that she had to think of him as dead and create a new life for herself apart from him. Reconciled with her and reuniting their daughter with her, he is free to create a new life for himself. Herald is more the victim whereas Troy is more the agent. The study chose Fences, however, because of the differing interpretations of its final scene. The time of Fences is 1957 with the final scene in 1965; the setting is the yard fronting the home of Troy and Rose Maxson and their son Cory where the conversations and interactions take place. Here Troy narrates the autobiography that explains the self he created from his suffering. One of eleven children of a sharecropping father whose life was a hellish struggle to eke out a living, he left the farm at fourteen to walk to the city and after marrying and fathering a son to drift into a life of crime that ended when he killed a man and was sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary. Released and vowing never to be remanded, he met and married Rose, his first wife having long since gone her own way, and fathered a second son in a culture in which men and women simply abandoned families in search of new opportunities. Bono,

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Troy’s friend from the penitentiary years, summarizes the culture. “Back in those days…they walk out their front door and just take on down one road or another and keep on walking.” 33 Bono never knew his father, and Troy’s mother walked when he was eight. But his father was different. Although he fought with the older man, which is why he left home when he did, he credits him with being responsible to his family by not walking. Responsibility the bedrock of the self he, Troy, created, it steels him against future suffering, for no matter what injustice or prejudice he encounters, he can hold his head high because, like his father, he stayed and provides for his family. The consequence of opposing the moral and the affective to make the former imperative is the repression of the latter: his emotional nature. When in answer to his father’s question about why he, Cory, receives from him such necessities as food, shelter, and clothing the son says, “Cause you like me,” Troy explodes. “Not ’cause I like you! Cause it’s my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you!” (38) Yet he is affectionate with Rose by putting his arm around her in their first scene together and with Bono by telling him, “I love you, nigger” (56). It is easy to see why. Both defer to Troy’s authority. Bono reminds his friend that he followed him to learn about life, and Rose tells Cory that because she wanted a marriage with a home, a family, and a man she could depend on, she did not assert herself but submitted to his father to “keep up his strength” (98). That Troy demands the same deferring or respect from Cory is understandable because he provides for his son by working as a garbage collector. That Cory does not submit as his mother did is understandable because he is trying to discover himself. He is not disrespectful; he is a teenager who, like all teenagers, distances himself from his parents to learn, not who they want him to be but who he is. Hence when Troy hears “Yeah,” he demands “sir” because he is the “boss” of his house (36-37) while Cory, hearing the demand for “sir,” hears yet another restrictive rule. If the above were the extent of their relationship, it would be fairly normal given the ages of the two. There is much more to the relationship, however, and it is not fairly normal. Cory, who plays high school football, asks his father to sign permission papers allowing him to be recruited by a North Carolina college whose representative will be coming to the house. But not only does Troy refuse to see the representative, he tells the coach that his son does not have permission to play on the high school team. The superficial reason is that Cory disobeyed by quitting his after-school job, despite the son’s explanation that his not working is temporary and that he has an arrangement that gives him back his job after football season is over. The deeper reason springs from Troy’s bitterness at what he perceives as racial discrimination that prevented him with his Negro league statistics from playing baseball in the Major Leagues. As he says to Rose, who supports Cory, “The white man ain’t gonna let him get nowhere with that football” (8). She,

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however, meets every objection her husband raises. Racial discrimination did not deny him a Major League career; his age, over forty, did. Turning to their son’s ambition, she counters that he plays football because that is what “boys in school do” (8) and the playing in college is not preparation for a professional football career but the opportunity to get a college education. Not only does Troy not budge, the other reasons he advances are suspect. At no point does he argue that by quitting his job, Cory will no longer contribute to the family’s income because depending on the teenager’s contribution would detract from his autocratic rule. The money the son earns does not help defray household expenses; it helps him with his “school clothes” (8) and enables him to date his “girlfriend” (36). But he could forgo new clothes until after football season, and he and the girlfriend could forgo movies, for example, as other couples in the same situation must be doing. Finally, Troy argues to Rose that he wants “him to move as far away from my life as he can get” (39). But learning a trade such as automobile repair that he advocates would not take him as far as a college education would. In his study of Fences, Kim Pereira cites the many political, social, and cultural changes in the decade in which the play is set in which African-Americans “mounted their most spirited challenges on the bastions of white supremacy.” 34 Yet Troy denies his son a college education. Cory has a reason why he did: “Afraid I was gonna be better than you” (86). He speaks the line to his father in the penultimate scene, the one in which the two men become physical with each other, the one in which the father evicts the son from the house, never to return until the day of his funeral. If the explanation for Troy is that he directs all of his energy into maintaining the self he created as a man responsible to his family, he pays a price for not softening the self-image as ruler of his domain. He does soften it but in another domain with fun-loving Alberta. As early as the play’s opening scene, Bono tells Troy that he saw him “walking up around Alberta’s house…more than once” (4), and as his involvement deepens, so does Bono’s warning that he is jeopardizing his marriage. Confessing to Rose that he fathered a child with Alberta, Troy struggles to verbalize the involvement. “She gives me a different idea…a different understanding about myself. I can step out of this house and get away from the pressures and problems…be a different man.…I can just be a part of myself that I ain’t never been.” Maintaining rigid control over his emotions at home, he relaxes the control in Alberta’s house, where he can “laugh” (68-69). A divided self, Troy keeps his life with Alberta separate from his life with Rose. When his wife asks him whether he plans to continue seeing his mistress, he replies, “I can’t give that up” (69). When he misunderstands her accusation about giving, he grabs her arm, insisting that he gives everything he has but only from the self he shares with her. He shares another self with Alberta but only so long as she lives. That is, when she dies, Troy does not

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accept their child, Raynell, as a living reminder of her. Accepting gives him the opportunity to solidify his monolithic first self: a man responsible for his family. When he asks Rose to care for Raynell, she agrees because she cannot deny the child a loving mother, but at a price. Accepting, she says to her husband, “This child got a mother. But you a womanless man” (79). Having betrayed their marriage, he alienates his wife as he will their son months later, evicting Cory after they fight following his refusal to say “excuse me” (84) when attempting to get by his father sitting on the front stoop. Rose, however, ultimately forgives him, a man who “meant to do more good than he meant to do harm” (97), in a monologue that induces Cory, who had not planned to attend the funeral, to attend, thereby reconciling with the memory of his father. Pereira sees in the play’s positive ending Troy’s strength of purpose empowering his family members, endowing them with a “surer sense of who they are and a greater instinct for survival.” 35 Wallace, on the other hand, sees Fences ending “very bleakly” in that by denying his son a college education and thereby prompting him to join the Marines, Troy sacrifices Cory to the Vietnam conflict. For her, Wilson’s theatre is “arguably tragic.” 36 If Fences is interpreted as an Aristotelian tragedy, the action follows from a good man making errors in judgment: thinking that he could have a relationship with a woman that would not affect his relationship with his wife and that he could make decisions about his son’s future that would not affect his relationship with him. Not Aristotelian is Troy’s lack of recognition of the consequences of his errors. During one of their conversations when Bono warns his friend that he is jeopardizing his marriage, Troy tells him that the relationship with Alberta “sets right in my heart.… Cause that’s all I listen to. It’ll tell me right from wrong every time” (63). Scenes later speaking so that Rose can hear him, he says, “I ain’t sorry for nothing I done. It felt right in my heart” (79). Fences is important for this study, however, not because its ending is both positive and bleak—it is not the first play examined with such a combination—but because the errors follow from the necessity of Troy creating a self in which he could take pride. In her review of a 2011 production of A Raisin in the Sun, Anita Gates made the connection between the Lorraine Hansberry play and the Aristotelian conception of tragedy. “It qualifies as a tragedy: big dreams are trampled because of one man’s misjudgment. And yet hope remains. Progress is made. Life goes on.” 37 The examination of the play will make the connection with the necessity for creating a self. The time of A Raisin in the Sun is between World War II and the present or 1959, the year the play premiered. It is approximately the time of Fences: 1957. Immediately different is the setting. Whereas Fences is set in the yard fronting the three-member Maxson family’s “ancient two-story brick house,” A Raisin in the Sun is set in the fivemember Younger family’s three-room apartment whose central room func-

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tions as living room, dining room, and bedroom for the youngest of the five, a pre-teenage boy. The hallway bathroom serves more than one family; cockroaches inhabit the apartment’s cracked walls. The family has resided here, paying rent, for decades. The play opens on the adult Youngers talking about the change in their lives that an anticipated event can bring. The event is the arrival in the next day’s mail of a check for ten thousand dollars from the life insurance of the matriarch’s late husband. As matriarch Lena or Mama chats with daughterin-law Ruth, she reminisces about the time when she and Big Walter (to distinguish him from their son Walter) moved into the apartment expecting to have their own house within a year. The dream deferred for decades, the check can make it happen now. “Been thinking that we maybe could meet the notes on a little old two-story somewhere, with a yard where Travis [Ruth and Walter’s son] could play in the summertime.” 38 The power of her dream, kept alive for decades, gives an insight into the power of the self Troy created. He could hold his head high because he owned his house, “paid for with the sweat of his brow” (85). The statement told to Cory is not totally accurate, since he needed his brother’s disability payment, but it is consistent with his self-image. Mama is not the only Younger with a dream. Her daughter Beneatha’s dream is twofold. One part is career; she wants to be a doctor. Since her choice means that some portion of the insurance money must be set aside for medical school and therefore subtracted from the amount available for his dream, brother Walter, questioning the legitimacy of her choice, advises her to “be a nurse like other women—or just get married and be quiet” (38). Yet even if she settled for his choices, she still has a second part that she connects with the self she wants to create. When she first met a Nigerian student at college, she told him that she wanted to talk to him “‘about Africa. You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity!’” (62) The play’s comedy stems from her quest’s convergence with and divergence from the cultural attitudes and dreams of the two young men courting her. Once the wealthy George Murchison dismisses her heritage as “nothing but a bunch of raggedy-assed spirituals and some grass huts” (81), there is no question about who the better man is, although Beneatha is not ready to commit to Joseph Asagai’s dream that they marry and she return as a doctor with him to Nigeria. The tragedy stems from Walter’s quest to realize his dream. A chauffeur driving a white man’s limousine, he tells his mother the consequence of not realizing it. “Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me—just plain as day. The future, Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me—a big, looming blank space—full of nothing” (73). “Nothing” is the key word. Without the dream fulfilled, he cannot create a self in which he can hold his head high. As for the dream itself, he wants to invest the insurance money, along with the money that two partners

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invest, in a liquor store. They will be owners of a business guaranteed to be profitable. Seeing how the dream’s denial is destroying him, Mama relents and entrusts him with the money left after she put three thousand down on a house, the amount to include a portion for Beneatha’s medical school. Walter, however, gives the full amount to one of the two partners to secure the liquor license, only to learn that he absconded with his and the other partner’s money. More so than Fences, A Raisin in the Sun conforms to a conception of tragedy in which one accepts suffering or one accepts his/her role in causing it. Both Troy and Walter suffered in the past, but Troy’s suffering ended before his play opens because he had created a new self. Walter is still suffering in his old self as a chauffeur that ends temporarily as he pictures to Travis the new self as business owner and in that new self dances with Ruth until the revelation of the partner absconding crumples him to the floor “sobbing wildly” (128). All the adults suffer. Mama, for example, beats him “senselessly in the face” (129), and when Asagai stops by, Beneatha, her dream blasted, repeats her brother’s language for the consequence of not being able to create a new self: “Me, I’m nothing” (132), though he buoys her spirit by proposing marriage. Troy shows no recognition for the suffering he causes Rose and Cory. Walter recognizes his role in the others’ suffering by attempting to make restitution. Earlier that day a spokesman for the all-white community in which Mama purchased the house visited to offer to buy it at a financial gain to the family. The basis of his argument is that races are happier when they stay within their segregated communities. Rejecting his offer, Walter ordered him out of the apartment. Now prepared to accept, he phones the spokesman, who left his card, and invites him back. Troy is not in the closing scene. Rose defends him, and a reconciled Cory joins Raynell in singing their father’s song. Walter redeems himself in the closing scene. Realizing that his action with the partner was an error in judgment from which he learned a lesson, he also realizes that taking the spokesman’s offer would not be another error in judgment but would be a betrayal of everything that his race and family believe in. With his arms around his son, the “sixth generation” (148) of Youngers in America, he rejects the offer, in this action creating a new self as a man who takes pride in the family’s African-American heritage. A Raisin in the Sun ends with the Youngers moving to their new home. In the two plays just examined, tragedy stems from a character’s need to maintain the new self-created or to create a new self. In the next play, the tragedy stems from something that so arrests a character that he cannot create himself. The narrator of Adam Rapp’s Nocturne, identified only as the Son, was seventeen, Jason’s age when he accidentally killed Danny in Rabbit Hole, when he accidentally killed his sister. There is no comparison with

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Jason, however, because his play takes place fifteen years later when he is thirty-two. Yet he is still haunted by the accident, reliving in scene 1, a scene laden with images of death, driving a car with defective brakes that do not hold when “something small” 39 runs into the road. No matter how he alters the syntax of a sentence with a form of kill or how he defines or conjugates the verb, he ends up killing his nine-year-old sister. Death so pervades his narrative that a piano whose distant sound is heard waits in “coffinlike stillness” before being played and then produces sobbing notes when played. The “final movement of a sonata” is an “almost-human tragedy” (9-10). The above images precede the reliving of the human tragedy. Hence the subject of Nocturne is the tragedy’s effect on the Son, and the play’s action is his struggle to come to terms with the tragedy. The tense in the line “The accident happens like this” (11) reveals the hold that the tragedy has on him. Except for a shift to past tense when relating that he played the family’s Steinway piano until he was seventeen, he narrates the accident in the present tense from the time he leaves work at his summer job to the time, though injured when he has to crash the car to stop it, he walks back to discover his sister’s decapitated body. Back in his car in the narrative and trying to reconstruct the accident differently in a series of “still frames” (22), he imagines hitting a dog or a garbage can. Forced to return to hitting his sister, he imagines her in a series of still frames that would be comic were his memory not impinging on his consciousness. For example, he sees her popping up from the road after being hit wearing a clown’s “rainbow suspenders” (24). Admittedly he is “tweak[ing]” the “drama” (23), but since the outcome does not change, he continues in the present tense with his mother visiting him in the hospital, where she extends her hand to comfort him but instead retracts it into a fist in her lap. Home from the hospital, he responds to his father’s invitation to join him in the study only to have the parent insert a gun in his mouth but not fire it because his mother coaxes him into removing it. Recognizing that his father is reacting not so much to his daughter’s death but to another disappointment in a lifetime of them and with his mother so suffering from clinical depression that she will soon move out of the house forever, the Son ends this portion of his narrative by telling how he left the house and the Illinois hometown to begin a “fifteen-year disappearance” in New York City (40). At this juncture the play’s epigraph becomes relevant. It is the final line of the Wild Palms story whose five segments alternate with the five segments of the Old Man story in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. Having bungled the abortion that killed his lover Charlotte Rittenmeyer, with whom he was having an illicit affair, Harry Wilbourne is sentenced to “‘hard labor in the State Penitentiary at Parchman for a period of not less than fifty years.’” 40 In prison he is visited twice by Charlotte’s husband, who before the courtroom appearance offers to post bail for him, advising him to jump bail and disappear,

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perhaps in Mexico. Wilbourne rejects the offer. The second time, after the courtroom appearance where the accused pleads guilty, the husband gives him a cyanide tablet that he destroys after Rittenmeyer leaves. Wondering what happens to memory after death, Wilbourne realizes that if “memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory” because it is grounded in the body. He therefore concludes that if both he and Charlotte are dead, so is their memory. The final line is “Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief ” (324). Choosing what amounts to a life sentence at hard labor over suicide in order to keep memory alive, he becomes for one Faulkner scholar an image of “Man Suffering.” 41 Reliving the accident in which he killed his sister, the Son considers the possibility that she committed suicide because from the house’s driveway one can see an approaching car fifty yards away. She may have had a “death wish” (27). But he cannot pursue that possibility. Instead, he accepts responsibility for the accident, even though the used car that he bought at his father’s insistence from the family’s insurance broker had a defective brake line. Neither does he commit suicide: the nothing in the epigraph. Since accepting responsibility and suffering—the grief in the epigraph—are fundamental to tragedy, the Son becomes a tragic figure whose memory is grounded in his body whether he is in Joliet or New York City. He so disappears that he is detached from a sense of self, becoming the third-person “He” (41) in the narrative still told in the present tense in which he gets a job in an East Village bookstore and rents a nearby room. In his solitary existence, reading books is his “great escape” (43) except for a used manual Underwood typewriter that he buys to replace the piano in his prior life. It does not call to him for years, however, and when he does type on it, he composes a novel that reveals the impossibility of totally escaping, for the novel is the story of a guy who accidentally kills his sister, has a gun inserted in his mouth by their father, and flees to New York City. Although a redheaded girl that he meets at the bookstore’s poetry readings helps him get the novel published, he is impotent with her. Since sexuality is one manifestation of a person’s humanity, he knows that his life is blighted, and he ceases returning her phone calls. “Something inside him has died” (49) sums up the fifteen-year disappearance of a man who awakens in the morning with a “kind of cold intestinal sorrow” (51). Sharing in another person’s suffering finally enables the Son to come to terms with his suffering. One day an envelope arrives containing a short story entitled “The Story of My Life” written by his father, who asks him to come home because he is dying of cancer. Also in the envelope are the father’s new address and train fare. Immediately the Son refers to himself as the firstperson “I” (57). He regains a sense of self because belonging to someone or something outside of the self gives one a sense of identity. About the protagonist of his novel, the Son said that he “has trouble connecting to people”

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(47). Taking a train to Joliet, the Son is willing to try to connect or reconnect to his father, who is trying to connect or reconnect to him. Although circumstances have reduced the dying man to a second-floor apartment overlooking a rusted train bridge, he had the Steinway moved with him, and on the piano bench is a copy of his son’s novel that he read, though any mention of cars or the accident in the novel does not open up conversation. The Son tells him that he neither drives nor gets into cars and that the accident is in a work of fiction, drawing his father’s “‘Of course’” (66). They do, however, reconnect. When, crying, the father beseeches his son to stay, he does, and they talk about his fifteen-year disappearance, for instance, and when the older man falls asleep, the younger one sits next to him, holding his hand, whose fingers curl around the holding hand. He dies that night. The scene replaces the scene fifteen years earlier when his father should have comforted him, stricken by the accident, but put a gun in his mouth. Reaching out to comfort his father, stricken by the cancer, he liberates himself from his exile, though not from his grief. When in Rabbit Hole Becca allows Nat to talk about her, Becca’s, brother’s death, she asks her mother whether the grief ever goes away. Nat says, “No.… It changes though.… At some point it becomes bearable” (51). The grief “does not expire” for the Son either; “it simply changes temperature” (79). He can live with the change, however. Alive, he phones the redheaded girl, and they will try to reconnect. No longer in solitary confinement, he walks around Lower Manhattan marveling at the city’s sights, sounds, and silence. And when in his room, he will create, for the Underwood, silent for years, “calls to” him (81). Thus by choosing grief—accepting suffering—over nothing, he becomes something. He creates himself, and it is a self that can comfort another self’s suffering. The audience can never know what the Son would have been had the accident not happened, but it knows how the suffering helped him develop as a human being. The study ended the first category, isolation, with a play that although its author thinks of it as a tragedy, the study does not. Albee is the playwright, and The Goat is the play. The study ends the fourth category, suffering, with a play that although some critics think of it as a comedy, the study does not. Suzan-Lori Parks is the playwright, and Topdog/Underdog is the play. The back cover of the published text describes it as a “darkly comic fable.” A back-cover blurb from a New York Times review of the original 2001-2002 productions praised it as a “vibrant comic drama.” The New Jersey Theatre Alliance publishes a periodic calendar of the state’s professional productions. For the period July 2012 to February 2013, it included a Two River Theater Company production with Parks directing “her darkly comic tale.” Gates reviewed the production. Citing the comedy in the play, and it has funny bits throughout, she nevertheless saw the “tragedy.” 42 So does this study see the tragedy.

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A line that Booth, the younger of two African-American brothers, speaks to his older brother Lincoln in the final scene gives the reason for the tragedy. Booth desires a woman named Grace, who, he insists, not only desires him but “on her knees” 43 asked him to marry her, despite her failure to appear at the appointed time in the apartment for a romantic evening, although he subsequently says the fault was his in that he confused the dates. Lincoln never challenges his brother’s version. What he does is advise Booth to get a job with a regular paycheck because Grace will not tolerate “working her ass off and yr laying up in here scheming and dreaming to cover up thuh fact that you dont got no skills” (92). He rejects the advice because working for someone does not interest him. Lincoln’s assessment of his relationship with Grace, however, turns out to be correct because in the final scene, Booth confesses that he killed her: “Telling me I dont got nothing going on” (112). As in Lear “nothing” is the approach to the tragedy. As Grace saw him, Booth could not or would not create a new self but would always be a shoplifter. She was right but not because he wants to be a shoplifter. He wants to create a new self in which the relationship between Booth and Grace is a minor action to the major action of the relationship between the brothers. Lincoln was a three-card monte dealer and a good one who made a lot of money that he spent as fast as he made it until one day he realized that he did not have the “taste” (59) for hustling anymore and that he should quit. His mistake was in playing one more time because that was the day Lonnie, a member of his crew, was shot and killed. He lives in Booth’s apartment because his wife threw him out, but since he works, he brings in the money that the two need for necessities. He earns his salary as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator “unrelated,” as Parks explains in the introduction, to the Lincoln impersonator in her earlier work, The America Play, but similar in that he sits in an arcade exhibit for customers who, pretending to be John Wilkes Booth, pay to “play at shooting him dead.” The difference between the two works, Parks continues explaining, is that Topdog/Underdog would focus on the character’s “home life” (4), which means his interaction with his brother on their differing attitudes toward three-card monte. Lincoln could return to hustling in that he retains his skills as the dealer, but he does not want to for reasons that the study will examine. Obliging when Booth tells him that he must vacate the apartment because Grace will be moving in, he begins packing. He is not initially obliging, however, when his brother presses him on hustling. Booth is a shoplifter and a good one as evidenced by the two complete outfits he steals, one for himself and one for Lincoln, as scene 2 opens. He does not spend money, though, and not because he shoplifts. Unlike his brother, who spent the inheritance his father gave him, he still has his in the stocking his mother gave him, the knot still tied. He would not even use the inheritance to pay for the ring he got for Grace, stealing it instead. Yet as

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good as Booth is as a shoplifter, he does not want to be one all his life. He wants to be a three-card monte dealer, but to be that he needs Lincoln to teach him the skills. Scene 1 ends with Lincoln’s remark to Booth that their father gave them their names as “his idea of a joke” (29). A theatregoer might suspect therefore that Parks so named the characters as her idea of a joke. She may have, but even if she did, Topdog/Underdog is no joke. By having one character earn his living by appearing as a historical figure and by having both characters differ in their attitudes toward a game in which the crew uses appearance to lure a mark or victim into playing and the dealer uses reality to take the victim’s money for playing, Parks establishes the contrast of appearance and reality as early as scene 1. It opens on Booth practicing the self he aspires to be and winning the “imaginary loot” (12) in the appearance of a game as opposed to a real game. When his brother enters, he asks him what he thinks of the apartment’s appearance. Lincoln, however, addresses the apartment’s reality; it has no running water or bathroom. To prove his point in a later scene, the ex-dealer urinates in a paper cup because he is too lazy to walk to the communal bathroom in the hallway or because it is occupied. Still in the first scene, Booth tells his brother about the ring for Grace. “Diamond. Well, diamond-esque, but it looks just as good as the real thing” (14). Later scenes prove the point that for the wannabe dealer appearance passes for reality. In preparation for the romantic evening, he has a tablecloth covering a table on which are glasses and candles. Yet when the tablecloth is removed, the table is really two milk crates. For all of his talk about his passionate sex life with Grace, in fact he masturbates while looking at the appearance of—pictures of—women in girlie magazines that he stores under his bed. More dramatically significant than proving points, the contrast between appearance and reality distinguishes the brothers’ attitudes toward the dealer’s role. When Lincoln, still in costume, enters the apartment, Booth is too engrossed in winning the imaginary game to notice until sensing a presence, he whirls around to accuse his brother of looking “all spooked out” (13). The implication is that for a split second Booth saw the dead president. Lincoln tells a story that seems to be a digression but is actually crucial to the play’s action. On the bus ride home, a kid asked him for his presidential autograph. He obliged but took in return the kid’s money. Connecting kids and hustle victims because they cannot distinguish between appearance and reality, the story also connects Booth with kids and victims in his split-second reaction. Booth, however, does not see himself as a victim. He sees himself as a dealer, but to achieve that select status, he proposes that his older brother return to dealing and that he join the crew for the experience. Lincoln declines for the reason that he has put hustling behind him. His decision angers Booth, who yells at him, “YOU STANDING IN MY WAY,

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LINK!” Furthermore, from Booth’s point of view, he is a hypocrite by pretending that he no longer hustles because impersonating is a hustle. From here on throughout the play, Lincoln tries to get his younger brother to understand the distinction, a distinction that can be summarized in the line: “When people know the real deal it aint a hustle” (26-27). Three-card monte is a hustle because people are lured into playing. The arcade game is not a hustle because people pay to play. Three-card monte is a hustle because the players choose the wrong card based on appearance and not on reality; the dealer, however, must know the difference. The arcade game is not a hustle because the players do not think they are shooting the president based on appearance; they know the figure at whom they are firing blanks is really an impersonator. Booth, however, does not understand the distinction. Lincoln does. In a subsequent scene, when talking about the arcade game’s players paying to shoot Honest Abe, he says that they “shoot him, where they shoot me I should say” (33). The brothers’ differing attitudes toward appearance and reality reveal their differing attitudes toward reinventing themselves or creating new selves and as early as the first scene with Booth’s announcement that his new name is “3-Card” (23). Here too throughout the play, Lincoln tries to get Booth to understand the distinction by discussing his own life and by advising his brother. Lincoln begins discussing his life in the second scene when he tells Booth that simply putting on different clothes does not make him a different person, explaining in the third scene that although appearing to be the president looks easy, impersonating really is “hard” work (57). In other words, one does not create a new self simply by appropriating a new name. He tries with another image in the final scene. Now that he has been terminated from his arcade job, he realizes that although he had come to enjoy the impersonating, it is time to move on. Just as Lonnie’s death told him that he had outgrown the role of dealer, so the termination tells him that he “outgrew” (95) the role of impersonator and must discover a new role. In other words, creating a self is a process of growth rather than an instantaneous acquisition. The advice is epitomized in the statements: “First thing you learn is what is. Next thing you learn is what aint” (77). Lincoln does not wait until the second scene to advise but begins in the first scene as soon as he realizes that Booth is practicing dealing the cards, and the advice is to practice in “smaller bits” (23) because one does not acquire a new self in a fell swoop but by gaining mastery of the self step by step. In scene 3 the ex-dealer instructs the wannabe dealer to practice “every day” (51) and in scene 5 to learn at his side watching his moves. Booth, however, convinced that he is 3-Card, resists, boasting, for example, that he has the “words down pretty good” (79), even though, as Lincoln explains, dealing requires coordinating mouth and hands. The action comes to a climax in the penultimate scene when Booth, picking the correct card, “struts around gloating like a rooster” and crowns himself

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“champ” (81). Although Lincoln warns him that he is “never gonna learn nothing” (83), Booth ends the instruction and leaves the apartment to determine why Grace failed to appear. By winning in scene 1 an imaginary game and in scene 5 a practice game—the appearances of real games—but unable to distinguish between the two, Booth sets in motion the play’s tragic inevitability. Irritated by the constant advice and criticism and angered by Lincoln calling him “double left-handed” (98), he turns on his brother, challenging him to a “real” (101) game—that is, one with money. Lincoln puts up five hundred dollars he won by dealing, for he returned to the streets for a successful day of hustling, and Booth puts up the stocking purporting to contain five hundred dollars their mother gave him as his inheritance. Unprepared for reality, he loses. For the dealer, the reason is simple: “But you was in such a hurry to learn thuh last move that you didnt bother learning thuh first one” (111). Lincoln’s triumph is short-lived, though, because just as Booth learns too late the game’s reality, so does Lincoln learn too late his younger brother’s reality. Humiliated by his older brother calling him “double left-handed,” laughing as he collected the winnings, and moving to cut the stocking’s knot and possibly reveal that their mother left nothing, 44 Booth kills him for the same taunt that Grace made. Telling him that he had “nothing going on” (112), she denied his ability to create a new self. As their argument escalates into the challenge, Lincoln tells him the same thing: that he would “never…do nothing” (98). For one moment Booth tries to believe that he will “go out there and make a name” (114) for himself as 3-Card before crumpling to the ground, his dream of a new self dashed. If Martin whimpering because no one understands him for falling in love with a goat is tragic and Booth sobbing as he hugs the body of his brother whom he has just killed is comic, this study does not know what the words tragic and comic, tragedy and comedy are meant to convey. Topdog/Underdog ends this section because it leads into the next section on two counts. It dramatizes the pressure in America to create oneself and sometimes not once but many times over and the consequence of the success or failure of the pressured creation not only to the one creating but to others. Secondly, more than any of the preceding plays, it highlights three issues that are instrumental in the creation. To indicate the issues’ prevalence in the contemporary American theatre, this closing mini-section will illustrate them in the works of playwrights not in the previous sections. Telling Booth that he “got no skills” (92), Lincoln is telling him that it is unrealistic to think of becoming a dealer: a self that requires consummate skills. The issue is that a new self must be realistic. A middle-aged woman, Kate, in Beth Henley’s Revelers who failed in her attempt to become an actress earlier in life wants to believe that a second attempt will be successful, arguing that one is “never too old to make dreams come true.” A second

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character, Caroleena, disagrees, arguing that she “could never be a brain surgeon.” Momentarily miffed, Kate rebounds by insisting that she could if she set her “mind to it and worked very, very hard.” Caroleena deflates her dream by saying that her age would disqualify her for entrance into medical school. “And it’s too late,” she continues, “for you to be a prima ballerina or a concert pianist or the King of Norway or even a jockey.” 45 Criticizing Booth for refusing to learn the required skills step by step, Lincoln is telling him that creating a self is not an instantaneous acquisition but a process of growth. Maria Irene Fornes’ Abingdon Square gets underway with the marriage of fifteen-year-old orphaned Marion and fifty-yearold widowed Juster. One year later Marion is still struggling with the problem every teenager has: discovering herself. As she says in a monologue, “I feel I don’t know who I am.” 46 Although she is grateful to her husband for providing a home for her, the age discrepancy intensifies the struggle, dramatized in Fornes’ signature economical style. Juster’s son by his first marriage is teaching his stepmother to dance when his father enters. Marion wants Juster to partner with her, but he declines, preferring to watch her and his son dance. After an intervening scene in which she records an imaginary love affair in her diary, in a scene of a single image, Marion dons a “hooded cloak” (18) to enter the streets and follow a young man who will become her lover many scenes later. She has to test the self’s fitness before she can commit herself. Finally, Booth’s counterattack that Lincoln cannot return to dealing— “No matter what you do you cant get back to being who you was”—that provokes the brother’s retort—“Yr outa yr mind” (97)—is the contrast between the situational self and the true or essential self. To elude arrest by the police, Margo in Len Jenkin’s Margo Veil goes to a salon where characters go to reinvent themselves in new identities. There the director assures her, “You’ll have all the skills and memories of your new self, and somewhere deep inside, you’ll still have yourself.” 47 The assurance is confirmed near play’s end when Vivian, returning to the salon, has her “body and soul back together” (50) as Margo. Richard Foreman’s theatre exemplifies this issue. Since actors perform not as characters but as impersonated impulses vying for recognition, one could interpret his plays as a series of selves created for changing situations. But since Foreman creates the plays, he is the essential or true self generating impulses or potential selves from which he, the playwright, selects to create. That is, the impulse that wins recognition is the play. His theatre also illustrates the issue that creating a self is a process. An impulse does not spring into existence as the recognized self. In My Head Was a Sledgehammer, the impulses detach as students from the chorus and gradually ascend until one becomes the Professor. The art completed, the Professor descends into the dissolving flux from which new impulses emerge.

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This section completed, the study dissolves to reform into a new section.

Chapter Three

Eugene O’Neill

The preceding section closed highlighting the second reason for Topdog/ Underdog ending the section: issues instrumental in the creation of a self. This section opens highlighting the first reason: the pressure to create oneself and the consequence of the creation’s success or failure, issues encountered in Austin’s inability to take a “new step” (x) in Gurney’s introduction to Later Life, Fr. Rivard’s desire for a “new start” (44) in The Runner Stumbles, One’s despair at having his “new life” (50) thwarted in Four Benches, and Jessie’s rejection of Mama’s argument in ’night, Mother that she is “starting all over” (45) because she “never was” (50). To indicate the reason’s prevalence in the contemporary American theatre, this opening mini-section will illustrate it in the works of other playwrights, beginning with a play by an Irishman, Brian Friel. Examining the “different kinds of pressure” that force his characters to leave Ireland, in an introduction Seamus Deane forefronts the “conflict between emotional loyalties to the backward and provincial area and obligations to the sense of self which seeks freedom in a more metropolitan, if shallower, world” in Friel’s early plays. 1 Philadelphia, Here I Come is an early play. Since the future of Gar O’Donnell, who describes Ireland as “dead-end” (79) is limited to inheriting his father’s dry goods store in the village of Ballybeg, he chooses to emigrate to Philadelphia, where he has a job in a hotel awaiting him and where he fantasizes that someday he might fulfill the obligations of the self by becoming the president of a chain of hotels. The loyalties he will fulfill by storing memories of Ireland the night before his flight to “run over and over again” in America (99). Jon Robin Baitz’s The End of the Day opens with an Englishman, Graydon Massey, in America. A flashback scene has him a boy in England, where his father advises him to leave because “it’s all dead here,” likening London to Dante’s “Inferno.” 2 The implication is that change is impossible in Eng69

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land, since the Inferno is the place in which the damned are what they are for all eternity. A naturalized citizen in California, Massey, pondering the meaning of America, comes up with the insight that it is the place where “you can reinvent yourself. You can become yourself and nowhere else in the world is this thing possible” (119). Characters in other plays make the same point. Knowing that her husband is beset by doubts about her behavior that had her arrested in Fez, Abril Kempler appeals to his love for her in Allan Havis’ Morocco: “Let’s re-invent ourselves. Let’s fall in love with our better parts.” 3 Knowing that her husband feels that his celebrity father outshines him, Diane McBride in John Guare’s Marco Polo Sings a Solo has advice for him: “You can invent yourself.” 4 “In an age when we are constantly able to reinvent ourselves…” begins a paragraph in Tom Donaghy’s author’s note to one of his plays. 5 For Alden, Ashley’s husband in After Ashley, a difference between European writers and American writers is that European writers do not “embrace self-determinism the way their American counterparts do” (81). So far plays have emphasized the creating. Another play emphasizes the absence and presence of the creating. In Ted Tally’s satire, Coming Attractions, Lonnie is a small-time burglar apprehended trying to rob a laundromat, and Manny is a small-time theatrical agent. Combined, they become celebrities when the agent persuades the burglar to don a costume and become the Halloween Killer shooting people at random. Looking back over their careers, Manny reminds his partner: “I was Mister Nothin’, Lonnie—born Nowhere, and livin’ there still. Until I met you.” Lonnie reciprocates: “I was nobody too, Manny. You made me a star. I’ll always be grateful for that.” 6 The first two in a trilogy of Richard Nelson’s plays dramatize not the presence and absence of creating but the success and failure of it. In Conjuring an Event, Charlie is a journalist jaded from years of reporting events outside himself who wants to report an event emanating within himself. To prepare, he preps himself for the event, which occurs when bobbing and weaving in a boxing ring, he transforms the disparates of existence into a Whitmanesque prose poem in which he becomes “the consumer and the consumed. I am the one and I am the many!” The play ends with him celebrating the creation: “I am…Me!” 7 In Jungle Coup Hopper is a journalist on assignment to report a jungle coup but who is actually fabricating it because news organizations pay for stories of violence whether real or imagined. When a rival news organization sends its man to cover the event, Hopper retreats into the jungle to continue from the interior. There his watch stops and his equipment breaks. Thrust upon himself, he proposes reporting increasingly fantastic stories until he stops. Unable to transmit a self, he leaves the jungle, identifying himself as “Nobody.” 8 The following two plays dramatize the consequence of not having a self accepted and not creating one. When Arnold in The International Stud seg-

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ment of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy discovers that his gay lover has been avoiding him because the lover is bisexual and dating a woman, he replies in response to the lover asking him what he is thinking, “I am thinking about how it feels to be a no one in the life of someone you love.” 9 Perhaps the most famous lines in this entire mini-section are spoken by boxer Terry Malloy to his brother Charley in Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront. Years earlier Charley and the union boss had him throw a fight that he could have won but was a loss that marked the beginning of his decline. Spoken by Marlon Brando in the film version, Terry details the consequence of being denied the opportunity to create himself—to be the opposite of Hopper’s Nobody: “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” 10 Although the following consequence of the success or failure of creating is not as prevalent as the above consequences, it deserves inclusion. Told by heroine Heidi of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles that creating a self makes her friend a person but overcreating keeps her from being a person, Susan replies, “I’m sorry, honey, but you’re too deep for me. By now I’ve been so many people, I don’t know who I am.” 11 She has created so many situational selves that she has forfeited her true self. Finally, plays satirize celebrity as the ultimate self to create. Guare’s Bing Ringling is a playwright in Rich and Famous whose one production was a fiasco while his boyhood friend Tybalt is a Hollywood star. Bing tries to get his parents to understand that he is a failure as a playwright and that he may have chosen the wrong profession, but they do not want to know that. When he does get them to understand, they make a mental adjustment as they end the conversation. Calling him Tybalt, they direct him to “get rid of Bing, Tybalt. You’re a star. Bing’s a real loser.” 12 Gurney’s Tony resigned his professorship in The Perfect Party to host what he hopes will be the perfect party that he can parlay into a lecture tour and his own television show. “He desperately wants a review. Because he desperately wants to become a celebrity,” 13 his wife tells the woman assigned to cover the event. She understands because she is a stringer with the New York newspaper who hopes to parlay her review into a full-time position as the paper’s celebrity reviewer. Robert is a first generation Chinese-American in David Henry Hwang’s Family Devotions. Explaining America to a new arrival from China, he relates how he rose from working in grocery stores to a bank president in which capacity he was kidnapped and held for ransom, an event that made him a celebrity. “Anyone can make money in America,” he summarizes. “What’s hard is to become…a celebrity.” 14 For Robert, it is the American Dream’s supreme achievement. The study turns to the three playwrights acknowledged as America’s major tragedians of the 20th century to see if the approach to tragedy as issuing from pressure on characters to create themselves illuminates their

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plays. 15 The study will examine only selected plays, though they are ones on which their reputations rest, because it makes no pretense of being all encompassing; there are many excellent studies of the tragedians’ oeuvres. One of his early one-act plays, Ile, is not a work on which Eugene O’Neill’s reputation rests, yet for Travis Bogard, when O’Neill brought its concern together with another early one-act play’s concern, the “design of his early tragedy would be complete.” 16 This study agrees with the judgment of the play’s importance but argues that by itself it contains the germ of the later tragedy. The setting is Captain Keeney’s cabin on the whaling ship Atlantic Queen. The time is afternoon during which Keeney quashes one rebellion and foments another one causing it to erupt. Two years earlier the Atlantic Queen sailed on a two-year voyage. One year later it became encased in ice in the Arctic seas, where it has been ever since. The two years expire on the day of the play so that with provisions running low and the crew in ill humor after a year of being stranded in the unrelenting cold, they approach Keeney to turn back for home, navigationally possible because the water to the ship’s south is clear. He, however, will not turn back without a full ship of ile: Yankee for whale oil. Hence when the crew’s spokesman threatens mutiny, Keeney levels him with a fist to the jaw, and when the crew’s deputation pull out their knives, the captain and mate confront them with revolvers. Ordered back to their posts, they leave the cabin in “cowed silence” 17 and remain cowed because at play’s end when the ice begins to break up, they respond to the command to lower the boats in pursuit of a school of whales. Keeney does not cause the other rebellion. Mrs Keeney is responsible for its presence because she is responsible for being on board the Atlantic Queen. Tired of being alone in the house with her husband away at sea, she persuaded him to allow her to sail on the voyage despite his objection that a whaling ship is no place for a woman. Relenting, he even had an organ put on board for her, and apparently she was all right during the first year. Only after the ship became stranded did her mental health begin to deteriorate, evident from the concern of the steward and cabin boy at the play’s opening when they comment on her crying “to herself without makin’ no noise” (115). Where Keeney is responsible is in fomenting the encroaching irrationality, for she implores him to turn back or she will go mad in the Arctic cold and silence. Although on the verge of ordering the turnabout, he stops when the mate informs him that the ice is breaking up to the north where a school of whales has been spotted. Leaving the cabin, he leaves his wife to the overwhelming madness. If Ile is interpreted naturalistically, the ice, cold, and silence are features of the Arctic seas. If, however, Ile is interpreted metaphorically, the elements are features of the male psyche. The play cannot be exclusively metaphorical, for the ice breaks up at play’s end whereas the male psyche in the person of

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Captain Keeney solidifies. Nevertheless, the metaphoric interpretation explains the play’s conflict. Mrs Keeney’s feminine psyche has ventured into alien territory, that of the male psyche, a psyche she romanticized alone at home “dreaming about the old Vikings in the story books” and imagining her husband as “one of them” (126). Yet once at sea, she discovers the alien psyche’s reality. “All this horrible brutality, and these brutes of men, and this terrible ship, and this prison cell of a room, and the ice all around, and the silence” (125). It is this reality against which her psyche rebels. From Keeney’s perspective, Mrs Keeney cannot understand his unwillingness to turn back without a full ship because she is a woman whose traditional role is caring for the home while his is forging a career outside the home. It is not the “damned money” (121) he will receive for the whale oil that keeps him waiting for the ice to break up, Keeney insists. He has to “prove a man to be a good husband” (132) is one reason he gives his wife, but it is not as compelling as the other reason he gives her, which is proving himself to the other whaling skippers. “I got to git the ile” (128), he repeats. The play’s title symbolic, he has to secure the I. On every voyage he must return with a full ship to maintain his status as “first whalin’ skipper out o’ Homeport” (128). On every voyage he must recreate himself: the I of his self-image. Since Ile closes on the image of Mrs Keeney playing madly on the organ, the tragic consequence of the pressure Keeney feels to create himself falls on her. On June 6, 1939, O’Neill selected for development the two most promising sets of notes he had made for plays. Although what became The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night are “linked not only autobiographically but also creatively”—autobiographically in that the events dramatized occurred in 1911-1912 and creatively in that O’Neill reimagined the events for the dramas in 1939-1940—he developed The Iceman Cometh first. 18 This study, however, takes up the latter drama first. For biographer Louis Sheaffer, “Mrs. Keeney is the earliest image of Ella O’Neill in her son’s writings” and therefore closely resembles “Mary Tyrone of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” 19 This play can also be construed as the first in a trilogy of plays though not as tightly constructed a trilogy as Mourning Becomes Electra. Something is encroaching in the first act, set in the living room of the Tyrones’ summer house on a summer morning in 1912. The something is not the madness of Ile. Until such time as the action clarifies it for the theatregoer as opposed to the critic familiar with O’Neill’s biography, it is the past but only the mother’s, Mary Tyrone’s, past. Other pasts are in the open. With Mary and the younger son Edmund out of the room, the father James Tyrone and the older son Jamie vent their mutual antagonism. Jamie accuses his father of being a cheapskate by retaining Doctor Hardy, a “quack,” 20 to attend to Edmund, who appears to be seriously ill, and James accuses his son

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of squandering his talents to settle into sneering “at every damned thing in the world” (731). Although Mary’s past is not yet brought into the open, it is the visual and verbal focus of a play that could be subtitled Homecoming, for her behavior in the past few days that is different from that of the two months since her return home, though from where is not clarified, yields the focus. Visually the men look at her for evidence of the suspected behavior while hoping not to detect it. Verbally they cannot forget the past. Acknowledging their concern that Edmund’s illness may provoke the behavior to resurface because it first surfaced in her sickness following his birth, Jamie says to his father, “I can’t forget the past. I can’t help being suspicious. Any more than you can.… And it makes it hell for Mama! She watches us watching her—” (734). She also contributes to the verbal focus. With his father and brother out of the room, Edmund reluctantly reveals that he is concerned, prompting his mother’s agreement: “How can any one of us forget?” (741) The act closes on the visual image of Mary alone in the living room, her fingers drumming on the arms of the chair, “driven by an insistent life of their own, without her consent” (742). Since the fluttering of her hands is associated throughout the act with the self-consciousness she feels by being watched, the past cannot be repressed. It will resurface. The connecting of three events and attitudes in the past with those in the present that will culminate in the dreaded resurfacing begins in act 1. The first is the attitude toward Edmund’s illness, introduced in the opening moments in Mary’s concern and in her and James assuring each other that it is only a summer cold. The concern becomes ominous, however, as James and Jamie discuss his condition with Mary out of the room, a discussion that connects Edmund’s condition with the second attitude, introduced in Mary’s outburst that she “wouldn’t believe a thing” (727) the attending physician, Doctor Hardy, said and with the past in the two men’s concern for her condition. Just when Mary needs freedom from worry in which to rebuild her strength, the severity of the diagnosis, consumption, links not only Edmund’s illness with her father’s death but also with her illness following his birth, an illness in which, for Jamie, her attending physician was a quack like Hardy. Shifting alliances among the characters in which one will support another one time and then clash with the other another time create connections. For example, Mary agrees with Jamie in not trusting Hardy’s judgment yet complains to Edmund that she feels his brother’s suspicion more than his or their father’s. Act 1 closes with a clash in her attitude with that of her husband. James introduces the third attitude by telling Jamie that having his mother with them in the summer house has made the “home…a home again” (734). Yet the family has never had a home by her standard. Furthermore, she tells Edmund, had he and his brother grown up in a home, their lives would be different and in an implied connection, he would not be ill.

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The dreaded resurfacing begins in act 2 and is immediately apparent to Jamie and to James, who recognize it in Mary’s detachment. Connecting her present relapse with relapses in the past, they clarify her addiction for the audience. Connecting the three present attitudes and events with those in the past, she clarifies the futility of expecting any other outcome. She feels herself a transient in the summer house that for her is not a home, just as she has always felt herself a transient living in second-rate hotels while traveling with James on tour as an actor. Unable to cultivate friends to visit in their homes and to invite to her home, she has felt herself outside of a community. To James’ suggestion that she have their chauffeur take her for a drive in the automobile he purchased for her, she says, “I never know where to tell Smythe to go” (764). And with the three men deserting her as they always do to drink in town, she will be left physically as well as spiritually alone to worry about Edmund, for example, despite the sanatorium doctor’s warning that she should have “peace at home with nothing to upset” her (769). For doctors like Hardy, she has nothing but hatred, reminding her husband that her addiction, though she does not speak the word, began with the treatment prescribed by the doctor who attended her in her sickness following Edmund’s birth: “And yet it was exactly the same type of cheap quack who first gave you the medicine—and you never knew what it was until too late!” (757) By act-2’s end, the past and present fuse. When James reminds his wife of the night in the past when deprived of the drug she tried to commit suicide, Mary pleads with him not to humiliate her by remembering, only to remind him that it was a quack of a hotel doctor whose pain-killing prescription got her started. When he begs her to “forget the past,” she calmly replies, “Why? How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too” (765). So long as the summer house is not a home, Edmund’s illness duplicates her father’s illness, and quack doctors pontificate about curing oneself with willpower, Mary feels trapped in the continuum. A way out of the trap has been developing for her, however, once she started to take the drug again. She remembers the home in which she was reared: her father’s home that she “gave up” to “marry” James (756). She also remembers the Convent where she went to school and where she had friends from homes where she would “visit” them and who would “visit” her in her “father’s home” (764). The way out therefore is to reconnect with the past that predates the continuum, recover her faith in the Blessed Virgin’s imbuing love for the fallen, and regain her lost soul—her “true self” (749)—that the addiction has taken from her. The state that predates the continuum, the state in which Mary has taken “refuge and release” from “present reality” when act 3 opens, is a “dream” (772). There are two problems in achieving it, however. Once she starts taking the drug after a period in which she is clean, she does not know how

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much to take so that she is about to take more but stops when she hears James and Edmund returning from the afternoon in town. The vehicle for achieving release from present reality is the memory; the agent for activating the memory is the drug; the route for reaching the destination is the continuum. To arrive in the dream’s past, she has to pass through the continuum’s past that intensifies the hate she feels for the men, particularly James for denying her a home, for example, in the love-hate relationship she has with them. Analyzing the different kinds of memory in Long Day’s Journey into Night, John Henry Raleigh writes that “empirical studies of memory show that normally we tend to highlight happy memories and repress unhappy ones (one informed estimate says that fifty percent are pleasant, thirty percent are unpleasant…).” He goes on to show that in Mary the balance is altered with “fifty-six percent unhappy, forty-four percent happy.…” 21 Through act 3 the happiest moments occur at its opening with Mary released from reality dreamily telling Cathleen, the second girl, about her life as a schoolgirl when she first met James. As the drug begins to wear off, however, and she realizes that she needs to take more, the unhappy memories begin to take over, intensified by the presence of her husband and younger son, who enter the house. When Edmund protests that she should not have Cathleen get filled her prescription, ostensibly for a rheumatism medicine but actually for morphine, her antagonism flares out, linking ostensibly rheumatism but actually the addiction with his birth and taunting James about his fear of going to the poorhouse as an excuse for his stinginess. Yet in the intermingling of the dream and reality, she calls her son “My baby!” and protests that she loves him “most” (787-88). It is her husband, though, on whom in the dream she lavishes her love of thirty-six years that began at first sight when her father took her backstage to meet the dashing actor. She bestows the lavishing in the act’s opening moments, but as the drug wears off and reality advances, she mocks the “silly romantic” dream (779). No wonder that for Mary “only the past when you were happy is real” (777), and that past predates the continuum. When the dream’s past recedes, so does the released girlishness, leaving Mary a “cynically sad, embittered woman” (779) in the present reality. When act 4 opens, James is a “sad, defeated old man” (792). Since he escapes the present reality by returning to the dream’s past, he should release a youthfulness comparable to Mary’s youthfulness. He does not because his and Mary’s pasts that predate the continuum’s reality are diametrically opposed, and that is the root of the tragedy. Stung by Edmund’s criticizing him for being a miser, James relates his predating past in which his father deserted the family, making him the man who at age ten had to work in a machine shop while he, his mother, and his sisters were twice “evicted from the miserable hovel we called home” (807). Edmund has heard the machine shop story many times, but the audience has not and hearing it for the first time

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can understand why James would think of the summer house as a home, although it does not meet Mary’s standard. Neither Edmund nor the audience has heard of James’ predating past in the theatre. At the “high spot” (809) in his career as one of America’s most promising actors, he forfeited his future by purchasing the rights to a box office success that made him wealthy but also so identified him in the role that he could not get other roles. Even if memory exaggerates—Mary’s the security and privileges; his the insecurity and hardships—the exaggeration does not alter the opposition. The pre-marital opposition of backgrounds determines the post-marital opposition of directions the two take in creating a self. Ironically the analysis begins with their agreement rather than their opposition. With James and Edmund home from the afternoon in town in act 3, Mary continues talking about the past, not about falling in love as she did with Cathleen but about her wedding gown. “Where is it now, I wonder?” she muses (785). Telling Edmund in act 4 about his past as an actor, James muses, “Where is it now, I wonder?” If the language alone does not make the connection, Edmund’s wry comment does: “It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress” (811). James is referring to his career’s high spot: fellow actor Edwin Booth’s praise of him as Othello, which he had the theatre manager record. The praise occurred when he was twenty-seven, two years prior to his marriage at twenty-nine, for he is sixty-five and married thirty-six years. The good fortune continued for a few years after the marriage, which was an “added incentive to ambition” (810), before he realized that he had squandered his talent. He could call what he had lost his true self, but he does not, and neither does he search for the theatre manager’s recording of Booth’s praise because he knows that the past is not recoverable. At age sixty-five he cannot expect to be given roles he could have played in his thirties. He has to continue creating himself as he moves forward. Mary does search and she does find the wedding gown about which she wondered where she had put it, but the gown is not what she is ultimately searching for. The play’s closing scene eliminates any confusion about what she has lost because she enters the living room with the gown, and she knows it is the gown she is carrying, but she is still searching, although no longer for an item that she may have put in an attic trunk. In the act-3 dream scene with Cathleen, Mary talks as if meeting or marrying James was her high spot because by falling in love with him, she forgot about her two ambitions: becoming a nun or a concert pianist. Once the drug begins to wear off, however, she mocks her “silly romantic” dream and reminds herself and the audience that she was “much happier” in the Convent before knowing James “existed” (779). According to this passage, the high spot preceded the marriage when she was sixteen or seventeen. Since she is fifty-four and married thirty-six years, she was eighteen at the time of the ceremony. And just as her husband’s good fortune continued for a period into the marriage, so did hers,

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for in the play’s closing line, she remembers falling in love with James in the spring of her senior year and being “so happy for a time” (828). One other piece of evidence indicates the direction Mary takes that is diametrically opposed to that of her husband. In the act-3 dream scene, she tells Cathleen that she has not touched the piano “in so many years” (777), yet she plays it as if she were an “awkward schoolgirl” (823) just prior to entering in act-4’s closing scene. She is deeper into the predated past searching for but not finding the faith she lost: her true self as a girl who wanted to be a nun and who could pray to her namesake, who would listen. She tried to pray in act 3 but stopped because she knew that a dope fiend’s mechanical recitation would not fool the Blessed Virgin. She has to continue trying to create or find herself as she moves backward into the dream. The addiction ended the Tyrones’ happiness. That is, the addiction as a naturalistic drug. But the addiction can also function metaphorically. Trapped in a continuum in which James imposes his conception of a home while being insensitive to her conception and need and in which James and then their sons desert her for their barroom conception of a social life while being insensitive to her conception and need, Mary escapes the male psyche’s reality by activating the memory to retreat into the dream of a happy past and self that predate the continuum’s past. The characters are therefore trapped in a love-hate relationship. Mary and James love each other for sharing thirty-six years of their lives. James and the sons, however, hate Mary for not exercising her willpower to accept their male reality, instead retreating into the predated past. Mary, however, cannot surrender to their reality because it is simply more of the same: hotels, bars, and so forth. She hates them for not understanding that her needs are different from theirs. She cannot do what they want and forget the past because she was happy in the past. Thus Long Day’s Journey into Night ends in an impasse with James and Mary hopelessly asking each other to create a new self. That the addiction is naturalistic—and in O’Neill’s or any other playwright’s oeuvre, the study analyzes the drama and not the biography—adds to the tragedy. Because Mary needs the drug to activate the memory and the dream so that she can escape the continuum’s reality to search for her lost self, she will never be able to regain it because the addiction causes the loss. Thus Long Day’s Journey into Night ends in a hopeless impasse with the happy past and self into which Mary retreats forever summoned only to forever recede. The pattern of the tragedy in O’Neill’s theatre is forming. Mrs Keeney wants to be with her husband in her romanticized conception of life with him, just as Mary remembers loving James in her romanticized dream of being with him. In their love the two women want their husbands to create new selves that will accommodate their needs. Yet that is something the men cannot do because the creations would destroy their sense of themselves.

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Loving their wives, they in turn want them to create new selves that will accommodate their needs, yet that is something the women cannot do because the creations would destroy their sense of themselves. In this impasse Mrs Keeney goes mad as the reality of life with Keeney overwhelms her whereas Mary takes morphine to escape the reality of life with James. The Hairy Ape, though written years earlier than the plays in the construed trilogy, continues the forming by presenting in the first two scenes the two psyches or forces in the tragedy. The first scene is the firemen’s forecastle of a transatlantic liner where Yank, the “most highly developed ” 22 of the firemen, squelches Paddy’s reminiscing about the days of clipper ships when the crews, the ships, and the sea were one and Long’s politicizing to get the men to see that they are being exploited by the dominant capitalist class. For Yank, the firemen make the ship run. “We belong,” he tells them, in this “man’s job” (44), for they and he as their leader are the “ting” (48) in the coal they feed to the engines to propel the ship. Yank sees himself as driving energy, as primal power in a scene that ends with the men filing into the stokehole to begin their shift. Two productions of The Hairy Ape visually imagined the opposing forces. In the program for the 1988 RPM Players production, director Anthony Di Pietro, anticipating the audience’s discomfort, identified his approach as an “adaptation of the Post-Russian-Revolution theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold and his style of ‘Biomechanics.’” Though discomforted by the non-realistic approach, the audience had no trouble recognizing the emphasis that in Di Pietro’s words was “very physical.” The actors’ constant movement, baring of teeth in snarling grins, and flexing of muscles made the forecastle masculinity’s bastion. The second scene is the promenade deck where two “inert” (50) women lounge in deck chairs. Everything about the scene is the opposite of the first scene. The women are members of Long’s capitalist class, for the twentyyear-old Mildred is the daughter of the chairman of the shipping line’s board of directors and the older woman is her aunt accompanying her as chaperon. Not one with Paddy’s sea, they are “incongruous” and “disharmonious” (50) in the sunshine and wind blowing across the deck. Detesting each other yet forced to travel together, Mildred taunts her aunt, who mocks her niece’s desire to visit the stokehole for which she secured the captain’s permission by lying that she has her father’s endorsement. The scene ends with the aunt calling her niece “Poser!” and the niece slapping her aunt’s face while retaliating with “Old hag!” (55) The 1995 Wooster Group production as a work in progress with Willem Dafoe as Yank and Kate Valk as Mildred emphasized the contrast between the two forces. Their faces and torsos grimy, with prehensile tails when they turned their backs to the audience—and at one point they mooned the audience—and lumbering to create a swaying ship, the stokers were “inchoate”

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(39). In ballerina costume with oversized slippers daintily lowered from step to step as she descended, Mildred was “artificial” (50). One can discuss the exaggerations as instances of the play’s expressionistic mode, but the emphasis was the contrast in the genders’ perceptions of each other. Confronting each other in scene 3, Mildred reacts to Yank’s “abysmal brutality” by almost fainting. Reacting to the insult to his pride in his masculinity, Yank roars, “God damn yuh,” as he hurls his shovel at the door that closed after the engineers carried Mildred out of the stokehole (58). Alienated, he spends the rest of the play searching for her to “git even wit her” (64), but he never finds her. What he finds is the one place where he can belong: death. The Hairy Ape does not complete the tragic form because Mildred’s motivation is incomplete. She tells her aunt that she would like to “discover how the other half lives” in order to “help them” but does not “know how” to. Since her aunt, however, mocks her claim to “sincerity” as a “pose” (5152) and since Mildred never reappears after scene 3, the audience cannot be certain of the motivation. The pattern continues forming in the visual imagery in which Mildred descends into the male bastion, drawing Yank upwards toward her realm but is incomplete in Yank’s objective. He does not want to create a new self for her benefit; he wants to have her appreciate his existing self. As he says in his ranting to the firemen in scene 4: “I’ll show her I’m better’n her” (64). The pattern is complete but only visually in Yank’s death. The two remaining plays in the construed trilogy complete the pattern verbally and visually, beginning with the first drama that in 1939-1940 O’Neill developed from the two sets of promising notes. Like Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh takes place in the summer of 1912 but not in a New England summer house. Its setting is the bar’s back room of Harry Hope’s five-story hotel on Lower Manhattan’s West Side where its denizens spend their days and many of their nights when not upstairs in their rooms in drunken sleep drifting in and out of consciousness. Hope and ten denizens who are joined by four more, one of whom is the day bartender, are present awaiting the arrival of Hickey, a hardware salesman who not only attends the annual celebration of Hope’s birthday party but is its driving force, spending his money on booze for all the attendees, most of whom are dependent on Hope for room and board. A newcomer, Don Parritt, who arrived the preceding night looking for a resident, Larry Slade, is also present. For Bogard, “The Iceman Cometh is perhaps the most ‘Greek’ of O’Neill’s work, built around a central chorus, complete with choregos in Harry Hope, and the three principal actors, Hickey, Slade and Parritt.” 23 The second play in the construed trilogy, it could be subtitled The Libation Bearers. In the second play in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, the libation bearers are the chorus of slavewomen sent by Clytemnestra to her murdered husband Agamemnon’s grave to appease the past by appeasing his spirit because of a

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dream she had in which she bore a snake that when she held it to her breast bit the nipple drawing blood. In The Iceman Cometh, the libation bearers are the chorus of Hope’s denizens appeasing the past by constructing the first part of their two-part pipe dreams. Hope and Jimmy are two of the appeasers. According to Hope, the death of his beloved wife Bessie twenty years earlier so devastated him that he ceased taking an active role in the ward where he was a minor Tammany politician and withdrew into the hotel with its booze where he has been ever since. According to Jimmy, the discovery that his wife was unfaithful so devastated him that he ceased being a newspaper correspondent and withdrew into the hotel with its booze where he has been ever since. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the morphine summons Mary’s dream. The character other than Mary who can correct the romanticized, idealized past is James, who tells Edmund to take his mother’s memories with a “grain of salt”: that the Convent nuns had her believing she could be a nun or a concert pianist as their way of “flattering her” (800). Mary herself corrects when, the drug wearing off, she mocks her “silly romantic” dream (779). Since The Iceman Cometh has multiple characters who lived in the predated past, they can correct others’ romanticized, idealized pasts that the booze summons in pipe dreams. For a disgraced police lieutenant, Hope’s wife was a “bitch,” corrected by her brother to a “God-damned bitch.” 24 Since the play has a larger cast than that of the Tyrones’ play, there are greater opportunities for interaction in which in a moment of anger one character will expose another’s pipe dream, but to do so leaves one’s own pipe dream vulnerable. When denizen Rocky taunts two of the women denizens into admitting they are “whores” and not tarts as they think of themselves, they retaliate and call him a “pimp” (621) rather than the night bartender who takes their money only because they would “trow it away” (571). He retaliates by slapping each one. The characters do not correct their own pipe dreams, however. Saving them from the pipe dreams is Hickey’s mission that he announces upon his arrival, but the examination of it has to be postponed. For the moment Larry’s categorization takes centerstage. In the “Palace of Pipe Dreams” (611), the first part is the pipe dream of “yesterday” (592). There is a second part to the romanticizing of the past though not in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Mary’s dream is to recapture the self she was and recreate it in the present, but she is unsuccessful in that the happy past with its happy self keeps receding. Since the summoned past does not recede in The Iceman Cometh, the chorus not only recapture it in the present in their pipe dreams’ first part, they will recreate it in the future in the second part. A “dreaming” Jimmy speaks the dream “aloud to himself ”: “No more of this sitting around and loafing. Time I took hold of myself. I must have my shoes soled and heeled and shined first thing tomorrow morning.” Just as Larry labels the first part, so does he label the second part: the “tomorrow move-

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ment” (592), honoring its titular leader not by his birth name, James Cameron, but by his nickname, Jimmy Tomorrow. That the chorus speak as if they expect to recreate themselves in the future, rather than hope to as Mary does, is one reason their pipe dreams are an advance on her dream and their play the second, rather than the first, play in the construed trilogy. In neither play, however, is the self in the dream or pipe dream a new self; it is a recreation or revitalization of the old self, despite the pressure on the dreamer to create one. A character who did create a new self is James Tyrone, and even though the creating occurred long before the time of the play, it is a model to be emulated. Loving the theatre, he quit his job as a machinist, read plays, studied Shakespearean roles, and overcame an Irish brogue that had it persisted would have limited the roles he could essay to become one of America’s most promising actors. Another character who claims to have created one is Hickey, who tells the chorus he is a “new man” (610) no longer dependent on booze or pipe dreams. First, though, his arrival at Hope’s bar recalls a scene in The Libation Bearers. Aeschylus’ play opens with the arrival of Orestes and Pylades at Agamemnon’s tomb, where Orestes prays. Seeing the chorus of women with Electra approaching, they conceal themselves to determine the reason for the approach. In O’Neill’s play when two of the chorus arrive in the back room, one tells the others awaiting Hickey’s arrival that she saw him on the street corner, where he told her that he was trying to determine the best way to save them. Her information serves no purpose, though, because he enters a moment later and after the welcoming tells the others that he means to save them “from pipe dreams” (610). While praying, Electra discovers the lock of hair that Orestes left at the tomb and the footprints that lead to the stranger who emerges in the famous recognition scene to reveal himself as her brother. Made aware of a stranger in their midst, Hickey twice calls Parritt “Brother” and tells him that he “recognized something about” him (612), but it is not a lock of hair. Once reunited and assisted by the leader of Aeschylus’ chorus, who as slaves are not loyal to the queen, brother and sister invoke the dead king’s spirit to give them the strength—the power—to fulfill Orestes’ mission to slay their father’s murderer: their mother Clytemnestra. In The Libation Bearers, only the principal actors, Orestes and Pylades with attendants, gain entrance to the palace, but in Sophocles’ play on the same event, Electra, a third principal, the Old Tutor or Servant, gains entrance with the two young men. In The Iceman Cometh, Hickey, Larry, and Parritt are separate from the chorus, although the latter two are separate from Hickey, who nevertheless sees his mission as saving all of the assembled by assisting them in slaying their pipe dreams. Hickey says that he wants to save the others because he saved himself. Now the study can examine the self he claims to have created beginning with the pressure he felt to create it. Relating the story of his life, Hickey describes

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himself as “restless” coming of age in the Hoosier hick town who liked to hang out in its poolrooms and whorehouse, earning the reputation of “nogood tramp” (693-94). His one saving grace was loving Evelyn, who loved him and believed in him so that although he was on the road most of the time as a hardware salesman, they were married and they were “happy” for a while (696). That initial happiness connects them with James and Mary Tyrone, each of whom remembers being happy for a time. But it is what immediately preceded their marriage that separates Hickey and Evelyn from the Tyrones and is another reason why The Iceman Cometh is an advance on Long Day’s Journey into Night in the construed trilogy. Only Mary and not James reveals love as a power impelling her into marriage. James loves her. Mary cites his thirty-six years of fidelity as proof of his love, and he reveals his shame in act 3 for his drunken bouts while she waited for him in hotels and his guilt in act 4 for subjecting her to a quack doctor after Edmund’s birth. Yet it is not so much what the husband and wife say as the form in which they say it. James does not drift into a reverie recapturing the love or into a dream attempting to escape love’s betrayals as Mary does. Hence she is the lone victim of a pipe dream in the first play. The number of victims increases as the number of marriages increases in the second play. Hickey identifies Hope, Jimmy, and Larry as the three denizens he most wants to help. Since Parritt identifies with Larry before identifying with Hickey, he has to be included in this grouping, although he and Larry have to be discussed in a separate grouping. Except for the two bartenders with their tarts, the five men had long-term relationships with women with the nature of each revealed in a hierarchy. All that the audience learns about Bessie is that she hounded Hope to “have ambition and go out and do things” (674) and that in Hope’s words, after Hickey hounds him into taking the walk around the ward, she was a “nagging bitch” (678). Around midnight of the day he arrived, Hickey tries to prod Jimmy into admitting that rather than his wife’s infidelity driving him to drink, it gave him a “good excuse” to continue drinking (644). Jimmy resists until, hounded, he delivers in act 4 his capsule autobiography in which he cannot remember why he married Marjorie or why she married him beyond being sure that she could not have “loved” him (692). Yet in the absence of evidence to the contrary, she could have. He does not accuse her of being a nagging bitch, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, she did not take a lover to exact revenge on him; she simply withdrew from a hopeless situation. Hickey is sure of his love for Evelyn and her love for him, and he is also sure of his pipe dream and of hers, and her having one adds a depth to The Iceman Cometh in its advance on Long Day’s Journey into Night. The Tyrone males’ hope that a sanatorium stay will cure Mary’s addiction puts pressure on her to reform. She complains about their insensitivity to her

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needs, but she puts no pressure on them to reform. The pressure was mutual in The Iceman Cometh, and it began even before the couple were married with Evelyn, a “sucker for a pipe dream,” telling Hickey that she could make him happy and once happy he would not “‘want to do the bad things…any more’” (694-95). Married, they were happy until his first relapse, which fueled her pipe dream. Believing she had not given enough love for him to respond, she gave more “sweetness and love and pity and forgiveness” (698), fueling his pipe dream. He tried harder to prove to her and himself that he was worthy of her love and capable of reforming. He could be the man in whom she had faith until the next relapse, which fueled her pipe dream and then his. The repeated pattern continued for years, gradually intensifying her forgiveness for his relapses that included giving her venereal disease that he had gotten on one of his trips, his guilt for betraying her forgiveness, her disgust with him that she was able to conquer, and his hatred of himself and of her that he could not conquer, for as he says, “There’s a limit to the guilt you can feel and the forgiveness and the pity you can take!” (699) Hickey came to hate the pipe dreams, Evelyn’s and his, both of which expected something of him that he was incapable of doing: creating a new self. Her love hoped to transform him interiorly. His response hoped to rise above being a no-good tramp to her level. With repeated relapses, however, his response became guilt for failing to rise and self-hatred for feeling guilt. If only she would deny her pipe dream, she could descend to his level, ending his guilt and self-hatred. To encourage the denial, he told her dirty jokes to which she laughed simply to please him and kiddingly suggested that she betray the marriage vow, a suggestion she ignored. Furthermore, his attempt to get her to deny her pipe dream so that he could deny his had the reverse effect. It intensified her effort to transform him, intensifying his failure. Reaching his limit, he killed her, thereby believing he killed her pipe dream and his, saving him from guilt and hatred and embarking him on his mission to save his drinking buddies in the back room of Hope’s bar. Hickey’s mission explains why a denizen of the back room constructs a pipe dream. For Larry, humanity is a “mixture of mud and manure” (581). But the human being must yearn for a spiritual nature that rises above the mixture. Otherwise, he/she, content to wallow in the mixture, would not respond to the love another bestows; the love must speak to the yearning creating the hope in the loved one that he/she is being interiorly transformed. The hope is not perceived as a pipe dream; repeated failures to create a new self make it so. Neither is the love perceived as a pipe dream; repeated failures to transform the loved one make it so. Rather than creating new life therefore, the love and the hope spawn guilt and hatred and death. Wanting to believe that he has been saved, Hickey takes a two-part approach to the denizens’ two-part pipe dreams of yesterday and tomorrow. The denizens have to stop romanticizing the past. If Hope, for example, admits that Bessie

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was nagging him rather than loving him, he can free himself from the guilt and self-hatred for betraying that love. They have to stop postponing the future. If Jimmy, for example, applies for his job reinstatement, he can free himself from the guilt and self-hatred for being mired in mud and manure; by acting, by existentially creating himself, he is not mired. Hickey can save his drinking buddies from guilt and self-hatred but not from death. He is a bearer of death and not solely because he killed Evelyn but because he kills pipe dreams without which the human being cannot live. Pressuring the denizens, as Evelyn pressured him, he fuels their pipe dreams of creating new selves while destroying the pipe dreams, for they die interiorly. Hope feels “like a corpse” (677) while Jimmy’s face “has a wax-figure blankness that makes it look embalmed ” (692). They need pipe dreams as much as he does, as the play’s closing scenes prove. Relating the story of his life, Hickey claims that he killed Evelyn to spare her the knowledge that her love was not transforming him and any guilt therefore that she might feel for not loving him enough until the moment when he relates that standing over her dead body, he blurted out his hatred of her and her “‘pipe dream…you damned bitch!’” (700) Horrified, he protests that he must have been insane to say that and petitions Hope and the others to confirm the insanity. Seizing upon his defense, they oblige because if he was insane before he left home, he was insane when he arrived in the back room and they were just playing along with his harassing and bullying to humor him. Insisting to the arresting officers that he would have “killed” himself (703) before hurting the woman he loved, which is his pipe dream, Hickey leaves the back room to the chorus of libation bearers celebrating yesterday and tomorrow in the restored Palace of Pipe Dreams. The handcuffed Hickey’s departure also leaves the back room to Larry, a long-time resident, and Parritt, who came to Hope’s bar seeking guidance from Larry following the arrest of his mother Rosa for participating in a West Coast bombing by an anarchist organization, the Movement, to which lovers Larry and Rosa and Parritt belonged. At one point the newcomer suggests to the older man that he is his father, a suggestion that Larry vehemently denies, as well as denying that he left the Movement following a falling-out with Rosa and that he still loves her. Parritt does not dispute the first denial. The second two he does, and in his exchanges with Larry and his confession, the play dramatizes the perspective of those who bestow love on those who betray it. Through the son’s need to talk, the audience gets a picture of a woman who felt she had to have many lovers to prove herself free from Larry’s “bourgeois morality and jealousy” (634-35) that expected her to be responsive and consequently faithful to his love. Parritt also expected her to be more of a mother than a whore, although he insists until the end that he loved her, at which time he antiphonally parrots Hickey’s confession in relating his hatred laughing at the “‘freedom pipe dream’” of the “‘damned

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old bitch’” (704), arrested after he sold her out to the police. Stripped of his pipe dreams about the reasons for selling out his mother and finally securing Larry’s guidance, Parritt commits suicide. Stripped of his pipe dream that he detached himself from life for a grandstand viewing, Larry, staring “in front of him” apart from the celebrating chorus, realizes that he is the “only real convert to death that Hickey made here” (710-11). The Iceman Cometh completes Mildred’s incomplete motivation in the forming tragedy pattern in The Hairy Ape. Evelyn descended into Hickey’s bastion of poolrooms and whorehouse, lovingly calling him to rise above the mud and manure of his fallen nature. Left alone, he could have continued enjoying life without guilt, but once she awakened him to a higher form of life, he responded with love because she called to his innermost desire to be more than a no-good tramp. She was the one person in the town who thought enough of him to see what he harbored in the depths of his being. If he did not have that hope—if characters in O’Neill’s plays were content to wallow in the mud and manure—they would not respond to the call; they would not construct pipe dreams. The power of O’Neill’s theatre is in the torment that characters suffer because they want to be more than no-good tramps. They want to create new selves that can love and be loved. The love, however, makes them realize that all they do is betray their hope and the hope of the ones who love them. Love so harries hope that the harried construct pipe dreams that submerge and displace the guilt for the failures and betrayals, commit suicide, sink into despair, or murder the loving partner. If a new self is created, it will be in the play that completes the construed trilogy and the tragedy’s pattern. In a 1990 scholarly article, Richard F. Moorton, Jr, argues that contrary to the prevailing judgment that in The Haunted segment of Mourning Becomes Electra O’Neill abandoned parallels with The Eumenides segment of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, he patterned the “third play of his American trilogy on the third play of the Greek trilogy which he had made his model.” 25 This study cannot make a similar argument for A Moon for the Misbegotten because it cannot amass the wealth of supporting details that Moorton’s article does for The Haunted, but it makes the argument that seeing a connection between A Moon for the Misbegotten and The Eumenides earns appreciation for the O’Neill play as the third segment of a construed trilogy. The Libation Bearers closes with Orestes, driven mad by the sight of the avenging forces of conscience, the Furies, following the slaying of his mother fleeing Argos. The Iceman Cometh closes with Hickey insisting as he is being taken away by the arresting detectives that he was insane to say that he hated Evelyn. For Laurin R. Porter, “Hickey bears a resemblance to Jamie O’Neill (as well as to the playwright) both in his tendency to consort with prostitutes and feel guilty afterwards and in his love/hate relationship towards women in general.” 26

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The Eumenides opens on Orestes surrounded by the sleeping Furies, who pursued him, at the Pythian temple at Delphi, where Apollo directs him to go to Athena’s temple at Athens. He leaves, tracked by the awakened Furies, for the temple, where as a suppliant he awaits the goddess, who arrives in full armor. A Moon for the Misbegotten opens on the home of the Tyrones’ tenant farmer, Phil Hogan, and his twenty-eight-year-old daughter Josie. Though the home is a clapboarded shanty, the connection begins here. Athena is “generally represented as a woman of severe beauty.… She is frequently referred to as glaukopis, which probably meant blue-eyed, and Pausanias remarks on the blue eyes of a statue of Athene which he saw.” 27 The description applies to Josie, who is “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak” yet with “no mannish quality about her.” The epithet also applies; she has “large dark-blue eyes.” 28 Athena has a special relationship with her father Zeus, from whose head she sprang. Josie has such a relationship with her father Phil, for she is the only one of his children that he likens to her mother, whom he loved. Athena is a goddess of tricks and wiles, which is one reason she befriends the wily Odysseus in the Odyssey. Josie, who conspired with Phil, “as crooked as a corkscrew” (865) in her words, to doctor a horse they traded, agrees to his scheme to ensnare Jim Tyrone (as Jamie is called in this play) until she realizes that Phil is lying about him. The most distinguishing characteristic, however, that connects Josie with Athena occurs in act 1. The Greek goddess is a warrior goddess, an armed maiden who when she raises her aegis, “her enemies are overtaken by panic and soon are lost.” 29 Although Josie does not carry a goat-skin aegis or a spear, she carries a club in the opening act that dramatizes an incident that Edmund relates to his parents in Long Day’s Journey into Night that involves the tenant farmer and his neighbor, a Standard Oil millionaire. The anecdote makes no mention of the farmer having a daughter. In the dramatized version, Harder, the Standard Oil man, comes to the farm to accuse Hogan of constantly breaking the fence separating the properties so that his pigs can wallow in the millionaire’s ice pond. Harder, however, is no match for the Hogans, who, waiting for him, take the offensive, knocking him off balance. Told by her father to leave her club in the house, Josie is nevertheless a redoubtable force. While Hogan threatens Harder with a lawsuit for endangering his pigs by breaking the fence to entice them into the pond, she advances “menacingly” and “tears” the riding crop from his hand raised against her father. The millionaire’s “retreat becomes a rout” (886-89). The scene can be interpreted as an early indication of the father and daughter working together against an opponent, as they will later against Jim until Josie realizes that Hogan lied about an action Jim took against them. The scene functions better, though, in establishing Josie as a figure of the virgin goddess Athena, to whom Orestes, tormented by the Furies, must go to be tried for the matricide. And even though the connection ends here, it is a

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powerful connection and a fitting one in the construed trilogy. It ends because once the scene in The Eumenides shifts from Delphi to Athens, the emphasis shifts from Orestes, who does not deny killing his mother, to the antagonism between Apollo and the Furies and the trial by jury with Athena casting the deciding vote for Apollo and Orestes. The trilogy ends not with Orestes’ acquittal or his departure for his patrimony in Argos but with a flaming procession celebrating Athens’ continued prosperity. Once the scene with the Hogans and Harder shifts to Jim Tyrone’s entrance, the emphasis shifts to connections between A Moon for the Misbegotten and the two earlier plays. When Jamie enters in Long Day’s Journey into Night, he is described as having beneath his exterior self the “remnant of a humorous, romantic, irresponsible Irish charm” (722). When Jim enters Hogan’s farm, he is described as having the “ghost of a former youthful, irresponsible Irish charm” (875). Between 1912, the time of the trilogy’s first play, and 1923, the time of the third play, the remnant died and became a ghost, and if one asks what happened in the interim to cause the death, the answer is that Mary Tyrone died. James Tyrone also died, but Jim “hated” his father (920). Uncovering the connection between his mother’s death and his inner self’s death is the play’s action that the drama builds through comparisons such as the following two. For Mary, the “past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too” (765). Jim also feels trapped in a continuum in which “there is no present or future— only the past happening over and over again—now” (920). When Mary reappears in act 2, she is no different from her act-1 appearance except for “brighter” eyes and a “detachment in her voice and manner” (747). When Jim returns to the farm in act 2, he is no different from his act-1 appearance except for “glazed ” eyes and a “vague quality in his manner and speech” (907). Having resumed the taking of morphine, Mary will progressively withdraw into the dream in an attempt to recover the happy past. Returning with a bottle, Josie is apprehensive that Jim will withdraw into the “dreams” (914) he withdrew into while she was gone. He assures her that he will not because he saw a “ghost” of himself, but it is not the ghost of Irish charm. This ghost is “punk company” (912). Josie’s role, however, will be assisting him in confronting this one and other ghosts. Haunted by the past, he is tormented by his ghosts or Furies. Her role changes as they interact in “O’Neill’s great, elegiac love story.” 30 Because she loves Jim, once Josie realizes that her father lied about him, she can forget about springing the trap and be herself, telling Jim not only that she loves him, but that she is a virgin and not the brazen trollop she pretends to be. And as a real woman, she wants him in bed with her. Her hope is that her love will save him—that is, help him create a new self. Her realization that the situation is hopeless compares her with Evelyn, who also hoped that her love would save Hickey—help him create a new self. Hickey

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felt the pressure; failing to be the man Evelyn wanted made him feel guilty. Jim feels the pressure in a different way; being the man Josie wants would make him feel guilty. Although he loves her, he wants the night to be “different from any past night” (915) like those he spent with Broadway tarts awakening in hotels with “dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows” (919). Rejecting her sexual overture ends the second of Josie’s incarnations. The first is as a figure of the virgin goddess. The second is as a woman in love with her lover. Jim’s rejection is to the pressure of her verbal invitation to the bedroom, but since their bodies were pressed together in kisses, the physical pressure created a third incarnation: that of whore, for he momentarily thought she was “that blonde pig” on the train (925) to whom he alluded without explanation. He apologizes, ending that incarnation and is about to leave when Josie assumes the fourth incarnation: the one he was hoping for in which they could express their love without sexual intimacy. The moonlit scene ends the comparisons with the construed trilogy’s first two plays. The past Mary summons to relive keeps receding from her. Jim not only summons his past, he relives it. Hickey came to hate Evelyn for forgiving his moral lapses because for him, there is a limit to the amount of forgiveness a person can take. Jim craves Josie’s forgiveness because he likens her to Mary, who he feels would forgive his moral lapses by drinking again and sneaking the blonde pig into his room on the train if she understood that her death left him abandoned. Converting her sexual passion to “maternal passion” (927) in the fourth incarnation, Josie becomes his mother, who “loves and understands and forgives!” (933) The moonlit scene ends the comparisons with The Eumenides. Orestes confronts the Furies in Athens, but once Apollo appears, the god confronts them. Jim confronts his Furies, the ghosts of himself and the blonde pig, when he relates to Josie what happened when he brought Mary’s coffin from the West Coast. Following Athena’s acquittal of Orestes, the Furies are transformed into the Kindly Ones to be honored in Athens’ pantheon. Following Josie’s absolution of Jim’s “sins” (942), his guilt and shame return, but so does his recognition of the love he and Josie share, and though the guilt and shame may return again, he will never forget the love, and for that he will be grateful for as long as he lives. The night was different for Jim, who came to confess and have his sins forgiven by Josie in her fifth incarnation because A Moon for the Misbegotten “is, essentially, a religious play, deeply rooted in the Roman Catholic heritage that O’Neill could never entirely leave behind.” 31 In her first incarnation, Josie was the virgin goddess. In this incarnation she is the virgin mother “who bears a dead child in the night, and the dawn finds her still a virgin” (936). Jim’s experience with the figure of the Blessed Virgin does and does not compare with Orestes’ experience with Athena. An acquitted Orestes is free to leave Athens for his home. About him Hellenes will say,

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“‘A man of Argos lives again in the estates / of his father.’” 32 An absolved Jim is free to leave the farm for Broadway but not to live again. Freed from the need for pipe dreams, he can now die. Jim’s self is a new self, as he recognizes when telling Josie that he feels “new” (942). The self is tragic, however, as the stage directions indicate when the dawn rises on him and Josie in a “tragic picture” (935) that images the Pietà. Another reason Hickey has for hating Evelyn is that she promised salvation but did not deliver because her love did not emanate from a supernatural source, drawing him into redemption. “The Iceman Cometh, then, is about the impossibility of salvation in a world without God.” 33 The Hairy Ape prefigures the world of The Iceman Cometh in that Mildred descends into Yank’s reality—his nature—to awaken him to a reality—a nature— higher than his, yet he can never find it because she never reappears; she awakens him to death as his ultimate reality. By awakening the male, the female maroons him in the nothingness at the core of life, rendering the creating of a new self impossible and forcing him to construct pipe dreams to live with the nothingness. 34 Two statements by O’Neill point the way for overcoming Yank’s defeat. The first statement is that humankind today, like the playwright today, must give meaning to life that ends in death, since science and materialism have not filled the void left by the death of the Old God. 35 The second statement is that man must pursue the “‘unattainable. But his struggle is his success!… Such a figure is necessarily tragic.’” 36 Struggling to will his future and not have it determined for him, Jim becomes a tragic hero in the construed trilogy’s third play that completes the tragedy’s pattern. In The Hairy Ape and the construed trilogy’s first two plays, creating a new self is unattainable with the options open to awakened humans ranging from pipe dreams to suicide, despair to murder. That goal is Jim’s, however, in A Moon for the Misbegotten, and he finds the way with Josie as a figure of the Blessed Virgin in the Catholic constellation, yet it is a tragic way because the price for pursuing the goal, the dream to its attainment, is death. Yank discovers death, but it is meaningless. Jim makes death meaningful. In a world without God and divine intervention that redeems the past, he becomes a Christ figure in the Pietà, sacrificing himself to change the future so that it does not repeat the past. He admits to having “sins” (942), but in a court of law, they would not receive a death sentence. His most grievous sin was betraying his mother’s love for him and faith in him by resuming drinking as she lay dying. Accepting responsibility for his moral lapse and accepting suffering by reliving the lapse as he confesses to the figure of Mary in the Pietà, he invokes Josie’s blessing that he have his wish and “rest forever in forgiveness and peace” (946). Two other plays of O’Neill’s late period dramatize alternatives to creating a new self. The easier alternative is claiming a past self in which identity was

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secure. It is the alternative taken by Erie in Hughie, whose goal therefore is Mary Tyrone’s goal. A similarity between them is that each had in the past someone who saw the claimant as he or she wanted to be seen, regardless of the self-image’s reality. Mary, for example, had, in James’ criticism, the nuns “flattering her” (800) that she could be a concert pianist. Another similarity is that those accepting the self-image are dead. 37 A difference, however, is that there is someone in Hughie who can be brought into accepting. It will take some doing, but that is the play’s action. The one-act play takes place in 1928 in the lobby of a seedy New York midtown hotel. Erie, a long-time resident, enters, and since the new Night Clerk does not recognize him because he is returning from a drunk uses the blank he draws as an opportunity to present his self-image. Inhabiting the fringe of Broadway gambling and amorous activities but wanting to be perceived as a principal player, he regales the Night Clerk, as he regaled his predecessor, Hughie, with stories in which he is a Broadway sport and a wise guy. His storytelling recalls Jim Tyrone’s storytelling. Each became so captivated by horses and horse racing that he followed the horses south in the winter, and each had an amorous adventure with a blonde on a train, though Erie does not elaborate. Yet he shares more with the denizens of Hope’s bar in that he, like them, needs a sustaining pipe dream. Here too, however, is a difference. He is more truthful about his need than they are about theirs. Not receiving from the Night Clerk, who remains silent except for perfunctory utterances, the expected “reassurance” 38 that Hughie gave his self-presentation, Erie modifies it by confiding that he is down on his luck: that he has not “won a bet” since Hughie left the hotel to die. Now he cannot conceal his disappointment with the Night Clerk’s silence. Taking the lack of a response as a rebuff, he continues “appealingly” (838) until finally confessing his dependence on another’s acceptance: As “Hughie lapped up my stories…I’d get to seein’ myself like he seen me” (845). Hughie was not unresponsive, and neither was Erie to the predecessor, for behind “his characterization of himself ” lies “some sentimental softness” (832) that tempered the creating of his pipe dream self. As Hughie allowed him to win at shooting crap by not checking the dice with which he played, thereby creating a high roller image, so he allowed Hughie his own pipe dream image as a player consorting with a high roller. Companionship established, they became pals with Hughie inviting Erie to his home for dinner with his family. Though the wife shielded the children from his racehorse story, her not taking to him did not end the nightly indulgence in mutually supportive pipe dreams. Hughie’s death did. On one level Hughie is a play about Erie suffering the loss of a mutual dependence that he commemorated with a hundred-dollar flower piece set in a horseshoe of red roses. It is this loss from which he is trying to recover with the new Night Clerk, whose

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early perfunctory utterance makes him “grateful even for this sign of companionship” (839). The pressure Erie is under to reclaim his past self puts pressure on the Night Clerk because Erie will not leave him alone. Whenever he appears ready to go to his room, he turns back to the desk and resumes talking. Desperate to get through the night and vaguely aware that the guest has been talking about gambling, the Night Clerk questions him about Arnold Rothstein, thereby beginning to create “his own dream” (849) in which he fantasizes playing poker with the professional gambler and winning. No Rothstein, Erie nevertheless seizes the opportunity to recreate his own dream. Inviting the Night Clerk to shoot crap like he “used to with Hughie,” he wins, and the play ends with Erie a “Wise Guy” and the Night Clerk a “sucker” (851). The game that repeats the past with the Night Clerk taking Hughie’s role infuses life into the present. Regaining his “self-assurance” (850), Erie reclaims his past self, and the Night Clerk, a “corpse” (837) before creating his own pipe dream, plays with an expression that he hopes “resembles Arnold Rothstein’s” (851). What is disturbing, however, about the final scene is the language, whether read or heard because there are productions in which thoughts are spoken. 39 In a world in which the supernatural is absent, an absurd world that forces humankind to find its own salvation, Erie and the Night Clerk do just that. Yet the language is so excessive, it seems to mock their budding companionship. The Night Clerk experiences the “beatific vision”; Erie, a “saving revelation.” The Night Clerk resembles a saint “elected to Paradise”; Erie has his grief “purged ” (848-51), completing the purgatorial requirement for entrance into Paradise. Whether mockery or not, as bleak a picture of contemporary life that Hughie presents, characters can experience a saving grace; they can form bonds of friendship. C.W.E. Bigsby makes the case for the play’s storytelling enabling the narrator and the listener-audience to create themselves in their dreams, keeping at bay the death that awaits Erie in the hotel room to which he resists retiring. Deciding to respond to the guest, the Night Clerk also keeps at bay the death in the hotel lobby: “I should use him to help me live through the night” (846). The critic can also argue that by keeping death at bay, the two prevent themselves from being tragic heroes as Jim Tyrone is, for as Bigsby argues, death is the source of hope in O’Neill’s late plays because only death can combat life’s absurdity. 40 The tragic hero therefore is the one who in his death defeats absurdity’s power. Of the alternatives to creating a new self that two of O’Neill’s late plays dramatize, the more difficult alternative is claiming a past self in which identity is not secure. The time of A Touch of the Poet is 1828, one hundred years earlier than that of Hughie. The place is a village tavern owned by Con Melody, an Irishman tricked by Yankees into buying it and surrounding

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woodland on the promise that the discontinued stagecoach line that had made the tavern prosperous would be reinstated, but the line never was. He and Erie, subject of the easier alternative, can be compared. Although both need an audience to bolster their self-assurance, Con Melody is “self-assured ” and “arrogantly” so 41 in his initial appearance whereas Erie does not begin to regain his “self-assurance” (850) until the closing scene and only after the Night Clerk expresses an interest in gambling whereas Con only needs to see his reflection in the mirror. Each has a real or true self beneath the projected self-image, but Erie’s is more apparent because it is closer to the surface than Con’s is to his surface; that is, it is not in so extreme a contrast with his selfimage as Con’s is with his self-image. The contrast is between the tavern owner’s body and his manner. The former is rooted in a “tough peasant vitality” (197). In the opening scene, a visitor to the tavern who served as a corporal in England’s Seventh Dragoons under Con, who though promoted for bravery had to resign for being involved in a scandal, knew the Melody family in Ireland. He tells the bartender that Con’s father was a “thievin’ shebeen keeper” (185) who with his illgotten wealth purchased an estate and set himself up as gentry whose son he sent to school and college. The latter is reflected in the way in which Con acts the role of a “polished gentleman.” He so overplays the role that it “has become more real than his real self to him” (197-98). His interaction with his wife Nora and daughter Sara dramatize the contrast. Nora’s presence annoys him so much so that when she touches his arm, he moves it with “instinctive revulsion” (198) partly because the Irish brogue that she was unable to overcome detracts from her status as a gentleman’s wife and his as a gentleman. Hence he allows the rumor that he was forced to marry beneath him to go unchecked. Yet since she worships him and he loves her, he “puts his arm around her” as they discuss her preparations for celebrating the anniversary of his soldierly bravery until in “revulsion” (202) he pushes her away. Sara provokes an even stronger reaction. She intentionally speaks in brogue to taunt his gentlemanly pretensions, a taunt he can ignore. What he cannot ignore is her criticism that the pretensions so possess him that he cannot distinguish between a lie and the truth, the dream and reality. “Convulsed ” by pain, he half rises in “rage” before “gripping” the chair’s arm to steady himself and resume sitting (207). Con is a man struggling to control a violent self threatening to erupt. Discussing their economic situation, he says to Nora, “I’m done—finished— no future but the past” (213), because he sold the estate in the United Kingdom to come to America, where he was tricked into purchasing the tavern and surrounding woodland. Yet they both want Sara to be a gentlewoman not only for her happiness but as a recognition of his claim. Thus the past that he insists people acknowledge is his upbringing in Ireland and military career for England that validate the manner of a “polished gentleman.” Insisting on

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this past, however, will activate the other past. That is the play’s action leading to the eruption of the repressed “tough peasant vitality,” making the clash of the dream and the reality inevitable. A representative of the Yankee family into which Sara wants to marry speaks the word that triggers the eruption. As a gentleman Con expects to settle a dowry on his daughter, the terms of which he wants to discuss with the well-bred Harford family. Financially strapped, he considers a “note of hand” an option. By “settlement” (246), however, the family’s attorney means the amount the Harford patriarch will pay Melody and the daughter to disabuse themselves of the idea of marriage and with their family leave New England for America’s westward expansion. The reason: “There is such a difference in station” (247). “Station” is old-world. One is born into a station, where he/she remains throughout his/her life. (Self-creation or self-invention are the new-world counterparts.) Con thinks of himself as old-world. As he says to Sara, it would be snobbery on his part to judge the Harfords by “oldworld standards” (205), but when applied to himself have him born into the gentry in Ireland, which in 1828 was part of the United Kingdom. To the Yankee tradesman, however, he is a tavern keeper with fantastic pretensions. The insult has Con restrained from punching the attorney, though he has him physically removed from the tavern and despite Sara’s pleading leaves with the visiting corporal to demand Harford apologize and if he will not to challenge him to a duel. In a scene preceding the attorney’s arrival, Con, wearing Major Melody’s uniform and seated at the dining room’s center table, recreates with dinnerware and his and the corporal’s commentary the military battle in which he distinguished himself. In the act following the removal of the attorney, he and the corporal return to the tavern, where the corporal recreates the battle that was not gallantry in the field but a brawl inside and outside the Harford mansion. The combatants were not the French and the Seventh Dragoons but Harford’s servants and police alerted to expect trouble from two disorderly Micks. And the weapons were not sabers and bullets but a riding whip, clubs, and bare knuckles. That he and the corporal were physically beaten, for they return battered and bruised by overwhelming odds, does not explain Con’s transformation from the major reliving a military exploit to the tavern owner admitting that he was living a pipe dream. That he was spiritually beaten does, for not only did a servant deny the two entrance to the mansion but told them that they should have applied at the servants’ entrance, adding an insult to the attorney’s delivered insult. That the tavern’s Irish habitués do not perceive Con as an officer and a gentleman never bothered him because he perceived them as beneath him, but insults by Yankees whom he begrudgingly accepted as his equals are too much to bear. Since they do not perceive him as an officer and a gentleman, he will be neither. When he finally speaks, though still with a dazed expres-

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sion, it is as the “son of a thieving shebeen keeper” (267). For Nora, he looks “like a corpse” (272), but with his expression changing, he protests that he is not dead. The major is, whose uniform he will bury in the ground, and the gentleman is, whose mare he killed. He himself is alive but as a “loutish, grinning clown” (277) or a “leering peasant” (279) because the brawl that knocked the pretensions out of him released the erupting peasant vitality so that he can accept the “station” he “was born to, from this day on” (274). Like his father, he is a shebeen keeper, and speaking in brogue he leaves the dining room for the barroom to join the habitués, not to look down on them but to be one of them. A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hughie, and A Touch of the Poet dramatize three consequences of the pressure on characters to create or invent themselves. At some point in his life, a Broadway sport and wise guy was a new self that Erie created, and since he does not attempt another creation, he is safe, although being safe means finding an audience that accepts the existing self and repeating the past rather than discovering a new future. Like the Night Clerk, he wants to get through the night, and to do that he must keep death at bay. To get through his life, he must do the same thing; the consequence, however, is not creating his life but simply repeating it. At some point in his life, Con Melody created a new self as a major and gentleman. Like Erie, he needs an accepting audience. Unlike Erie, he does not find one. Both the corporal and his daughter respect him as a major but not as a gentleman, and even if they did, it would not make a difference because the accepting audience he wants is the Harford family, with whose mother he made a fool of himself. Finding an audience, Erie buries his friendship with Hughie, for whom he was “carryin’ the torch” (851). Denied an audience, Con buries his military uniform, kills his mare, and becomes “vulgar and common” (272): indistinguishable from the mass of ordinary people. A Byronic hero is distinguishable “defying his tragic fate,” and it is the image Con sees in the mirror. Without an audience, however, he cannot sustain the image so that the defeat brings a “trace of real tragedy” to his face (210). Since his tragedy is that he cannot be perceived as the tragic hero he wants to be, he relinquishes the image and the dream creating it by killing the mare, for example. The irony is that although he escapes death by not killing himself as he had planned to, he experiences death nonetheless: the death of selfhood. He relinquishes tragedy by joining the habitués in the barroom, who are different from the denizens of The Iceman Cometh. That play ends with Hickey and Larry separate from the denizens, each one of whom has a dream as each sings his or her favorite song. A Touch of the Poet ends with Con joining the habitués, no one of whom has a dream as they stamp their “dancing feet” (280). Revelers are comedy’s subject. The dreamer is tragedy’s subject.

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Jim Tyrone had a “dream” (927): to follow the horses in the succession of thoroughbred racing venues, but it is not the one he wants to tell Josie, and the image he creates is neither that of a Broadway sport and wise guy nor that of an officer and gentleman. The self is that of a sinner who betrayed his love for his mother. He needs Josie as an audience but not to impress her; he needs her to be a surrogate for Mary and forgive him, which she does. His story told, he does not wink at the new sucker as Erie does; described as “dead” (934), he does not spring to life after relinquishing his false self for his old self as Con does. Larry Slade becomes a convert to death, but he remains seated at play’s end. Hickey wants to die but only because he cannot live with the truth that he hated Evelyn. Accepting what he did rather than denying it, as Hickey does, acting on the self-knowledge rather than being immobilized by it, as Larry is, and changing the future rather than retreating into the past, as Erie and Con do, Jim creates a new self as the tragic hero of O’Neill’s late plays.

Chapter Four

Arthur Miller

The section on Arthur Miller begins with early plays because Miller’s two essays on tragedy appeared in the same period so that the critic should expect a connection between the conception of tragedy and the dramatization of it. In All My Sons, thirty-two-year-old Chris Keller invited to his family’s home twenty-six-year-old Ann Deever, whose family lived next door for many years and whose father, Steve, and the Keller father, Joe, were partners in a machine shop. He explains his reason to Joe: “I want a family, I want some kids, I want to build something I can give myself to. Annie is in the middle of that.” 1 A veteran of World War II, he wants to create a new self, even using the word “new” when he tells her that he invited her because he loves her, although apologizing for the declaration in the backyard rather than a “place where we’d be brand new to each other.” The place does not bother her because she loves him and wonders why he “wait[ed] all these years” to tell her (34-35). Chris’ desire to create a new self with Ann sets in motion the play’s action. He waited because he did not want to win her “away from anything” (34), the anything being her memory of his younger brother Larry, to whom both families expected her to be married. But since Larry, an Air Force pilot, has been missing in action for three years, Chris believes he is dead, and Ann is so sure that she would have been married to someone else had Chris not started writing to her. Yet they are not the play’s only two characters. Joe is also convinced that Larry is dead. As he says to a neighbor talking about the war, “I had two sons, now I got one” (11). But since his wife absolutely refuses to accept the death, he is reluctant to openly support Chris’ desire, which would mean a confrontation with her. His position is “I ignore what I gotta ignore” (16). Kate Keller cannot be ignored, however. Not only is she opposed to the marriage, her warning to Ann about believing that Larry is 97

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dead strikes an ominous note. Ann’s father, Keller’s former partner, is in prison for knowingly shipping defective cylinder heads to the Air Force during wartime that caused the deaths of twenty-one airmen. When she suggests that one of those heads might have been in Larry’s plane causing his death, Kate asks her “never to say that again” (31). But the force of the objection suggests that there may have been a connection between the defective parts and the death. And the note or tone becomes an ominous chord when Ann’s brother George phones to tell her that he is coming to the Kellers’ house from a visit with their imprisoned father. Act 1 ends with Joe and Kate trying to calm each other for the arrival. Chris’ desire to create a new self with Ann had him inviting her to visit. Her desire to create a new self with him had her accepting. She must have sensed from his letters that he would propose because she told George she was “going to be married,” an announcement that prompted him to overcome the shame for the crime and visit their father for the first time to alert him because the father “loved” her “so much” (54). The emotion is no longer reciprocated. According to Kate speaking to Chris, “To his last day in court Steve [Deever] never gave up the idea that Dad made him do it” (41). According to Ann when filling in the Kellers, whom she had not seen in years, on her relationship with her father, she “followed him, went to him every visiting day [at the prison]” until “the news came about Larry” (31) at which time she stopped believing him because, as she explains to her brother, they “know how quick he can lie” (55). George, on the other hand, always believed the court record of his father’s guilt apparently because he knew him to be a liar. Only when hearing him defend himself does he start believing him. Even though a strained device, the sequence allows George to follow Ann to the Kellers’ house, there to confront them with his father’s defense: that Joe, claiming illness that prevented him from coming into the plant, authorized by phone the shipment of the defective parts. Joe’s absence from the plant became the basis for his partner’s conviction and his exoneration on appeal. George also tells his sister not to marry Chris “because his father destroyed your family” (53). Although his change of heart about their father does not persuade Ann to leave with him, George’s presence has Kate making a fuss over him and talking until she inadvertently exposes the lie about Joe’s flu preventing him from going into the plant that day, bringing All My Sons to its denouement. In the earlier, by a month, of the two essays on tragedy, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller identifies the tragic character as one “who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.” 2 Seventeen years later he reaffirmed his belief that tragedy cannot be separated from death: “And there is no possibility, it seems to me, of speaking of tragedy without it.” 3 Since Joe is the only one of the five characters that the strained sequence of events brings together who commits sui-

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cide, he has to be the first considered as a tragic hero. The lie about the flu keeping him home the day of the shipment exposed, Joe has to defend himself to an accusing Chris. He feels no responsibility or guilt for Larry’s death because the cylinder heads were made for P-40s, an aircraft Larry did not fly. Neither does he feel responsibility or guilt for the deaths of the twenty-one airmen who did fly P40s because he assumed that the Air Force would not install the defective parts and by that time the plant would be shipping perfect parts. Finally, he could not risk stopping the shipment because the Air Force might have canceled the contract, putting the plant dependent in wartime on military contracts out of business. Joe’s insistence on his innocence remains unchanged at act-3’s opening, which takes place hours after defending himself to Chris. When Kate suggests that if he volunteers to go to prison, Chris will probably forgive him, he explodes: “He would forgive me! For what?” He did what he did to make money because as a man his responsibility is to his family and “Nothin’s bigger” (76-77) than that responsibility, which incorporates the relationship between a father and a son. “Chris, I did it for you,” he justified himself at act-2’s close because a father is expected to leave something for his son, and he could not risk losing the business because at his age he would not have another “chance to make something” for him (70). If there is something bigger than that responsibility, Joe tells Kate, “I’ll put a bullet in my head!” (77) Apparently Ann’s revelation of Larry’s letter in which he foretold his suicide after reading the newspaper coverage of their fathers’ convictions makes him recognize a world bigger than that of the family. The apparent recognition gives the play its title, for he guesses that the twenty-one airmen “were all my sons” (83) before committing suicide at act-3’s close. He is no tragic hero, however, for Barry Gross, for whom the denouement is “unconvincing.… Joe Keller has not overthrown sixty years of thinking and feeling in a minute.” 4 Two critical statements by Joe, one on either side of the letter’s revelation, support Gross’ interpretation that rather than experiencing a change of heart and mind about his responsibility to a world outside the family, Joe commits suicide because he shamed his sons. To George he callously characterizes his father as belonging to the group of men “who rather see everybody hung before they’ll take blame” (64) while denying his own blame. And the verb “guess” (83) that he uses for the twenty-one airmen as his sons is a verb of concession without certainty; he concedes the possibility of his responsibility to them without being convinced of it. Neither is Kate a tragic heroine. When Chris defies her ultimatum that Ann must leave because she is Larry’s girl, he insists that his brother is dead and he is marrying her. Not only does Joe support Chris’ intention, he calls his wife a “maniac” for continuing to believe that their younger son is alive. She “smashes” her husband in the face and says to Chris, “Your brother’s alive, darling, because if he’s dead, your father killed him” (68), revealing

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her knowledge of Joe’s role in the shipment of the defective parts. Decades later Miller praised a production in England in which the actress playing Kate caught her sinister side as a “partner” to the crime “without having committed it.” 5 With neither Joe nor Kate creating a new self, Chris remains as a candidate, and he has the play’s noblest speeches beginning in act 1 and running through act 3. To Ann he relates a wartime experience in which he discovered a “new thing”—men being responsible for one another—and his disillusionment returning to peacetime to realize that “nobody was changed at all” (35-36). Furious to learn of Joe’s role in the crime, he demands to know, “Don’t you live in the world?” (70) And in the finest of speeches, he tells Kate what one can know: “There’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that’s why he died” (84). The speeches notwithstanding, he shares his father’s values, desiring a family and kids, for example, or telling Ann, “I’m going to make a fortune for you!” (36) He too has a sinister side that emerges in Kate’s revelation that she always had the feeling that her son “almost knew” (74) of Joe’s role in the crime so that his insistence on his father’s innocence is really his insistence on his own innocence. Furthermore, he evades responsibility. At play’s end as he prepares to take his father to prison, he counters his mother’s argument that the man cannot survive in prison by using Larry’s letter as justification. Yet when Joe commits suicide, he appeals to Kate, “Mother, I didn’t mean to…” (84). Chris can create a new self with Ann because she wants to create the same new self with him. He cannot create a new self with his father because Joe does not desire the new self that his son conceives for him. Chris wants him to be a “scapegoat,” 6 ridding himself of his responsibility for almost knowing while not acting on the almost knowledge by transferring his guilt onto his father who will be out of sight in prison, enabling Chris to live in his new self as Ann’s husband and plant owner. Yet by committing suicide rather than fading into oblivion in prison as Steve Deever did, Joe adds to Chris’ responsibility and guilt that, however, do not drive him to duplicate his father’s act or that of a character in a play that opened a few months earlier than All My Sons. In the closing scene of The Iceman Cometh, Parritt commits suicide for putting his mother in prison where she will die. If Chris takes Kate’s ironic advice, “Live” (84), that closes the play, it will be in the old self intensified by the additional burden of responsibility and guilt: not for almost knowing but for absolutely knowing what he drove Joe to do. A question therefore is whether a play can be a tragedy if no candidate meets the requirements for tragic hero or heroine in Miller’s conception of tragedy, the sole conception of tragedy considered in the chapter. Brantley offers one perspective based on an actor’s performance in the role of tragic hero. Reviewing the 2012 production of Death of a Salesman with Philip

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Seymour Hoffman, he wrote, “For ‘Salesman’ to work as tragedy (for which it does qualify), there has to be a touch of the titan in Willy, of the hopeinflated man that his sons once worshiped, so we feel an ache of loss when all the air goes out of him.… Mr. Hoffman’s Willy is preshrunk.” 7 A comparison of the emphasis in the two essays on tragedy offers another perspective. “Tragedy and the Common Man” emphasizes the hero or individual man who acts to “wholly realize himself.” 8 “The Nature of Tragedy” emphasizes the chorus or audience who from the acting hero gains “knowledge or enlightenment…pertaining to the right way of living in the world.” 9 The hero who acts and the audience who learns are tragedy’s two integral parts that should connect, especially in a play whose “idea of connection was central.” 10 Joe does not connect his act and its consequences, the past and the present, himself as an individual and the society outside the family. Chris does connect them but in speaking and not in acting. Thus All My Sons is an interesting play in that the audience learns from what a character says and not from what he does. The end of the chapter gives a fuller answer to the question the paragraph raised. Replying to an interviewer’s question about the relationship of form to content in his plays, Miller said that although he was never interested in being “‘realistic,’” it is the form for telling the story of All My Sons. 11 It is not the form for Death of a Salesman as evidenced by a comparison of the two plays’ settings and opening scenes. The more detailed a setting the more realistic or naturalistic it is. The setting of All My Sons is the backyard of the Kellers’ house with garden chairs, a table, a garbage pail, and a wire leafburner. The setting of Death of a Salesman is the interior of the Lomans’ house that has an “air of the dream” clinging to it. Details are limited: in the kitchen, for example, which “seems actual enough” except that it has only a table, three chairs, and a refrigerator and “no other fixtures.” 12 As for the opening scenes, Joe Keller sits in the backyard reading the Sunday newspaper and conversing with neighbors who enter and exit the backyard. The past and present are morally connected, but when Joe addresses the past in subsequent scenes, he does so in the past tense. In the later play, Willy Loman, a salesman in his sixties, enters exhausted from an abortive trip to New England that had him turning back in Yonkers. After a conversation with his wife Linda, who returns to bed, he settles in the kitchen and begins a conversation with their two sons, Biff and Happy, who enter through the “transparent” setting’s “imaginary wall-lines” (1) as high school students. The past and present are morally connected, but when Willy addresses the past, it is also physically connected with the present in that he relives the past in scenes that dissolve into one another. In another sense, however, Death of a Salesman is more realistic than All My Sons. The earlier play offers little background information on Joe beyond characterizing him as an “uneducated man” (6) who attended “night school”

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(48). The lack of formal education did not prevent him from creating a self as a partner in a machine shop. Neither did the crime prevent him upon being exonerated from making the shop “one of the best shops in the state again” (30), a factory that to George “looks like General Motors” (62). The Keller family also has a maid. Of the characters met so far in the three tragedians sections, Willy’s background resembles James Tyrone’s background. When his father abandoned the family to return to Ireland, at age ten James had to quit school to work in a machine shop to support his mother and siblings, and when he quit the shop, it was not to own a shop but to become an actor. Since Willy’s father and older brother Ben abandoned the family, Willy had to be under pressure additional to that felt by every person coming of age to create a self. He chose a salesman, and given the conversation with Linda about his length of service with the Wagner Company, he has been selling ever since. All My Sons offers little background information on Joe’s relationship with Chris beyond his responsibility as a father to leave something for his son. Miller has given various ways of interpreting Death of a Salesman. For Bigsby, the one that works best is a “‘love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America’” (xxii). This study agrees while inserting a subordinate clause between “son” and “and”: conflicted by the necessity for creating themselves. Act 1 has scenes in which Willy relives the past, the first of which supports the main clause: the love story. When he arrives home in the opening scene, Linda tells him that their sons are asleep in the bedroom they once shared after an evening out in which Happy took Biff on a double date. Happy has his own apartment but is sleeping in the house to be with Biff, who returned from a sojourn as farmhand in the West. Their presence in the house combined with Willy’s confusion of the car he was driving in Yonkers with the car he drove when the sons were boys and simonized it stimulates the memory releasing the scene. Although Willy praises both sons for the “terrific job” they did on the car, he singles out one of the two: “Good work, Biff,” and although Happy tries to get his attention, Biff is the attraction: the high school football team’s captain and star quarterback who promises to score a running touchdown in Saturday’s game just for his father, who cannot contain his appreciation, kissing him: “Oh, wait’ll I tell this in Boston!” (1719) This scene also supports the subordinate clause: the conflicted relationship with Biff. The mention of Boston summons from Willy’s memory Bernard, Biff’s classmate who lives next door, who enters to warn Willy, whom he calls Uncle, that unless Biff studies for the math exam, he will fail the subject, jeopardizing graduation and a university football scholarship. Although Willy tells Biff to study, he dismisses Bernard as “anemic” (20) and the notion that the math teacher would fail the class’ most popular member as preposterous. The conflict is present even before Bernard’s arrival in Willy

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telling Biff to return a team football he stole while laughing with him at his initiative in securing a ball with which to practice passing. The two clauses, the love story and the conflicted relationship, merge in the present in the scene in which Willy arrives home. Pleased to have his son home, the father nevertheless criticizes him for drifting from job to job—for failing to create a career in which to make money. In almost the same breath, Biff is a “lazy bum” but “not lazy,” and since he exudes “personal attractiveness,” Willy will “get him a job selling” (5-6). A second relived scene summons Willy’s conflicted relationship with his own career. He tells Linda that he sold “five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston,” but as she computes the commission he will earn for such quantity and the bills that must be paid, he adjusts downward until he admits to “roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip” (22). By the time of the scene in which Willy arrives home, the conflicts have taken their tolls in the exhaustion and erratic driving that prevent him from keeping his appointments. Having to create himself, Willy became a salesman. Bigsby surveys works that feature the iconic American occupation from Twain’s Gilded Age to David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross. An example earlier than Twain’s novel is Melville’s The Confidence-Man, whose protagonist in one of his incarnations is a herb-doctor peddling Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator and Samaritan Pain Dissuader. Examples later than Mamet’s play are the Hotel segment of Len Jenkin’s Limbo Tales and Jenkin’s My Uncle Sam. It is the self for someone without credentials such as academic degree and/or special training but with the two requirements of personality and dogged determination, requirements possessed by O’Neill’s Hickey, who “had the knack” by pretending an interest in clients until “they wanted to buy something to show their gratitude.” Selling was not work for him but “like a game”; it was “fun” (696). Selling is no fun for Willy even with dogged determination. After he adjusts his sales downward, Linda tries to boost his spirits by assuring him that he still makes enough in commission to cover the household expenses. He agrees but only because he works the territory “ten, twelve hours a day,” unlike the other salesmen, who “do it easier.” And selling is definitely not fun with doubts about his personality—he jokes too much, is fat, and does not dress to advantage—before she stops him by telling him that he is the “handsomest man in the world” (24). The combination of Willy’s role in Biff creating a self, his doubt about his qualifications for his choice of self, and the mention of Boston releases a relived scene that is cumulative not only in building on the two dissolved relived scenes but also in building on verbal stimulants. There is nothing in the first relived scene beyond the event itself that would stimulate the memory to summon Bernard. That is, no verbal stimulant explains the classmate’s sudden appearance. The second scene has a verbal stimulant in Willy boast-

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ing about “sellin’ thousands and thousands” (22) before coming home that leads into the discrepancy between his exaggerated sales in Providence and Boston and the reality of the sales. An aural stimulant opens the third relived scene. A Woman’s laughter coincides with Linda telling Willy that he is the handsomest man in the world. The verbal stimulant follows. As Willy tells Linda how much he misses her on the road and how he wants “to make” so much for her and the boys, the Woman, who has come into the scene, corrects him, using “make” in its sexual sense. He did not “make” her; she was the aggressor (25). The aural and verbal stimulants explain the Woman’s appearance and the reason for Willy’s affair with her. He is not like Happy, who seduces women for the feeling of power the seductions give him. The Woman empowers him in a different way. She boosts his self-esteem. So does Linda, but Willy can downplay his wife’s boost as fulfilling her role of supportive partner. The Woman, however, owes him no allegiance, and, furthermore, she made the overture and as a member of the world he sets out to conquer every time he embarks on a trip. She chose him from all the salesmen who pass her desk every day and for a reason that allays his deepest doubt about his career qualifications. He has a sense of humor, a hallmark of personality. Looking forward to their hotel rendezvous the next time he is in Boston, she leaves laughing at his joke, her laughter only one of the repeated stimulants completing the cumulative scene. With Linda’s laughter blending in with hers, the scene returns to her complimenting her husband on being the “handsomest man” (26) as she mends her stockings, an activity she started in the preceding scene. The mending is a visual stimulant in that it leads to the Woman thanking Willy for his gift of stockings. Bernard’s return with his warning about Biff failing math clarifies the relived scenes’ function in the play’s structure, just as the act-2 Boston hotel scene clarifies their content. Willy believes that the primary qualification for success is personality: personal attractiveness that sells, that induces people to buy. Despite the Woman’s boost to his self-esteem, he remains plagued by doubt about his personality, for the lack of it seems to be the explanation for not being successful. Yet he has no doubt that Biff has it. Ordering Bernard out of the house, he turns on Linda for suggesting that something is wrong with their son: “He’s got spirit, personality…” (27). The question therefore is why Biff does not use his personality because his son’s success would validate his belief. Hence these act-1 relived scenes have Willy returning in memory to the time when Biff was on the verge of fulfilling his potential. Not every act-1 scene is exclusively the relived past, however. Two stimulants in the present when the action reverts summon the next relived scene. One stimulant is verbal. Willy expresses regret to Happy that he did not go with his older brother Ben, who, in a passage repeated more than once, at age seventeen walked into a jungle and came out at age twenty-one a rich man.

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The second stimulant is visual. Willy plays cards with Bernard’s father, Charley, who could not sleep and who reminds him, already thinking of that lost opportunity, of his brother. Before Charley, the owner of a business, leaves, he offers his friend and neighbor a job, but an insulted Willy declines the offer. Although he does not go into detail, the reason is obvious. To accept would be to admit that he made the wrong career choice—that he is a failure as a salesman. He does not want a better offer from Ben; the one opportunity Ben offered is behind him. He wants something else from his brother: approval not only of his choice but the inculcation of his values into his sons. Since their interaction is not another past event unfolding but Willy directing the interaction, he gets it. Ecstatic as Ben’s exit ends the fusion of the relived past and the imagined present, Willy picks up on the result of the jungle experience: “…was rich! That’s just the spirit I want to imbue them with! To walk into a jungle! I was right! I was right! I was right!” (37) Plagued by doubts about his own success, Willy dispels the doubt about his role in his favorite son’s success, and since Biff does not forcefully oppose him, his belief prevails, as it does in a scene following Ben’s departure. Admitting to his mother that he has not found himself and feeling remiss in his filial obligations when learning that his father is contemplating suicide, Biff consents to stay and see a former employer, Bill Oliver, about a position in business. Excited by the decision, Willy advises him on the impression he should make in his clothes, for example, or his demeanor: “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it—because personality always wins the day” (48). Act 1 ends on a variation on a motif in Long Day’s Journey into Night. In act 4 Jamie sinks into despair because he linked his ability to change himself with Mary’s ability to change herself so that her regression dashes his hope. As he says to Edmund, “I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too” (818). In Willy’s mind Biff is poised to claim the stardom he has always deserved, stardom that shone from him when “like a young god” he took the field for the football game. With the son seeing Bill Oliver a validation of personality as the essential ingredient for success, he, Willy, displaying his personality will claim his share of success by seeing the company’s owner for a position in the home office. “Everything’ll be all right” (57), he assures Linda. Though the interviews are similar in that they are humiliating for father and son, the outcomes are different. Willy does not change. His immediate response is to imagine a scene with Ben in which Biff is entering the clubhouse to dress for the Ebbets Field football game, enabling him to confirm his belief to his brother that since universities are scouting the star quarterback, “it’s who you know” (65) that matters. Having secured Ben’s approval for inculcating his values into his sons, Willy never addresses the moral issue. Parents wishing their children well imagine selves that they hope the

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children grow into, but the issue is the degree to which a parent can impose a conception of self onto an offspring—can construct a self for the offspring. Biff’s return to enter the clubhouse is the past, which act-1’s final scene seemed to have put to rest, returning with a vengeance. To an even greater degree than in act 1, Willy pins his hope for the future on his son’s success in his interview, for although the past increasingly impinges on his consciousness until it climaxes in the Boston hotel scene, he remains adamantly future oriented. In the restaurant Happy reminds Biff that their father is “never so happy as when he’s looking forward to something”: an accurate characterization because when Biff tries to tell him about his humiliating interview with Oliver, Willy is not interested in “facts and aspects.” He does not want the truth or reality; he wants a “little good news” (82-83). Since it is personality that counts and Biff has it but will not use it, he is spiting Willy: getting even for the Boston scene by refusing to create a self that guarantees success in life. Biff does change because he comes to realize the consequences of allowing another, even a father he loves, to create a self for him. Filled with “hot air” (105) by Willy into believing he needed nothing other than personality, he is characterized as “very lost” (5) by his mother, has drifted from job to job, and stole a suit in Kansas City that landed him in jail. But the humiliating interview with Oliver made him realize what does matter to him, and it is not wearing a business suit in servitude in an office. It is being outdoors on a ranch in the West with the “work and the food and the time to sit and smoke” (105). Unlike Willy, who never knew himself—never knew that his strength was in his hands installing a living room ceiling, for example—or Happy, who is staying in the city—even though he is only an assistant to the store’s assistant buyer—he discovers himself. In a house where the truth was never told, he tells it: “Pop, I’m nothing! … I’m just what I am, that’s all” (106). As Biff breaks down in Willy’s arms, proving to his father that he loves him, he tells him to burn his “phony dream” (106). ‘Self ’ can be substituted for “dream” in this scene and in the Requiem, where Biff repeats the charge that their father had the “wrong dreams,” angering Happy. Charley intervenes to defend his friend by arguing that a salesman has to “dream.” Charley is right. Since dream or self confers identity, one has to create a dream or self. Biff is right too, however. Willy had the wrong dream in that he did not create it from the truth of himself: his reality. He was selling when in Linda’s words, “He was so wonderful with his hands.” Happy’s dream to be “number-one” is also wrong if it is not created from his reality. Biff is the lone male of the three Lomans who can create a self that expresses his reality because he begins with “nothing” (106): that is, with no self-conception or dream imposed on him by another. And he has discovered himself. As he says to Happy in the Requiem, “I know who I am, kid” (110-11).

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Whether Willy is a tragic hero who sacrifices his life in his “total compulsion to evaluate himself justly” 13 or a delusional suicide is debatable. Had Biff discovered too late that he had sacrificed his life attempting to realize the dream Willy imposed on him, Death of a Salesman could be his tragedy because part of the play’s power is its insistence that to be fully human, one has to claim his “sense of personal dignity” 14 : one has to create a self that expresses that personal dignity. Willy, however, is the protagonist, reaffirmed when he claims his personal dignity rebutting Biff’s “dime a dozen” speech: “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!” (105) Since he is the protagonist, critics offer ways of thinking about him in terms other than those of Miller’s two early statements on the genre. For Bigsby, his tragedy is that he pursues his dream at the expense of the love of his family (xviii). For Eagleton, his “real tragedy…is that he has no choice but to invest his admirably uncompromising energies in a worthless end.” 15 Responding to Willy gazing with wonder on the moon at act-1’s close, Isherwood wrote in his review of the 2012 production: “If Willy had been able to hold on to that image of the moon, shining alike on all men’s failures and all men’s triumphs, perhaps he might have discovered the beauty of life itself, with all its defeats and disappointments, before it was too late.” 16 In Travis Bogard’s words, The Iceman Cometh is “perhaps the most ‘Greek’ of O’Neill’s” plays. In Miller’s own words, A View from the Bridge is the most Greek of his plays. Relating its origin, he writes that upon hearing the tale that became the play’s basis, “it seemed to me that I had heard it before, very long ago. After a time I thought that it must be some re-enactment of a Greek myth which was ringing a long-buried bell in my own subconscious mind.” 17 With the narrator functioning as a chorus commenting on the action but unable to prevent the inevitable catastrophe, the play’s form is Greek, encapsulated as a “moral conflict between the strivings of the individual hero and the values of his community.” 18 In the contemporary reinvention of this “confrontation between individual desire and communal code,” John Orr sees A View from the Bridge as the “one unconditionally tragic work which Miller ever wrote.” 19 Not all individual desire, however, is in conflict with communal code or values. The opening scene is a prologue in which the narrator, a lawyer named Alfieri, identifies the community as Red Hook, Brooklyn, where longshoremen work on the docks unloading ships’ cargoes. With longshoreman Eddie Carbone’s entrance onstage to mount the stairs leading to the living room of his and wife Beatrice’s flat, the audience is witnessing the play proper. He is greeted by Catherine, the seventeen-year-old niece living with the Carbones following her mother’s death whose new dress, change in hair style, and general excitement signal her individual desire. The best student in her stenography class, she has been offered a job as a stenographer

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with a good salary and opportunity for promotion to a secretary’s position. Though she has Beatrice’s consent, she needs Eddie’s as head of the household for the new self she wants to create. In explaining why she consents, Beatrice makes Catherine’s desire for a new self consistent with the community’s values: its expectations for aspiring girls from working-class families at mid-20th century. They would be expected to graduate from high school and, since they were not upper-class girls going to college or middle-class girls going to nursing school, acquire a skill such as stenography that would get them jobs with the fortunate ones eventually becoming secretaries. Since Catherine has been fulfilling these expectations and not only is the principal’s choice for the job opening but also has his assurance that she can complete the stenography class’ requirements for a certificate, Beatrice does not understand her husband’s resistance. “I mean it, Eddie,” she tells him, “sometimes I don’t understand you; they picked her out of the whole class, it’s an honor for her.” 20 In explaining his resistance, Eddie gives a series of objections. His niece has to finish school before going to work. The job in a plumbing company by the Navy Yard is in a bad neighborhood, rendered more dangerous now that she is at an age that draws attention from men like longshoremen, plumbers, and sailors who prey on inexperienced girls. And he prefers that when she goes to work, it will be with a “different kind of people” (9) such as lawyers, for example. The women defuse each objection, as Beatrice does when she tells him to “Listen, if nothin’ happened to her in this neighborhood it ain’t gonna happen noplace else” (9). He reluctantly consents but not before revealing in his objections one facet of his individual desire. Though stated dictatorially as what he “wanted” for his niece (8), the desire does not conflict with communal values, for it is the legitimate concern of a man who promised Catherine’s dying mother that he would take responsibility for her. In his objections he reveals another facet of his individual desire. Reluctantly consenting, he confesses to Catherine that he “never figured on one thing.… That you would ever grow up” (14). Inhabiting unchanging mythic time, she was his charge looking to him for guidance, and he was her protector guiding her. All three conspired to create the suspension of time. Eddie and Beatrice call Catherine “Baby” among other appellations while she acted like a baby for them. With mythic time abolished, however, they are thrust into the changing present time and a variation on Greek tragedy in Miller’s reinvention. Greek tragedy interacts a present, democratic age as embodied in a chorus with a bygone, heroic age as embodied in a legendary or mythic figure such as Orestes or Oedipus. In Miller’s variation Eddie is the dislodged legendary or mythic figure interacting with contemporary Red Hook except that it is Red Hook’s communal code that is ancient. As the Italianborn Alfieri introduces the setting, he relates that every so often he has a case

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similar to one that occurred in “some Caesar’s year, in Calabria perhaps or on the cliff at Syracuse” (2). Neither does this facet of Eddie’s individual desire violate communal values. Every parent, and though Eddie and Catherine are uncle and niece, their relationship is that of father and daughter, probably subconsciously wants to keep the child in mythic time in which he/she is the mentor and the child the learner. The opening scene ends with Alfieri referring to Eddie “as good a man as he had to be in a life that was hard and even” (15) while acknowledging his role in helping his wife, who calls him an “angel” (7), realize her individual desire by providing space in their flat for her two Italian cousins who enter the country illegally to work on the docks. The harboring of illegal immigrants is a realization of communal values in which Red Hook residents help old-world relatives find employment in the new world. Yet in introducing the setting, Alfieri likens the action about to unfold to a case that a lawyer in ancient times was powerless to stop from running “its bloody course” (2). A third facet of Eddie’s individual desire that he reveals responding to Catherine’s desire to take the stenographer’s job explains why the action runs inevitably to its tragic end and why he is an actor in the action, for the facet violates the communal code and the moral code. He is “sickened ” (9) to learn of the job’s location because sailors will ogle her as she walks from the subway stop to the plumbing company. The disturbing stage directions do not apply to him alone. Hearing his series of objections, Beatrice is “angering” (9) at his resistance and “avoiding his gaze” as “tears show in his eyes” (14) when he finally consents. These stage directions are the first indication of Eddie’s unholy desire for Catherine, the obsession that “can’t be given up,” that “becomes more powerful than the individual that it inhabits, like a force from another world.” 21 But unlike the first two facets, the legitimate concern and the desire to remain in mythic time, this facet is buried beneath Eddie’s consciousness. Reacting to a Russian production of the play that he saw, Miller writes that he was “astounded to hear Eddie, in the first ten minutes of the play, facing Catherine in the presence of his wife, and announcing that he was in love with the girl—they had simply eliminated anything subconscious from the whole story.” 22 How long the obsession could be held in abeyance and not become more powerful is a moot question. At some point Catherine would become involved with a man in the plumbing company or elsewhere, activating the obsession. An event anticipated in the first scene that occurs in a subsequent scene, however, activates it. Beatrice’s two illegally immigrating cousins arrive to sleep in the Carbone flat while working on the docks: Marco, the married older brother, and Rodolpho, the single younger brother, whom Catherine finds so interesting that Eddie increasingly ignores him to address only Marco and embarrasses his niece by sending her out of the room to

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change her high heels for low heels, provoking a “cold look” (22) at him from his wife. The scene ends with Eddie’s face “puffed with trouble” and Alfieri commenting that the trouble “would not go away” (23). The puffed trouble is the activated obsession that the first scene in the play proper connects with the consequence an individual pays for snitching on illegal immigrants to the Immigration Bureau, which deports them. Yet if that is the only way to get rid of a rival, the action will run its bloody course with the chorus unable to prevent the tragedy. In Miller’s reinvention of Greek tragedy, Eddie is possessed by an obsession that is “like a force from another world” as mythic characters are possessed by forces from another world that are represented by deities. The obsession becomes more powerful as an uncontrollable force because another force from another world challenges it. But this second force is not Greek; it is Italian. Neither is it mythic; it is realistic in the person of Rodolpho, who unlike his brother Marco, who sends money home to his family, spends his wages on clothes and records, wants to see Broadway’s bright lights, and becomes romantically involved with Catherine. Eddie cannot control this second force for a variety of reasons. He is suffering from a lack of virility that has nothing to do with the brothers’ arrival. As Beatrice says to him, “It’s almost three months you don’t feel good; they’re only here a couple of weeks” (25). Implying that Rodolpho is homosexual also has nothing to do with the Italian’s sexual orientation and everything to do with neutralizing his virility. Eddie feels that Rodolpho taking advantage of Catherine is a violation of his hospitality, but he cannot evict the brothers because they are his wife’s cousins and doing so would violate communal values. Eddie is suspicious of the Italian’s motive for dating his niece, but when he tries to alert her that if Rodolpho can get her to marry him she is his passport to American citizenship, she refuses to “believe” her uncle (30). The primary reason, however, for Eddie being unable to control the force that challenges the force possessing him makes A View from the Bridge a better play in terms of motivation than All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Chris’ desire to create a new self with Ann sets in motion action that is strained. Ann’s brother George, who never visited their father in prison, does so for the first time only to tell him that his beloved daughter is marrying into the Keller family but while there hears for the first time the father’s defense, sending him to the Keller house to confront Joe, a confrontation that has Chris speaking but not acting. Biff’s return home from a sojourn as farmhand in the West sets in motion action by goading Willy into renewing his effort to get his son to create a new self in his image, a self Biff has consistently resisted. He agrees this time but only when he learns that his father is contemplating suicide before coming to realize that Willy’s dream is wrong for him. By play’s end he understands that he has to create a self that expresses his reality: a creating in the future.

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Catherine’s desire to create a new self as stenographer sets in motion her play’s action. Overcoming her disappointment with her uncle’s reaction helps her to be more self-assertive when desiring to create a new self with Rodolpho. Beatrice’s support also helps. She tells her niece, “It means you gotta be your own self more. You still think you’re a little girl, honey. But nobody else can make up your mind for you any more, you understand?” (31) Unlike the first two plays, A View from the Bridge dramatizes Catherine being her “own self more.” She is angry when Eddie questions what Paramount she and Rodolpho went to: in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Refusing to believe Eddie’s accusation that Rodolpho is using her as his passport, she tells her uncle to “stop” badgering her (30). Whether the immigrant is or is not using Catherine is never resolved. What is, is his desire to create a new self with her, and the play’s dramatization of the two lovers creating themselves in a union culminates in the post-coital scene with an enraged Eddie kissing her first and Rodolpho second with Catherine screaming at him to let go of the man she will marry or “I’ll kill you!” (52) She too has become an uncontrollable force. The collision of the uncontrollable forces propels the action to its climax. Learning from Alfieri that legally he cannot prevent the marriage and from Catherine that having “made up” her “mind” (59) she cannot be dissuaded, Eddie snitches on the brothers to the Immigration Bureau, provoking Marco to spit in his face and Eddie to demand an apology or retribution for the insult. The ferocity of his demand for the restoration of dignity to his name qualifies him as a tragic hero in Miller’s definition, for in his refusal to run when warned that Marco is approaching, he is a “character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.” 23 What is absent, however, is the awareness of his betrayal of the communal code. He pulls his hand away from Rodolpho’s attempt to apologize for not asking his permission to court Catherine and demands that Marco apologize for the insult, but he has no remorse for depriving Marco of the opportunity to send money home to his family. As Miller himself writes, his conception of “right, dignity, and justice” is “misguided.” 24 Clarification of a phrase in Alfieri’s closing speech underscores the misguidance. The lawyer commends Eddie for allowing himself to be “wholly known” (72). But by whom? “Wholly” appears twice in Miller’s two early statements on tragedy. In the first he writes about man’s need to “wholly realize himself” (6); in the second about characters who are “wholly and intensely realized” (11). In the first the tragic hero realizes himself; in the second the playwright realizes the characters. The second applies to Eddie: a wholly realized character who does not know himself. In the scene with Marco approaching, Eddie recoils from Beatrice’s imputation that he wants but cannot have Catherine. Yet it is his desire for her that is the uncontrolla-

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ble force that her creating a new self sets on a collision course with the uncontrollable force of the two lovers. The study examines Incident at Vichy because critics find that one of the characters fits Miller’s definition of tragic hero 25 and also because a critic interprets the play as a clear structural example of Sartrean existentialism, 26 and the study has not invoked existentialism in examining any of the plays. The reader familiar with the contemporary theatre does not have to be familiar with 20th-century philosophy. He/She can glean the issues from sources such as Mary Tyrone’s belief that a person has a “true self ”—an essential self or essence that precedes existence—but that repeated existential experience can so numb it that it is “lost…forever” (749). From Foreman’s theatre that dramatizes the rise of impulses from the fluid unconscious into consciousness and conversion into language, art, behavior that once fixed has to be dissolved so that the process of constantly creating oneself can begin again. The self that does the conversion, however, is the essential self that is Foreman in a theatre that he calls that of “SITUATION and IMPULSE” 27 to distinguish it from the Aristotelian theatre of event and action. From Robert Jay Lifton’s analysis of the contemporary self as “sequential”: a person changes as he/she has different involvements in life; as “simultaneous”: a person can hold multiple, even antithetical, images and ideas at any one time; and as “social”: a person presents himself/herself in different ways in different situations. 28 The reader should also be familiar with the modern world’s irrationality and absurdity, introduced in the play’s opening moments in which six men and a boy sit apprehensively in a detention room in Vichy, France, to which the authorities have brought them. The most visibly nervous, the one least able to master his fear that they were arrested for being Jews, is Lebeau, a painter. He talks compulsively, telling the others that in 1939, before Germany invaded France, his family had an American visa, but at the last moment, his mother refused to leave because she could not part with her furniture— that he is in mortal danger today because of her “brass bed and some fourthrate crockery.” In an attempt to calm him, Bayard, an electrician, tells him to “think of why things happen. It helps to know the meaning of one’s suffering.” 29 Lebeau explodes, giving as evidence of a lack of meaning the way in which he was arrested. A car pulled up alongside him as he was walking and a man got out and measured his nose. The size of one’s nose is a determinant of one’s identity! As the procedure begins and one by one they and three new detainees are taken into an inner room to have the papers that all people must carry checked for authenticity because with refugees coming into Vichy forged papers are rife, the conversation among them shifts to another check the Germans use as a determinant of identity: the presence or absence of circumcision.

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“Nothing” describes the play’s world, which is that of a Nazi-controlled detention room in Vichy, France, in 1942: a world without rationality and morality, without meaning, and without God. At first the word is spoken innocuously in statements such as Lebeau’s “I’ve got nothing against stealing” (17) referring to the Gypsy’s presence in the hope that if he was arrested for stealing, the explanation for the detainees is not racial, for in the opening moments Lebeau suggested the explanation was a “racial implication” (4). But as the apprehension builds, so does the word until it is repeated with regularity in the play’s closing speeches. Its occurrence midway through the action, however, is its most important occurrence, spoken by a non-Jewish detainee, the Austrian prince Von Berg, in response to the actor Monceau’s response to Bayard’s account of seeing and smelling sealed railroad cars that support the rumor that the trains transport Jews to concentration camps to be cremated. Monceau cannot believe that the Germans would do that. “You can say whatever you like,” is his position, “but the Germans are not illogical; there’s no conceivable advantage for them in such a thing” (37). Leduc, a psychiatrist, criticizes him for imposing a rational explanation onto irrational experience. Von Berg also disagrees with Monceau’s position in the play’s longest speech, though the following summary incorporates words not found in the speech. For the Austrian prince, with the medieval world’s breakup, the traditional conception of a human being as an essential or true self has “no room on this earth.” Since all life begins in “nothing,” every life must create a self. Whereas characters in other contemporary plays fall into despair realizing they are nothing, “it is the hallmark of the age—the less you exist the more important it is to make a clear impression.” The Nazis’ clear impression, Von Berg concludes, therefore is creating a monstrously hypertrophied atrocity that “prove[s] for all time that they exist, yes, and that they were sincere” in what they did (38-39). A minor play in Miller’s oeuvre, Incident at Vichy is a major play on the necessity of creating a self, an identity, in the world left in the wake of the traditional world’s breakup. The study examines the creations of five of the detainees interrupted by an examination of two of the authorities’ creations. The electrician Bayard, the first of the five to be ordered into the inner room, is a communist who chides Monceau for relying on his ability to act a part. Arguing that it takes something more substantial than acting to face the enemy, he takes confidence despite his nervousness from his faith in the future rather than the present and in historical determinism rather than individual action. Although Von Berg momentarily punctures his belief in class interest effecting change by pointing out that most Nazis come from the working class, he makes Von Berg question his belief in individual action effecting change by asking, “Are you seriously telling me that five, ten, a thousand, ten thousand decent people of integrity are all that stand between

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us and the end of everything?” (33-34) Not thinking of the inner-room interview as a personal confrontation because he thinks of himself as part of an inevitable movement, he achieves an “authority” (36) approaching the Police Captain, who beckons to him that he is next. The actor Monceau is in a state of denial in which the idea that Germans would herd Jews into trains to be cremated is “fantastic idiocy” (36) because Germans love the arts. Having acted in Germany, he found the audience “sensitive to the smallest nuance of a performance; they sit in the theater with respect, like in a church” (24). Even Von Berg’s story of the German authorities sitting through a musician’s rehearsal with respect and then arresting the musician does not change his mind because the cultivated audience for whom he performed “could not burn up actors in a furnace” (46). In denial, he persists in interpreting the detainees’ situation as simply waiting to undergo a routine check of their identification papers. When beckoned he will create a self as every actor does, this one so credible that the authorities will have to honor it and release him. Unshaken by Von Berg’s story, he is unshaken though furious by Leduc’s repeated question about what he will do when they tell him to open his fly to check for circumcision. His answer is “I have nothing to say to you” (49). He approaches the beckoning Police Captain with “erect elegance” (58). The painter Lebeau has the psychology of the victim. The most visibly nervous of the detainees and a compulsive talker who keeps asking the others whether their noses were measured as his was, he admits he is “scared to death” (8) and periodically reveals “unconcealed terror” (28). The first to suggest a racial implication in the detainees, he is also the first to acknowledge his fear that “we’ve had it” (5). Later, emotionally exhausted, he confines the conversation to his situation by wishing that he was Von Berg: arrested by mistake and therefore innocent. To Lebuc’s question about why he feels guilty, he explains that a Jew is made to feel guilty living with the world’s hatred. Yes, he concludes, he believes that he will die. Beckoned, he rises “sleepily” (57) to move in the wrong direction before reversing and disappearing in the inner office. No one of the three is issued a pass releasing him. While the detainees are revealing themselves, so are the German authorities. With a degree in racial anthropology, the Professor ferrets out Jews hiding behind forged identification papers because in Nazi science Jews are a race or nationality distinct from French, apparent in his asking the detainees whether any of them are “bona fide Frenchmen” (40). But his science does not include himself in the examination. His interaction with the German Major does. When the Major first appears, he tells the detainees that he is “not in charge” (11). Later, the Professor tells him that he is “in command of this operation” (41), despite the latter’s contention that he is a line officer wounded in combat whose assignment to the detention room is temporary.

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The Professor will have none of it, insisting that he will not proceed without the Major. That is, the Professor refuses to take responsibility for the deportation to death camps. Neither will the Major take responsibility. Although he admits to Leduc, a fellow combat officer in the French army, that the operation is “inconceivable” to him (53), he will not aid the detainees in escaping or stop the operation. Brandishing his revolver, he explains why. There are no longer “persons” (55) responsible for actions, for if they were to stop the operation, they would be replaced by another set of functionaries. In effect, he confirms Von Berg’s argument that the modern world denies personal responsibility by rejecting the traditional conception of a human being as a person of essence: an essential self disposed to act in a certain way. As the last two detainees await the opening of the inner door and the beckoning, Von Berg asks Leduc for his friendship because beyond telling Leduc’s wife what happened to her husband, there is nothing he can do to change the procedure’s outcome. A Gentile arrested by mistake, he will be released while the psychiatrist, a Jew, will be deported. Instead, Leduc tells him the “truth” of the atrocity: that he too is guilty of the genocide by making the Jew the Other who is reviled, ostracized, condemned to death. Jews themselves are guilty, for even “Jews have their Jews.” Yet he does not want Von Berg, who is protesting his innocence, to simply accept his guilt for harboring hatred. He wants him to accept his responsibility as he should have when his Nazi cousin, Baron Kessler, helped to remove Jewish doctors from the Viennese medical school. Not accepting guilt and responsibility renders the suffering meaningless, to be forever repeated (66-67). Beckoned, Von Berg cannot act before entering the inner office. He has to wait until he is released with a pass to leave and can give it to Leduc, urging him to Go. Von Berg is a good man who challenges Monceau’s argument that Germans love the arts by asking, “Can people with respect for art go about hounding Jews?” (24), who tells of the musicians arrested on his estate, and who confides that he contemplated suicide when discovering that his circle of friends did not care what happened to the musicians. But he does not act from his essence because Leduc’s “truth” taints it, the tainting reinforced by the laughter in the inner office that begins when a detainee, the Old Jew, is taken in and rises to half-hysterical pitch. The laughter can be interpreted as the sadistic pleasure the authorities derive by tormenting an old, defenseless man, but since it also coincides with Leduc’s accusation and ceases when a stunned Von Berg recognizes his complicity by not becoming involved in the medical school’s convulsions, it can be interpreted as the authorities’ recognition that the prince is one of them. If he is, it is only until his release—not into an essential self paralyzed by the taint but into an existential self free to accept his guilt and responsibility by sacrificing himself. In the existential freedom of the will to choose, he creates a new self by accepting death. His sacrifice, however, affirms the power of individual, personal action and

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proves a “moral world at the cost of his own life.” 30 And the responsibility does not have to end with Von Berg, for the atrocity and suffering continue with four more detainees brought into the detention room. Giving the boy’s ring to Leduc, Von Berg gives him the opportunity to accept responsibility for the dignity of life by creating a new self that risks his life getting the ring to the boy’s mother so that she will know what happened to her son. In a 1989 interview, Miller revealed an eleven-year off and on struggle he was having trying to complete The Ride down Mount Morgan, a play he was not sure would “end up a tragedy or a comedy.” 31 Almost twenty-five years earlier, he had reaffirmed death as essential to tragedy: “And there is no possibility, it seems to me, of speaking of tragedy without it.” 32 If the inseparability of the two held in 1989, The Ride down Mount Morgan is not a tragedy because no one dies, although attempted suicide may be the explanation for the accident that precedes the play’s opening scene. Lyman Felt awakens in a cast in a hospital to which he was brought after crashing his car by driving down the icy Mount Morgan. Learning that his two wives have been summoned as next of kin, he tries to have the hospital rescind the summonings because his first wife, Theo, does not know he married a second time, and the second wife, Leah, believed him when he told her he was divorcing Theo. Imagining in his distress their meeting, he considers the possibility that the “crash…was maybe to sort of subconsciously…get you both to…meet one another, finally.” 33 Attempted suicide remains a possibility. For Leah, his driving on the ice at night is “incomprehensible” (10) because he is familiar with the roads and the dangers they pose. For the state police, he had to remove the barrier they had put up to prevent cars from driving on the ice at night. For his best friend, the lawyer Tom Wilson, who “almost hope[s]” he attempted suicide, it would indicate in Theo’s words a “moral conscience” (55). That presence would indicate a tragedy. Discussing the role of the traditional tragic hero in an interview, Miller said that such a hero “threw some sharp light upon the hidden scheme of existence, either by breaking one of its profoundest laws, as Oedipus breaks a taboo, and therefore proves the existence of the taboo, or by proving a moral world at the cost of his own life.” 34 Bigamy can be a contemporary equivalent to ancient incest, but Felt does not understand the “terrible harm” (67) Tom accuses him of doing to the women because he gave them interesting lives, wonderful children, and sizable incomes. Mocking the idea of the “moral purpose of the universe” (68), he therefore denies the presence of tragedy. For him, life is absurd, as in his account of meeting Theo. When hitchhiking at age nineteen, he left his suitcase on the road’s shoulder while he urinated behind a bush. Her father saw the suitcase, stopped, gave him a ride, and introduced him to his daughter. Yet at the same time, by admitting that his character is “so bad” (36) that it is “miserable” (57), he proves a moral world, just as he does later when he

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concedes to Tom that he may have been attempting to “end…it all” and confesses to the women that he “harmed” them (113). This fluctuation between denial and admission of the moral consequences of his conduct is one reason The Ride down Mount Morgan is “comic without being a comedy and tragic without being a tragedy.” 35 By sometimes being accountable by choosing to take responsibility for his culpability, Felt is therefore midway between Von Berg and the protagonists of the three earlier plays. For Joe Keller, Willy Loman, and Eddie Carbone, “only a non-choice exists, in which they are unable to understand their accountability.” 36 If the play is not a tragedy, perhaps it is a farce, for Leah, having discovered that Lyman has two wives, invokes the genre when she asks Tom, “Can he be two people? Is that possible?” (19) In its classical model, farce interrogates the concept of identity, as in Georges Feydeau’s theatre. The setting for acts 1 and 3 of a three-act Feydeau farce is the respectable bourgeois society, though with undercurrents of repressed desire in act 1. The setting for act 2 usually is a hotel, the place where a couple can release the repressed desire. The action there moves at a frenetic pace, propelling characters through darkened corridors and in and out of rooms, doors slamming, some of which incompetent clerks misassigned because the hotel has licit guests as well as illicit lovers and some of which are temporary hiding places for other harried philanderers. For the would-be adulterers, the assignation is exhilarating, freeing them from bourgeois society’s restraints. Since they cannot leave at the hotel a record of their identity, which they shed with their respectability, they can adopt any disguise and assume any identity they choose. The experience, however, is not without the risk of discovery by licit guests who may recognize them or by suspicious spouses who may have followed them. More terrifying is that by stepping outside of society, they forfeit their bourgeois identity and are therefore potentially unable to reclaim it in society. Hence act 3 returns to act-1’s setting with the chastened characters so grateful to be safe and secure in respectability, its blandness notwithstanding, that they resolve never to stray again. Feydeau’s protagonist is an essential self, though with errant impulses that surface in act 2. With the errant self on the verge of being exposed as his secret self, the protagonist inters it by reclaiming his true self: his identity in society. Miller’s protagonist does not appear to be an essential, unitary self, for he lives two distinct lives with two different women. And given his definition of man, which can be interpreted as exceeding the boundary of Lifton’s analysis of postmodern man as sequential, simultaneous, and social, he could be twelve more selves: “A man is a fourteen-room house—in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in his living room he’s rolling around with some bare-assed girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up” (69).

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The question, however, is whether Felt can be fourteen different identities. The only way to answer the question is to determine why he lives two distinct lives. The simplest explanation is to overcome boredom, the bane of the monogamous state. Having two wives allowed him to indulge one desire such as flying planes or racing cars with one wife and a different but compelling desire with the other wife. He himself raises the attendant issue with Tom, guilt for violating the marriage vow, only to shoot it down. He does not feel guilty because a “man can be faithful to himself or to other people—but not to both” (66). He chose being responsible to himself. Note that he says “himself” and not ‘his selves,’ which would be consistent with his fourteenroom house metaphor as a definition of man. Earlier he told Tom of his desire at this point in his life “to wear my own face on my face every day till the day I die” (24). Note too that he did not change his name for the second marriage. The implication running through these instances is that at the core of the fourteen selves is an essential or true self. The explanation is not only simple; it is simplistic, appropriate though it is for a man with a hunger for life, a man for whom a new woman is an “undiscovered shore” (24), a man for whom paradise is being pressed between the “double heat of two blessed wives” (40). The more complicated explanation is fear of death, and it is complicated because Felt waffles between admitting in one flashback scene that he “fear[s] death” (57) and in another flashback scene convincing himself that he overcame his fear by not bolting from the charging lion, and he waffles between crying out, “Fuck death and dying” (90), and admitting that he hoped the ride down Mount Morgan that would bring him to Leah would also bring him “back to life again” from the “corpse” he was in the motel (113). Thus Miller’s play is not like a Feydeau farce, which in interrogating the concept of identity satirizes bourgeois values, but it is like a Feydeau farce in that Felt does not have fourteen identities. He does not even have two identities. What he has is an essential self concealed beneath his two marriages. Waffling between a concealed essential self and fourteen situational selves that function as that self’s barricade is Felt’s way of keeping death at bay. The waffling defuses death’s power by diffusing it: keeping death from concentrating its power on the true self creating the forms. And they are not limited to two wives and the children they produced. He can express himself in as many forms as he has energy, so that if death claims one—racing cars, for example—he still has thirteen in the fourteen-room house metaphor. As a drama about responsibility, The Ride down Mount Morgan is midway between the three early dramas and Incident at Vichy. Even though Von Berg is least accountable because the three early protagonists actually did something, unlike the Austrian prince who passively tolerated the purging of Jewish doctors from the medical school, he accepts responsibility and sacrifices himself. Although Felt accepts responsibility for being selfish and hav-

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ing “harmed” his wives and children, he waffles in the same speech, protesting that he still does not understand why he should be “condemned” (113). Waffling is his way of keeping tragedy at bay. The waffling defuses tragedy’s power by diffusing it along a spectrum from accepting responsibility to denying it, from proving a moral world to disproving it and thereby preventing tragedy from concentrating its power on a responsible Felt. If he allowed the concentration, he would be expected to sacrifice himself, and he is not about to do that. A comparison of the closing scenes of A Touch of the Poet and The Ride down Mount Morgan shows why the O’Neill play is more tragic than the Miller play. Unable to find an appropriate audience that will accept the selfimage of Major Melody to which he devoted his energy in creating, Con sacrifices that identity by joining the men in the bar, commoners whom he previously treated as socially beneath him. While his wife understands his need for companionship in his “loneliness,” his daughter, hearing the music played in the bar, hears a “requiem for the dead.” In trembling voice she wishes that the Major “rest in peace!” (280) With his wives, daughter, and lawyer friend leaving him, Felt consoles himself in the play’s closing speech with the directive to “learn loneliness.” The consolation is momentary, however, for in the next breath he tells himself to “cheer up!” because he has “found Lyman at last!” (116) Alone, he has found the essential or true self at the core of the house metaphor: the identity that creates in fourteen different forms from writing poetry to running a company, flying a plane to making love to different women. Lyman Felt is the new self that neutralizes death and tragedy by so engaging in life that he keeps death and tragedy offbalance. If the crash was a subconscious desire to bring two wives together, it was also a desire to bring two of his selves together so that the wives would know that he is the creator of their conjugal lives. The chapter closes by returning to the question raised at the end of the examination of All My Sons: whether a play requires a tragic hero/ine to be a tragedy. The chapter delayed the issue until now because Miller, unlike the playwrights in the preceding chapters, wrote extensively on tragedy and because a Miller scholar connects four of the candidates for the designation in the five plays the chapter examined. Although Steven R. Centola uses the term “tragic figure,” he must mean it as synonymous with Miller’s “tragic hero” because both men apply the terms to Oedipus. Interpreting the playwright’s oeuvre, Centola sees him plumbing the “potential of humanity for honest self-exploration” in a theatre that celebrates the art of the possible. This study agrees with Centola’s conclusion that “characters like Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Eddie Carbone, and Lyman Felt do not exercise their freedom to choose honestly and responsibly.” Given the opportunity to realize their potential but not seizing it, the four therefore are not tragic heroes.

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The study also agrees with Centola, who shows how while celebrating the art of the possible, Miller creates a theatre in the “tragic mode,” incorporating his “tragic vision.” But after reading this chapter, someone might counter that that statement only obtains for Incident at Vichy. Hence the question remains. Can the four protagonists’ plays be tragedies if they are not tragic heroes? Centola’s summary of the Kellers in All My Sons answers in the affirmative: “The Kellers, and many of those around them, choose to blame everyone else for their dilemma, but the play actually shows its audiences that they are the authors of their destiny and failure to accept the tremendous burden of their freedom and responsibility is itself the cause of their personal tragedy.” 37 Strictly in terms of the four protagonists’ plays, Miller’s theatre realizes its potential by dramatizing the tragedies of characters given a set of circumstances in which to realize themselves, their potential as human beings, who fail to act honestly and responsibly, who fail to be tragic heroes.

Chapter Five

Tennessee Williams

In each of the two previous chapters, the first scene of the first full-length play introduces the creating of a new self as the action’s motivating force. The first scene of The Glass Menagerie has a created new self, but a spectator seeing the play for the first time would not realize that or the creating of a new self as the action’s motivating force because what pressure there is to create a new self is on another character and only flickeringly. The speaker, Tom, identifies himself as the action’s narrator and a character in it, but though he is dressed as a merchant sailor, he gives no indication of a connection between being a sailor and whatever takes place in the scene. The “play is [his] memory,” but though by “turn[ing] back time” 1 The Glass Menagerie makes a temporal connection between the creating of the play and the events it recreates, the first scene does not necessarily make a causal connection. Moreover, while Tom’s monologue establishes temporality, the scene itself abolishes it. The setting is the Wingfield apartment where Amanda, the mother, and her two adult children are finishing dinner. Amanda’s directive to Laura that she not get the dessert but “stay fresh and pretty—for gentlemen callers” (25) seems to flicker with a desire for the daughter to create a new self as a Southern belle, but the desire is not developed. As Laura and Tom recognize, the directive is the mother’s excuse to tell again the story of the day she received seventeen gentlemen callers: a ritual that is the eternal return or recurrence of an act originally performed primordially before humankind was imprisoned in irreversible time, for the realm that Amanda inhabits as Southern belle is timeless. It is the mythic state in which she can perform other rituals, other acts that abolish time. She can perform myths of the Old South in which she tells Laura not to get the dessert. “You be the lady this time and I’ll be the darky” (25). Yet although Amanda dominates the scene, 121

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it ends with her repeating the flickering desire, held a bit steadier, that Laura prepare for the gentlemen callers despite the daughter’s protest that none are coming. Scene 2 clarifies. Amanda also inhabits the real world. She has to, given the abandonment of the family by the father that forces her to earn income where she can: demonstrating brassieres, for example. She also has a genuine concern for her daughter that forces her to check on her progress in the business school in which she was enrolled but which she stopped attending because the pressure to perform on the typing keyboard made her ill. With “hopes and ambitions” (32) blasted for Laura creating a new self as a stenographer, Catherine’s occupation in A View from the Bridge, she must create a substitute new self. Amanda is now serious about Laura becoming marriageable because without a business career and unmarried, she will be dependent on the charity of others. To become marriageable, she must develop charm, the distinguishing quality of the woman who attracts men. To develop it, she must vacate the mythic state she inhabits in which her companions are her glass menagerie and enter the world of gentlemen callers wanting to be charmed. Laura withdrew to compensate for being “crippled” (35) by a childhood illness. Yet her mother will not accept her daughter’s description of her condition. She has a “slight disadvantage” (36) that can be overcome but not in reclusion. She must enter the real world. Amanda may have withdrawn to compensate for being abandoned by her husband, but there is more to her situation than that hasty conclusion. In chapter 2 Foote’s introduction to The Orphans’ Home Cycle refined the opposition of immobility and movement. Here the work itself illuminates. The nine-play cycle opens at the opening of the 20th century, but although the setting is village and town life, upheavals and dislocations wrought by the South’s loss of the Civil War and Reconstruction are affecting the population, sending families rooted for generations into urban centers in search of employment: to Houston, for instance, where oil is replacing cotton as the primary source of wealth. The Glass Menagerie is set in the 1930s in an urban center: a St. Louis apartment in a building that is “one of those hivelike conglomerations of cellular living-units” whose population is lower middle-class. It is entered by a fire escape, a symbolic structure because the building and those like it are “always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation” (21). Given the prospect that this situation offers, Amanda recalls a culture of social graces and moral commitments in which gentlemen callers left their widows financially independent. And if her memory distorts by producing seventeen gentlemen callers, adjusted to half that number, it would still evoke a happier time. Tom, like his mother, inhabits two worlds. Scene 3 is a quarrel between them that according to the stage directions was “probably precipitated by Amanda’s interruption of Tom’s creative labor” (40), but since the creativity

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is not specified, identifying the world he enters when laboring in the apartment has to be withheld until it is specified. Whatever the labor is, Amanda must feel that it jeopardizes Tom’s job at the Continental Shoemakers warehouse because it, like going to the movies nightly, robs him of the sleep he needs to perform at work. He does not need a reminder of the family’s situation, however, because he knows that the salary he earns for a job he hates pays the rent. As for the movies, he intends to keep going nightly to escape the warehouse’s reality. Visual entertainment is one of the two principal forms modern man uses to escape the tyranny of time. Public spectacles, Mircea Eliade writes, “take place in a ‘concentrated time,’ time of a heightened intensity; a residuum of, or substitute for, magico-religious time [or the mythic world in which the original act is primordially performed]. This ‘concentrated time’ is also the specific dimension of the theatre and the cinema. Even if we take no account of the ritual origins and mythological structure of the drama or the film, there is still the important fact that these are the two kinds of spectacle that make us live in time of a quality quite other than that of ‘secular duration.’” 2 The second time Tom discusses movies at length, he tells co-worker Jim that they are popular because they allow people to vicariously experience the adventure enjoyed by the glamorous actors but denied to them in jobs like their warehouse jobs. “Yes,” he goes on, “until there’s a war. That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses!” (79) Reality is so oppressive that only by going to war can the bulk of humankind find excitement. Yet the war forecast in Tom’s allusions to Guernica, Hitler’s retreat, and Chamberlain’s peace were anything but fulfilling for the victims. Picasso’s mural of the Guernica bombing with faces frozen in pain is a depiction not of war’s excitement but of its horror. Tom is being sarcastic. The Glass Menagerie is not. Its indictment of reality has the Wingfields creating the mythic world. In the quarrel scene, Amanda criticizes Tom, but she cannot continue to criticize because she needs him. He is her sole hope for bringing to the apartment a gentleman caller from the pool of young men at work. Desperate to provide for Laura, she proposes a quid pro quo. Knowing, as does Laura, that Tom is unhappy in the apartment and at the warehouse, she agrees to let him leave if he will first get somebody to court his sister. His agreement completes the two conflicts that propel the action through the remaining scenes. Since Jim, the gentleman caller, is both the “most realistic character in the play” (23) and “like some archetype of the universal unconscious” (37), a constituent of myth, the first conflict is between reality and the mythic state to determine the apartment’s dominant mode. In the second conflict, Tom wants to create a new self away from the apartment while Amanda wants him to create one in the apartment. This scene establishes a delayed causal relationship between the play and the events it recreates, although

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only the most attentive of the audience would return in memory to the opening monologue to make the connection. The rest of the audience have to wait for the closing monologue unless they pick up on Tom’s monologue that opens the scene in which Jim arrives for dinner. Describing his relationship with the co-worker, Tom says that Jim called him Shakespeare because he knew of his “practice of retiring to a cabinet of the washroom to work on poems when business was slack in the warehouse” (68). Creating poetry is another way of escaping the tyranny of time. But poetic creation, like linguistic creation, implies the abolition of time—of the history concentrated in language—and tends towards the recovery of the paradisiac, primordial situation; of the days when one could create spontaneously, when the past did not exist because there was no consciousness of time, no memory of temporal duration. It is said, moreover, in our own days, that for a great poet the past does not exist: the poet discovers the world as though he were present at the cosmogonic moment, contemporaneous with the first day of the Creation. From a certain point of view, we may say that every great poet is remaking the world, for he is trying to see it as if there were no Time, no History. 3

Arriving, Jim enters the mythic state, but it is not Tom’s created by writing poetry, though that was probably the labor Amanda interrupted in scene 3; it is the apartment’s mythic state created by Amanda reversing time. Wearing the dress she wore when she entertained gentlemen callers, exuding “girlish Southern vivacity” (80), and jabbering about Old South traditions, she relives the primordial act in her life. Laura’s absenting herself from dinner by retreating into the living room only draws Jim deeper into the mythic state with its symbolic menagerie. The boy that Laura liked in high school, he can be the prince of the Cinderella story who rescues her from a life of reclusion, except that Williams in the essay “The Catastrophe of Success” belittles that fairy tale as a national myth. Reality ends the scene as the dominant mode, for Jim is engaged and cannot return as a gentleman caller. With Jim gone and Tom not long after and with him his salary that paid the rent, reality is also the apartment’s dominant mode. Honoring the quid pro quo, Amanda releases the son but, unlike him and his father, does not abandon the daughter, though by staying she sentences herself to servitude demonstrating brassieres and selling magazine subscriptions until death claims her. Tom opens the play’s closing monologue by telling the audience that he left after being fired for writing a poem on a shoe box. He does not say whether he still writes poetry, but he does not have to because he creates the mythic state that is The Glass Menagerie. He did create a new self away from the apartment enabling him to reverse what in reality is irreversible: time. To

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claim, however, that the play’s dominant mode is mythic is misleading. The form with its non-realistic elements is mythic; the content is realistic. For a 2013 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, director John Tiffany and set designer Bob Crowley came up with a design that would not reproduce the “realistically shabby, cramped” Wingfield apartment standard in most productions. “Three hexagon-shaped platforms, arranged like a molecular honeycomb, would serve as the Wingfield living room, dining room and kitchen, and a pool of syrupy black liquid would fill the rest of the 48-foot-by-40-foot stage.” Since The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, the effect they hoped to achieve would be the “way that words and images can appear in our minds, as if out of darkness, and combine into a strand of thought.” 4 As imaginative as the design is, Tom’s closing monologue’s strand of thought is of his sister. In St. Louis he created the mythic state of poetry to escape his life in the apartment and the warehouse, oppressive reality that he expected to leave behind when he left St. Louis. He is creative in that his memory creates the mythic state, but it is a curse because it contains reality. Tom “revisits the past because he knows that his own freedom, such as it is, has been purchased at the price of abandoning others, as Williams had abandoned his mother and, more poignantly, his sister.” 5 The sudden shift in the monologue’s tense attests to the power of the guilt that drives him, for what was the past in “Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass” becomes the present in “Perhaps I am walking along a street at night” as Laura’s image fills his consciousness. The apartment and the warehouse were traps. Now the new self is, and since its guilt is inescapable, he implores Laura to break the curse for him: “Blow out your candles” (115). Yet as Brian Parker reminds the reader, “Besides its gentle sadness and remorse, there is also ruthlessness in Tom’s final command.… Like Othello’s ‘Put out the light,’ this is a kind of loving murder, a repetition of the original violation.” 6 In the play’s ultimate irony, his St. Louis situation was the past from which Tom freed himself to create primordial acts endlessly repeated in the mythic worlds of poetry. Away from St. Louis, however, he discovers that the violation of Laura’s situation has become the realistic act endlessly repeated in his consciousness. In scene 4 of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois contrasts herself with her sister, Stella DuBois Kowalski: “I’m going to do something. Get hold of myself and make myself a new life!” 7 To fully appreciate the new self she intends to create, we have to go back to scene 1 and trace her progress to this point. When Blanche first arrives at Stella’s address in New Orleans, she is in “shocked disbelief” (5) by the “poor” (1) neighborhood and cramped apartment, but since she has no other place to go, she must make do with the situation, and she has no other choice because the DuBois family’s ancestral estate at Belle Reve has been lost through deaths and debts. And

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with the loss of the Beautiful Dream is the loss of the Old, agrarian South, of Amanda Wingfield with its myths of chivalrous gentlemen and fair damsels, replaced by the newer, industrialized, South. Stanley Kowalski’s job has him traveling; his best friend Mitch works for the same plant but inside in the spare parts department. For Stanley, such myths, at least those that Blanche propagates, are “imagination! And lies and conceit and tricks!” (158) Stanley’s deflation of Blanche’s pretensions comes in the final scene. Their initial meeting in scene 1 is cordial. She reveals her snobbish attitude toward him as culturally and socially inferior in the same scene when she refers to him as a “Polack” (22) after Stella refers to his ancestry as “Polish” (16), but she does this with her sister; she does not insult him. When in trying to learn about the loss of Belle Reve, property of which as Stella’s husband he is an owner, Stanley grabs a stack of letters from Blanche’s trunk, she feels so insulted that she tells him that she will have to burn them. Baffled, he asks for an explanation that she not only gives him but also apologizes for overreacting with the burning. The overreaction is understandable, though, for the letters are love letters written to her by the boy she married years earlier who died. Reacting to his gruff manner, she is playful with him, teasing him. And she tells Stella she was “flirting” with her husband. She even suggests that “he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve” (45). By the end of scene 2, there is no clear-cut self that Blanche intends to create. The self begins to emerge in scene 3 during the poker game. Not playing the hand Stanley and two other men are playing, Mitch responds when introduced to Blanche “with awkward courtesy” as “Miss Dubois,” prompting her to say to Stella that he seems “superior to the others” (51-52). Since “superior” is a cultural difference indicative of better breeding than that of the others, Blanche sets out to see just how interested Mitch is in her. She steps into the light moving “indolently” (54), diverting his attention from the game and provoking Stanley into rising and closing the curtains separating the men and the game from the sisters in the bedroom. Blanche turns on the radio; his attention diverted, Mitch rises, provoking Stanley into going into the bedroom to turn off the radio. While there he looks directly at his sister-in-law, who returns the look “without flinching” (55), implying that they are beginning to recognize each other as adversaries. With Mitch, not playing another hand, in the bedroom, she turns on the radio and waltzes to the music with Mitch following her, provoking a furious Stanley into throwing the radio out the window. When Blanche arrived at the apartment, she deferred to her brother-in-law’s hospitality, telling him in answer to his question that she would like to stay with him and her sister “if it’s not inconvenient for you all” (27). Yet in thirtysome hours, she has managed to so disrupt his poker game and infuriate him that he reacts with violence.

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A frustrated Stanley reacts with Stella and not with Blanche, and he might never have been violent with her had she stopped after creating a new self with Mitch. He might have even encouraged a relationship between his sister-in-law and best friend to get them married and her out of the apartment that he, like Eddie Carbone, thinks of as his as head of the household and, as he reminds the two women, as “king around here, so don’t forget it!” (131) What he does in his frustration and rage at having the poker game disrupted, however, gives Blanche the second half of the new self. When Stella asks the men to leave after he throws the radio out the window, he attacks his pregnant wife, causing the men to restrain him and causing her, guided by Blanche, to adjourn to the neighbor’s second-floor apartment. Not for long, though, because Blanche discovers that her sister rejoins her husband, the two coming together “with low, animal moans” (67), before he carries her back into their apartment. Appalled, the sister-in-law looks around for a “sanctuary” (67). It is definitely not the apartment. Mitch’s sensitivity expressed in his kindness is one half of the sanctuary apprehended by the creating of the new self’s first half. Blanche reveals the new self’s second half in scene 4, the creating of which will realize the sanctuary. The creating of the new self’s first half took place in scene 3 when Blanche got Mitch interested in her. As she says to Stella in a subsequent scene, with “it” referring to marriage, “Yes—I want Mitch…very badly! Just think! If it happens! I can leave here and not be anyone’s problem” (95). Their home would be a physical sanctuary. The new self’s second half consists of two parts. The first is getting her sister away from her husband, perhaps to live with her and Mitch in the physical sanctuary until she gets another man interested in her. Ignoring Stella’s objection that she has no intention of leaving Stanley because she loves him, Blanche continues to link herself and her sister in their need to escape their situation. Trying to compose a message to a former beau who has reaped success from Texas oil, she writes, “‘Sister and I in desperate situation.’” Seeing the folly in that approach but not giving up, she tells Stella, “I have to plan for us both, to get us both—out!” (78-80) The second part of the new self’s second half transforms the physical sanctuary into a spiritual one while retaining the escape from Stanley and the linkage of herself and Stella. Her husband, Blanche tells her sister, is “common,” “bestial,” “animal,” and “ape-like”—on the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder—whereas she and Stella, having benefitted from “such things as art—as poetry and music”—have risen on the ladder (82-83). And, she is adamant, they cannot regress, which is what living with Stanley is: a regression to a subhuman form of life. Blanche’s new self therefore is a refined self, the antithesis of her brother-in-law’s brutal self. Blanche’s reaction to the violence in linking her sister with herself in wanting to get away from the apartment is excessive, however, especially

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when a serenely relaxed Stella, who shows no signs of being an abused wife, minimizes the previous night’s disorder. Understanding the reaction clarifies the transformation of the physical sanctuary into a spiritual sanctuary. The insight comes when Stella, objecting to her sister’s linkage, replaces it with the linkage between a man and a woman. Now Blanche objects: “What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!” (81) For Blanche, desire is associated with brutes: an impulse or longing for sexual fulfillment. For refined persons, like herself and her sister, the impulse or longing is, or should be, for fulfillment of a higher order: artistic creation, for example. She has already dissociated herself from the brutal impulse with Mitch, telling him at the poker game when she asks him to cover the bulb that she cannot stand a “rude remark or a vulgar action” (60). The two sisters leaving Stanley would be further proof that they are higher on the evolutionary ladder; they are members of a genteel family. Mary Ann Corrigan sees the conflict between Blanche and Stanley as an “externalization of the conflict that goes on within Blanche between illusion and reality” with the illusion the “image of herself as a Southern belle” and the reality her “indulging ‘brutal desire’” as a way of making contact with life in her loneliness. 8 One of many insights into her reality that she seeks to repress is a conversation in which she tells Stella that she has been chary of sexuality with Mitch, although she must be careful not to lose him because a man expects a woman of her age “to—the vulgar term is—‘put out.’…And I—I’m not ‘putting out’” (95). The conversation bespeaks a familiarity with the term that exceeds academic knowledge. Thus the new self as finally created rejects not only regressing to Stanley’s brutal self but to her own brutal self: to her old self in the past. It is in trying to deny the old self and past that Blanche is most vulnerable. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, she is haunted by the memory of her failure to help her husband in his need. The polka music that was playing for the last dance she had with him the night he committed suicide is first heard in scene 1 without any provocation from Stanley, who merely asks about her marriage. Heard again in scene 6 when she relates the story of that night to Mitch, it recurs throughout the play’s final scenes. Other illusory selves or old-self incarnations amuse her such as rolling her eyes when she tells Mitch that she has “old-fashioned ideals” (108) or inquiring in French about sleeping together knowing that he does not understand French. More than anything else, one allusion summarizes the combination of new self and old self, illusion and reality, refinement and crudity that is Blanche. The allusion is to Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier with libretto by Hugo von Hofmannstal: high-brow music when set against the music emanating from a barroom around the corner from the Kowalski apartment. The opera opens on the bedroom of the Marschallin, a woman in her thirties, and her lover, the seventeen-year-old Octavian, after a night of lovemaking.

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Hearing approaching voices and thinking her husband has returned from a hunting trip, she bids Octavian hide, which he does disguising himself as a chambermaid. The arrival is not her husband; it is her cousin, Baron Ochs, who seeks her advice on the candidate to perform an aristocratic custom of presenting a rose to his fiancée, Sophie von Faninal, who is not quite fifteen. There follows inspired lechery in which while discussing family matters with his cousin, the Baron tries to wheedle the chambermaid into an assignation. Securing the Marschallin’s selection of a candidate, a young man named Octavian, Ochs departs, at which time Octavian, no longer disguised, returns to proclaim his love before departing. The Marschallin knows better, however. Reflecting on the passage of time and the discrepancy in their ages, she knows that despite his protests, inevitably Octavian will be attracted to a woman closer to his age. Realizing that she has not kissed him, she has servants run to call him back, but they are too late. He has left, and act 1 closes on her alone. In the corresponding scene in A Streetcar Named Desire, a young man comes to the Kowalski apartment to collect for a newspaper subscription but with the Kowalskis not there volunteers to return. Alone in the apartment, Blanche calls him back to light a cigarette and engage him in conversation. Calling him back a second time, she not only kisses him but blows a kiss at him as he departs. The fact that she kisses him is crucial. Blowing a kiss at him as she positions herself to receive her Rosenkavalier, Mitch, would be sufficient for terminating an involvement with “children” (99) such as the one with a seventeen-year-old student that got her fired from her teaching position. Actually kissing him suggests that she cannot terminate—or repress—the desire in her, desire she associates with brutes. The fusion of refinement and crudity in Blanche explains her and creates the tragedy. Were she all refinement, Stanley would have no pretensions to expose. Were she all crudity, she might relish a conflict with him, exposing his pretensions. She makes herself vulnerable attempting to repress the crude part, the old self, by putting so exaggerated an emphasis on refinement as to make him suspicious that she is hiding something in her past, and it is easy to check on her past in the town of Laurel. Felicia Hardison Londré shows how an interpretation of the play’s dramaturgical pattern makes either Blanche or Stanley the protagonist. Taking its cue from Londré’s article, this study has Blanche the protagonist whose determination to break up her sister’s marriage by having her leave her husband forces him to act: to become the protagonist. He does to her what she would do to him: break up a marriage with Mitch and then have her leave by giving her a bus ticket to Laurel. Interpreting scene 10, the rape scene, Londré writes that when Stanley returns to the apartment from the hospital where Stella will deliver their baby, he “can be generous” with his sister-inlaw, but she “provokes him to physical aggression.” But Blanche has been

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provoking him ever since the poker game and as recently as the revised birthday party when moments after he vehemently protests to Stella that he will not tolerate the way that she and her sister refer to him—as “‘Polack,’” for example (131)—Blanche calls him “Polack” (134). Yet he does not use physical force; he berates her. A good reason for a verbal rather than a physical response is Stella is in the room. For Londré, though, it is hearing her refer to him as “swine” (156) in scene 10 that “turns him into an adversary.” 9 Three details that precede the “swine” speech, however, suggest that he intends to rape her upon his return from the hospital. In the first detail, Stanley tells Blanche that removing his shirt is all the undressing he plans to do “right now,” but why start now and in her line of vision from the bedroom? And the words sound ominous. The second detail is a “red-letter night for us both” (154-55). For him, it is the birth of a son; for her, mockery of her fabricated invitation from a former beau. But it is the linking of her with him that calls attention to the detail. In the third detail, he enters the bedroom and removes from the bureau silk pajamas that he wears only on special occasions such as his wedding night. Since Blanche sleeps in the kitchen and he in the bedroom, why get the pajamas now? Why not wait? Is the audience expected to believe that he is not fabricating and plans to wear the pajamas in bed by himself to celebrate a son’s birth? The “swine” speech follows, after which he changes into the pajamas and grins at her as he did at the end of scene 4 after overhearing her objective of breaking up his marriage. To be fair to Londré, though, Stanley’s questions toward the scene’s end indicate that he does not know what to think of Blanche’s behavior, using physical force after she threatens to twist a broken bottle in his face. Londré also offers two ways of interpreting the final scene. Yet whichever way one interprets Blanche’s fate, by attempting to create a new self in which she wants to be accepted, she envelopes herself in a “tragic radiance” (166). In the two Williams plays examined so far, characters’ intent to create new selves creates tragedy with the creators becoming tragic figures as a result of the intent. They are not tragic figures when the plays open. That statement has to be qualified. Tom is a tragic figure when he first appears because the play is his memory and it is complete. He does not gain the memory as the action unfurls. The audience gains it as he reveals it—as the action dramatizes it—so that only at the close does the audience recognize him as a tragic figure because it is only in the final monologue that he reveals the degree to which he is tormented, though he is not as authentic a tragic figure as the Son in Nocturne with whom he can be compared. The Son reconnects with his family at his father’s invitation, but he does reconnect; Tom does not reconnect. The Son accepts his suffering for killing his sister; in his closing monologue, Tom in effect implores Laura to commit suicide to relieve him of his suffering. In the two Williams plays, Blanche is a better

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example than Tom, just as her play is a better play than his. She is in control in the first few scenes flirting with Stanley, defying him by turning the radio back on during the poker game, and articulating her intent to Stella. But once Stanley knows the intent, by overhearing it, he begins to gain control until he controls Blanche’s body in the rape, making her a tragic figure. Yet the lone character in The Glass Menagerie to whom Williams applies the adjective “tragic” is Amanda in her final scene with Laura. There are possibilities for her being tragic. She suffers the consequence of Tom’s act. In the second possibility, she “comforts” (114) her daughter. After learning that Laura dropped out of business school, she put pressure on her to create a new self as a marriageable girl so that, like Tom, she may feel guilty but for a different reason. She gave her daughter hope by inviting Jim, only to have him dash the hope, plunging the girl deeper in the mythic world she inhabits. In this possibility she accepts the consequence of her act, which is a characteristic of the tragic figure; comforting the girl is her way of atoning. In a third possibility, Amanda also tried to create a new self by reliving the past as a Southern belle vicariously through her daughter’s budding romance, only to have her hope of a new life dashed. She therefore combines the characteristic of accepting: both the consequence of her act and the consequence of Tom’s act. She accepts suffering because by not abandoning Laura and without Tom’s salary, she faces a grim future. A final possibility is that regardless of who caused consequences, and unlike her husband and her son, she sacrifices whatever chance she has for happiness by accepting responsibility for her challenged daughter. The preceding discussion of Amanda as tragic is a preface to a consideration delayed until the study had enough instances to open up a discussion. Tragedy in dramatic art—that is, in plays—as opposed to tragedy in performance art in which an individual performs or narrates a tragic experience gains resonance as the action or event affects at least one other than the tragic hero or heroine. Ruth, the professor in Collected Stories, severs her relationship with graduate student Lisa who she feels betrayed her trust by using her personal details as the basis for a novel. To prove a moral world, Ruth accepts isolation: loneliness. But so is Lisa affected, for she too suffers the loss of her relationship with her friend and mentor. And the Soul Shall Dance ends with Masako’s vision of the dancing Emiko, who, having had her dream of returning to Japan destroyed, committed suicide. In an interview, playwright Yamauchi responded to the interviewer seeing a sense of “renewal” in the scene: “That’s because of the little girl’s own feelings of romance or her own feelings of maybe getting away from there some day.” 10 In a similar interview, playwright Norman said about Thelma in ’night, Mother that although she cannot prevent daughter Jessie from committing suicide, she gains something from their evening together that they never had: “It’s the moment of connection between them.” 11

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Ignoring structure, characterization, language—any dramaturgy—and concentrating on resonance, one can say that the greater is the tragic hero/ ine’s acceptance of responsibility or suffering, the greater is the drama’s tragic resonance. The same principle is true for the effect of the tragedy on others. Because children suffer, Salt has a greater tragic resonance than Four Benches has. Larry converting to the death that Hickey brought gives The Iceman Cometh a greater tragic resonance than Hughie has. Alfieri remembering Eddie gives A View from the Bridge a greater tragic resonance than The Ride down Mount Morgan has. The two Williams plays examined so far have a tragic resonance. By not having Amanda speak in the closing scene, Williams eliminates her “silliness” in imagining herself a Southern belle, and by having her comfort Laura, he invests her with a “dignity and tragic beauty” (114). Since the audience can only see her and not hear her, the audience can imagine her as a tragic figure sacrificing herself for her daughter. Even though Stella’s neighbor places her baby in her arms, which should be a comforting sensation, her sobbing with “inhuman abandon” (179) as her sister leaves with the doctor and the matron heightens Blanche’s tragedy. All of the above is a preface to the third Williams play to be examined. He applies the adverb “‘tragically’” once in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 12 and the noun “tragedy” twice to the same character in his explanation of why he revised the play’s third act for the Broadway production. The director, Elia Kazan, suggested three revisions. About the second Williams writes, “I felt that the moral paralysis of Brick was a root thing in his tragedy, and to show a dramatic progression would obscure the meaning of that tragedy in him and because I don’t believe that a conversation, however revelatory, ever effects so immediate a change in the heart or even conduct of a person in Brick’s state of spiritual disrepair” (168). Brick is the son of Big Daddy and Big Mama and husband of Margaret or Maggie, who likens herself to a cat on a hot tin roof. One of his ankles is plastered, and he is dependent on a crutch because he broke the ankle the previous night jumping hurdles on the high school field where he was once a star athlete, but the physical state is being repaired. According to the explanation, the spiritual state needs repair but is not getting it because there is no dramatic progression in Brick’s tragedy. He is a morally paralyzed tragic figure from the outset with no intent to create a new self. Maggie and Big Daddy have the intent for themselves and for him. The setting is the Mississippi Delta estate of Big Daddy and Big Mama. To it have come the Pollitt clan ostensibly to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday but actually to claim ownership of the estate because although he does not know the nature of his medical condition, the truth having been concealed from him, he is dying of cancer and has made no will. At least that is how Maggie interprets the presence of Brick’s older brother Gooper, sisterin-law Mae, and their five children, who usually vacation in the Great Smokies. She perceives them as formidable opponents and not only because of

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Gooper’s expertise as a corporation lawyer that he can parlay into power of attorney with control over the disbursement of funds but because the couple are fecund whereas she and Brick are childless. Were they parents, the estate would automatically pass to Brick because he is the favorite son. Since she is “determined to win” (31), her goal is claiming ownership of the estate, her objective becoming a child-bearing woman impregnated with her husband’s seed. Brick, however, is more formidable an opponent than Gooper. Described as indifferent and detached, a man who has “given up the struggle” (19), he has withdrawn into celibacy and alcoholism. Creating a new self is the action’s motivating force as it is in the two earlier plays. Getting Brick’s cooperation is the obstacle to be overcome for the action to proceed. Act 1 of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the exploration of Brick’s withdrawal with Maggie doing most of the talking. She can no longer accept the conditions for living together such as sexual abstinence that he imposed but will not rescind. Neither will she take a lover as he advises, for she says that she loves him, the love grounded in what he was: “wonderful at lovemaking” (30) before their “sex life…was cut off short” (48). Confident that it will return, while waiting she tries to understand why it was cut off short. The event that did the cutting off was her interference in a longstanding relationship going back to their college days between Brick and another star athlete, Skipper, an interference that she freely admits while defending it. That this is the nub of their problem is obvious from Brick suddenly becoming animated, threatening Maggie to stop, and attacking her with the crutch because she is making the relationship “dirty,” an imputation she resists, although her description of their college double dates as “more like a date between you and Skipper” with the women chaperoning makes the relationship between the two athletes suspect (57-58). Resisting the imputation that he and Skipper were dating, he asks her, “Why would I marry you, Maggie, if I was—?” (the unspoken word presumably being ‘homosexual’) forcing her to bring out the event. Believing that Skipper harbored an “unconscious desire” for her husband, she attempted to seduce him, forcing him into a failure to perform, “liquor and drugs.” For Brick, Skipper’s death ended the “one great true thing” in his life and began his withdrawal (58-59). Act 1 ends with Brick and Maggie in a stand-off with him vowing not to return to his old self and her vowing to find a way to get him to return so that she can create a new self. In act 2 Big Daddy sets out to solve the mystery of the withdrawal because he too wants to create a new self. Believing the lie that he does not have cancer, he intends to indulge in sexual pleasure and while straightening himself out by making up for lost time straighten out Brick because he feels remiss for not involving himself in his son’s drinking that began when “Skipper died” (113). No longer a scraping of the surface, act 2 is the breakthrough with Brick asking his father if he thinks he is a “queer” (115), if he and

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Skipper committed “sodomy” (117), if they were “fairies” (120). Blaming Maggie for putting the idea in Skipper’s head that he was dirty so that his inability to perform with her began his decline that ended with his death, Brick insists that their friendship was a “clean, true thing” (120). Big Daddy does not contest that statement, instead contesting Brick’s earlier statement that he withdrew into alcoholism because he was disgusted with the mendacity that pervades life. For Big Daddy, “This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself” for not facing “truth with him” when Skipper phoned in the last conversation they had. Brick’s revelation about his friend’s “drunken confession” ends the breakthrough: “His truth, not mine!” (124-25) The implication is that Skipper was homosexual. To see Brick as homosexual, one has to ignore his ability to consistently over a period of time sexually satisfy Maggie, one of Williams’ memorable creations: a heterosexual woman aware of her ability to attract men’s attention and Big Daddy’s lecherous feelings for her. Their lovemaking was “wonderful” (30), “hit[ting] heaven together ev’ry time” (58). Even if the hyperbole to seduce him back into bed is subtracted, they had a good sex life. And his indifference about his performance did not detract; it added spice. Yet one cannot ignore his withdrawal. If Skipper’s confession spoke to something in him that he was unwilling to face, changing his relationship with Maggie, the something remains an undeveloped possibility. Brick’s sexuality should be ambiguous in keeping with Williams’ stage direction explaining that he wants to shun “‘pat’ conclusions” and “facile definitions” while having some mystery “left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself ” (114-15). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also shuns “pat conclusions” about living with mendacity and truth, since the two are complementary in the play. Brick says that the only two ways of reacting to a world in which mendacity is pervasive are drinking and death. The play, however, dramatizes other ways. Big Daddy did not lie to Big Mama; he pretended to love her while not being “able to stand the sight, sound, or smell of that woman for forty years now!—even when I laid her!—regular as a piston” (108). Mae calls Maggie a “Liar!” (162) when she announces that she is pregnant. Maggie told Skipper what she believed was the “truth” (59) of his feelings for her husband, yet for Brick, before he reveals the phone call confession, the idea was “false” (123). Why it takes him so long to reveal the confession, and only after Big Daddy’s unrelenting interrogation, is an issue left unresolved. What is resolved is Brick’s decision to “even the score between” (121) himself and his father by making him know the truth of his medical condition. The most intriguing interplay between truth and mendacity is in the relationship between Maggie and Brick. From the beginning of the action through the end, Maggie insists that she loves Brick. As she says to him,

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“Skipper is dead! I‘m alive!” (60) How can he remain impervious to her invitation to enjoy the pleasure of her company in bed? One answer is his ambiguous sexuality. Another is that she is lying about loving him and the truth is a carryover from The Glass Menagerie. When Amanda learns that Laura dropped out of business school, she lectures her on creating a marriageable self because an unmarried woman without a career has to prepare for the future; otherwise she becomes a charity case shuttled from relative to relative on whom she is dependent. Maggie knows this situation all too well because coming from a poor family, she had to “suck up” to rich relatives like the “snotty rich cousin” who gave her a “hand-me-down” gown for her debut (54). But she does not deny this second motivation. She tells Brick: “Born poor, raised poor, expect to die poor unless I manage to get us something out of what Big Daddy leaves when he dies of cancer!” (60) The two motivations are not mutually exclusive; she can both love her husband and want something from the estate. Brick accepts Maggie’s second motivation as truthful but not her first, making him his father’s favorite son. When Big Mama protests that she has always loved Big Daddy, he says to himself, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true” (78). The play’s original closing line is Brick’s. Not only is it a great closing line, it helps the audience understand why he is the play’s tragic figure. In a most general sense, Amanda, Tom, and Blanche are tragic figures because in attempting to create new selves, they cause suffering in themselves and others. Laura and Brick are tragic figures because they refuse to create new selves. Within the three tragedians’ plays that these chapters examine, Williams introduces as a tragic figure the character who withdraws from life. Although the refusal to realize his/her potential as a human being is the tragedy, the character does not suffer but causes another or others to suffer, enhancing a play’s tragic resonance. Laura’s withdrawal does not force Tom to act, for he intends to leave regardless of what his sister does or does not do, but he is tormented by the knowledge that he abandoned her. Her withdrawal does force Amanda to act and therefore suffer. She sacrifices herself to stay in the apartment and care for her daughter. In the past Skipper suffered from Brick hanging up on him. In the present Maggie suffers from Brick not responding to her love. She makes the “point” that “life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is— all—over” (57), but he disagrees. His sole objective is achieving the peace that alcohol confers, an objective that renders him immune to life’s most powerful force—“to love each other an’ stay together” (157)—that Big Mama proposes for combatting the death that has entered the estate. When after hiding the liquor so that if he wants another drink, he has to comply with her objective of becoming pregnant, Maggie tells Brick that she loves him, he repeats his father’s words about Big Mama’s love: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” (166) The original closing line enhances the tragic

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resonance, for Brick’s withdrawal forces Maggie to act and in acting prove an immoral world at the cost of her soul, which she damages by lying. About the play’s original ending, one critic writes, “The most startling of Maggie’s late exclamations is the announcement of her pregnancy. It’s a lie, as it turns out. She merely wanted to make Big Daddy happy. She also wanted to regain mastery over the scene, now crowded with all the other characters. From the start of the play, when she was the victim of that projectile breadroll, Maggie has been at the mercy of others. It’s perhaps sad, then, that she gains the most attention when she plays by the family’s rules, chief among them a readiness to lie, ‘mendacity.’ … Mendacity is the only way to prevail, and by lying about the pregnancy she wills it into reality.” 13 If Maggie could will the pregnancy into reality, she would not have to hide the liquor to get Brick to comply. Since he does not corroborate the announcement, Big Daddy is not present to have a reaction, and Gooper and Mae do not believe her and given their effort to claim the inheritance will continue to contest the pregnancy, she must get her husband to impregnate her so that an obstetrician can verify the pregnancy. If Brick wants another drink, he will have to comply, performing the onerous task physically without a spiritual or emotional commitment. He remains a character who is alienated from his deepest nature, a man who continues to damage his soul by failing to develop his potential without recognizing the effect on himself and now on his wife. The Broadway version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a radical change from the original play as a result of Williams yielding to Kazan’s suggestions for three revisions in act 3. Big Daddy, who is present, wants to meet with his lawyer in the morning presumably to draw up a will leaving the estate to Brick and Maggie following her announcement made on her knees before her father-in-law mellowed by his resignation to death. But if the will is based on her being pregnant and she is not, Gooper and Mae can contest it. Since Maggie has to be pregnant, Brick has to impregnate her. In yielding to the second suggestion, Williams violated his better judgment about Brick undergoing “so immediate a change” (168) after the act-2 revelatory conversation with his father. He corroborates his wife’s announcement by affirming that, contrary to Mae’s argument, they are sexually intimate, converting the play from the original genre to a new genre. In each version Maggie lies, but in the first version, she lies not knowing what her husband will do. As Robinson, the critic quoted above on the final scene, writes, “The biggest explosion in Cat is yet to come. Maggie senses its approach, and as the play ends we watch her trying to prepare for the worst, trying to create an environment to cushion the blow.” 14 Rather than comply since he did not commit himself, Brick might search for the hidden liquor or have the servants search. In the revised version, the lie is a white lie. Since he committed himself by corroborating the announcement, he will impregnate

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her, not because he has to but because he “admire[s]” her, spoken as he “sits on edge of bed ” (214). The third suggestion, developing Maggie’s character, Williams “embraced wholeheartedly” because she had become “more charming” to him (168). The revised version’s last lines are hers. In “hand[ing]” his “life” back to Brick (215), Maggie has become the protagonist. His moral paralysis forces her to act in each version, but in the Broadway version, what she does affects his paralysis. She is repairing his spiritual disrepair with the result that Brick, having experienced a change of heart with Big Daddy and now suddenly susceptible to love’s power, is no longer a tragic figure, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is no longer a tragedy. It has become a comedy. Transforming mendacity into truth is the action of Suddenly Last Summer, which consists of four scenes, the first and fourth of which are opposing narratives. The speaker of the first scene is Mrs Venable, an aristocratic Southern lady who narrates her relationship with her son Sebastian that ended suddenly last summer with his death in Cabeza de Lobo. She has confined to a private asylum her niece Catharine, who replaced her as Sebastian’s traveling companion the previous summer. The speaker of the fourth scene is Catharine, who has been brought from the asylum to the garden of the Venable mansion to narrate her relationship with her cousin that culminated in his death. Outraged by the account that Catharine babbled to anyone who would listen that led her aunt to have her committed, Mrs Venable has invited a doctor to the mansion to hear the story. Since he specializes in an experimental treatment for mentally deranged patients, she wants him to perform a lobotomy on her niece if she persists in circulating her narrative. Since Catharine protests that she has no choice but to tell the truth and since the doctor injects her with a serum to facilitate the telling, her truth opposes her aunt’s mendacity. This opposition recalls the same opposition in the earlier plays: Blanche’s mendacity about her past and the truth of it that Stanley uncovers, and Brick’s accusation that Maggie’s idea about Skipper was false until in his final revelation to Big Daddy, he admits the truth of it. The one-act play has other similarities with the full-length plays. Big Daddy is told he has a spastic colon when the truth is that he has cancer. Mrs Venable’s explanation for not accompanying her son the previous summer is that she had a “vascular convulsion” whereas Catharine’s explanation is that she suffered a “stroke.” 15 Brick became celibate after Skipper’s death; Mrs Venable takes pride in Sebastian’s “chaste” life (361). Both men own(ed) expensive Shantung suits. Both men retain(ed) their good looks, Brick by not letting his drinking “soften” him “up” (29), Sebastian by refusing “to grow old” (360). Maggie and Catharine are outsiders. Hearing from the doctor of her husband’s condition, Big Mama wants to hear it from Brick. When Maggie volunteers to tell her, Big Mama rejects the offer: “No, no, leave me alone, you’re not my blood!” (143) Neither are Catharine, her mother, and her brother, who are financially dependent upon Mrs Venable, her “blood

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relatives.” They are her dead husband’s sister with her two “worthless children,” whom she detests (391). Maggie resents having to accept a snobbish cousin’s hand-me-down gown for her debut. For Mrs Venable, Catharine’s motive for slandering Sebastian is the resentment the beneficiary feels for the benefactor. The principal similarity between the one-act play and the full-length plays is the action’s motivating force: the creating of a new self. As Catharine begins her narrative, Sebastian invited her to join him on the annual summer traveling because his mother’s health prevented her from going. Mrs Venable disagrees, arguing that she suffered the vascular convulsion upon discovering that her niece was trying to take her son away from her. No matter which version is the lie and which is the truth, the pattern of son and mother traveling together was broken, although each narrative initially proceeds along similar lines. Son and mother visited fashionable and exotic locations, dressed impeccably, and socialized with the proper sort. In the corresponding section of Catharine’s narrative, her cousin bought her a new, impeccably fashionable wardrobe in Paris. The narratives continue to converge in a detail in the niece’s story that shocks her aunt. According to Catharine, Sebastian bought her a swim suit that became transparent when wet because he had her “PROCURING for him” (412), just as he used his mother though without her knowledge. The narratives diverge at this point, which is the emergence of Sebastian’s new self, with Catharine noting that her cousin, who in his mother’s narrative never aged, “suddenly last summer,…wasn’t young anymore” (409). The location changed from exclusive resorts to a public beach next to a free beach in Cabeza de Lobo; the time for socializing from the evening to the afternoon; and the recipients from the “entourage of the beautiful and the talented and the young” (359) pursuing her son in Mrs Venable’s narrative to the “homeless, hungry young people” (413) who climbed over the fence separating the free beach from the one that in Catharine’s narrative she and her cousin frequented to pursue him. Sebastian’s old self is in his mother’s narrative. His new self is in the closing rush of Catharine’s narrative. The most gripping images in Mrs Venable’s narrative describe the Encantadas beach scene. The counterpart in Catharine’s narrative is the Cabeza de Lobo street scene. From the schooner off the Encantadas beach, Sebastian had seen what he was looking for. On the Cabeza de Lobo street, he became what he was looking for in a narrative so mesmerizing that despite Mrs Venable’s cry for her niece’s lobotomy, the doctor thinks that they should “consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true…” (423). As powerful as the closing rush of Catharine’s narrative is, the overall narrative has to be true for another reason. Its images transform those of her aunt’s narrative. Mrs Venable gives the basic image to be transformed in her opening speech commenting on the plants in Sebastian’s garden such as the

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Venus’s–flytrap. Since it “feeds on insects” (350), its victims, fruit flies, had to be flown in during the winter when the plants had to be covered for their protection against the weather. She gives the fullest description of predators devouring their prey in her description of the Encantadas beach scene where she and Sebastian witnessed the desperate flight of hatched sea turtles trying to outrun to the sea flocks of flesh-eating birds that swooping down would turn them over exposing their soft undersides and “rending and eating their flesh” (356). Catharine applies the image of predator devouring its helpless victims to Sebastian when in the two middle scenes before she begins her narrative and where her cousin is still in his old self, she tells the attendant who brought her from the asylum to the mansion that he talked about people “as if they were—items on a menu” (375). In the closing segment of Catharine’s narrative, which relates the emergence of Sebastian’s new self, the old self’s prey become the predators: the “homeless, hungry young people” (413) who crowded around him outside of the bathhouses for the tips he passed out. And the old self’s predator becomes the prey, for the hungry young people pressed against the fence near where she and Sebastian were dining were crying, “‘Pan, pan, pan!’” which she translates for the doctor as “bread” (415). In the crowning narrative, her Cabeza de Lobo street scene reverses her aunt’s Encantadas beach scene. The hungry urchins who are likened to a “flock of black plucked little birds” overtook Sebastian as he tried to outrun them up the steep street. When Catharine with the help she summoned reached her slain cousin, they discovered that his pursuers had “devoured parts of him” (421-22). Mesmerizing though it is, Catharine’s narrative does not explain Sebastian. For insights, the study has to examine the play’s religious imagery, introduced by Mrs Venable when she lifts a volume of her son’s poetry “as if elevating the Host before the altar” (353). Although the street scene recalls the dismemberment of Pentheus for rejecting Dionysiac worship in Euripides’ Bacchae, the Host or Eucharist is Christian, given to the faithful in the mass’ Communion service and is the reason for the mass because in the doctrine of transubstantiation, the unleavened wafer, the bread, becomes the body of Christ. “‘By the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood.’” 16 Ingesting the Host, the faithful partake of Christ’s divinity. Mrs Venable also prepares for the transformation that takes place in Catharine’s narrative when she tells the doctor that Sebastian’s work was his life and in a reversal that his life was his work. On Cabeza de Lobo’s steep street, Sebastian became the Host for the urchins crying “‘Pan, pan, pan!’” The Biblical basis for Christ as bread is in passages such as John 6.51: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he

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shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Before narrating the previous summer’s traveling, Catharine confides in the doctor that Sebastian had an image of himself as a “sacrifice” (397). This, however, is not the first encounter with sacrifice in Suddenly Last Summer. Sebastian’s garden contains an image of sacrifice in the feeding of fruit flies to the Venus’s–flytrap plants. The garden also contains the primordial state. Laura recreates it in her collection of animals featuring an extinct unicorn, but they are inanimate. Sebastian created the primordial state in his collection of the “oldest plants on earth, survivors from the age of the giant fernforests” (350), and they are animate. Here he could perform rituals reproducing ancient rituals or imagine original ones. In the Christian religion, the original sacrifice is Christ’s sacrifice: The most sublime function of the God-man is the infinite glorification of God, which He is to achieve in Himself and in His mystical body. The discharge of this task is the central point around which all His activity revolves. By carrying out this mission He procures for men their reconciliation and pardon with God, but in such a way that, once men have been reconciled and pardoned, they are to join Him as His living members for the purpose of glorifying God. The most perfect and effective glorification of God consists admittedly in sacrifice. Therefore, if the God-man is to promote the infinite glorification of God in the most effective and perfect manner, as He can, He must offer to God a latreutic sacrifice of infinite value. 17

Sebastian’s “God” is “terrible” (397). In the Encantadas he had seen his God in the birds devouring the sea turtles. In Cabeza de Lobo he became the devoured God-man in what one critic calls a “blasphemous Eucharist.” The critic completes the thought: “When mother can no longer serve as policeman of the image [of aristocratic superiority and artistic sensibility], denying the homosexual reality underneath, Sebastian runs amok with starving Mediterranean urchins, revealing the underside of old world pomp he and his mother have nurtured. When he decides he will no longer sexually consume these hungry boys, they literally consume him.” 18 For Orr, Suddenly Last Summer is the playwright’s “second major tragic work” with the “tragic experience of Sebastian’s death” fusing two elements: the “actual murder and Catherine’s witnessing of it.” 19 In accepting the responsibility in the new self he chose, Sebastian can be a tragic hero. It is the responsibility of sacrificing himself to his terrible God, the God of commitment, for his betrayal of commitment: first by only dabbling in poetry and then by forgoing it for another pursuit, for he wrote no poem the summer he traveled with Catharine. He did not have to seek the sacrifice as atonement for wasting his artistic sensibility by creating no more than one poem a year until he stopped altogether, but he had to participate in the sacrifice, which he

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did. In his new self, he revealed an awareness of the image of the life he had substituted for that of the creative artist when he rejected going back into the restaurant: “‘That gang of kids shouted vile things about me to the waiters!’” (421) He did not try to escape the gang by running downhill with Catharine toward the waterfront for help. By running uphill, he made it possible for the urchins to overtake him and devour parts of him. The difficulty in accepting Sebastian as a tragic hero comes when comparing his suffering with that of the God-man Mrs Venable invokes when she elevates the Host. Screaming, her son ran “in panic” (421) before the urchins overtook him, suggesting a third betrayal in that he did not commit himself to the sacrifice. Catharine is a tragic heroine. Her witnessing of the murder is not tragic. Accepting responsibility for the truth and the suffering she undergoes by telling the story over and over and always the same way, for she cannot tell it differently even though by not changing it she risks a lobotomy, is her tragedy, not Sebastian’s. The street scene seared in her memory, she must tell what she witnessed. That burden to tell the truth, from which there is no escape if she is to be faithful—committed—to her vision, gives Suddenly Last Summer its dramatic power. Act 1 of Sweet Bird of Youth ends with the protagonist assuming the new self he thinks he needs to succeed in his mission in his Gulf Coast hometown where he and his traveling companion have taken a suite in the town’s posh hotel. The protagonist is Chance Wayne, a twenty-nine-year-old gigolo; his companion is Alexandra Del Lago, a former film star. They met at a Palm Beach hotel to which she had fled following what she thinks was an abortive comeback and where he worked as a beach boy. As act 1 unfolds, Chance explains the new self’s mission to Alexandra. He has returned to his hometown to take the love of his life, Heavenly Finley, away with him. He has tried in the past to take her away, but her politically powerful father always prevented the union because he wanted his daughter to marry someone politically connected. The leverage Chance has this time is a contract with Alexandra, who is connected in Hollywood, for Heavenly to star with him in a film entitled Youth. To ensure that Alexandra complies, he has a tape recording of her talking about the hashish she has smuggled into the country that he will turn over to the federal authorities. She complies but not only because of the tape recording. Chance fulfills her need for a new self. In public he helps her create the illusion that she is younger than the record of her film career would indicate, and in private he satisfies her in bed. Although act 1 ends with the former actress agreeing to Chance’s demands, they part, she to remain in the hotel and he to drive around town in her Cadillac flashing her money to impress the locals with his triumphal return. Earlier in the act they parted verbally when in discussing her life following her retirement because she was not young anymore in an industry pandering to youth, she said, “Well, sooner or later, at some point in your

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life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then…you die, or find something else.” 20 Some retired stars give acting lessons or take up painting. Since she could do neither, she tried other options, including a comeback that she thinks failed. Smoking hashish is a current “something else” as is employing gigolos, the role for which Chance qualifies, though she prefers the term “young lovers” (22). A play by Charles Ludlam for his Ridiculous Theatrical Company offers other options. Inspired by the career of diva Maria Callas, Galas bears the subtitle A Modern Tragedy. When Galas’ performing days are over, a friend advises her to “amuse yourself. Play cards. Gossip. Spend money on clothes. Accept dinner invitations.” 21 Since none of these activities satisfy her need for an admiring audience, she commits suicide. Alexandra does not commit suicide. Furthermore, she enjoins Chance not to mention death because “it’s life” that she wishes for “terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever” (30). Chance accepts life on only one term: that together he and Heavenly recapture their youth with its great sex and dream of a future acting in films. His life had promise. At seventeen he and Heavenly appeared in a national contest in a play which he directed and in which he acted that received honorable mention, and he appeared in the chorus of a New York production of Oklahoma, but that was a high point. When doors did not open for him, when he did not get a break in show business, he did not find something else but persisted in his dream, earning his living as a gigolo in which role he infected Heavenly with venereal disease on one of his periodic returns to the hometown. At twenty-nine he is a beach boy at a Palm Beach hotel and Alexandra’s gigolo still pursuing his “girl” and “not leaving without her” (73) in defiance of the reality of his situation. The doctor who in Heavenly’s brother’s words spayed her “like a dawg” (79) to rid her of the infection tells Chance that they are to be married next month. He himself remembers that the last time he came back, Heavenly told him to leave without her and never return. Enemies like her brother and friends like her aunt who remembers him as the “finest, nicest, sweetest boy” (46) urge him to leave because Boss Finley threatens to castrate him. And when the two finally meet, “they simply look at each other” before Heavenly proceeds into the hotel with her father. Though “stunned” (76), Chance remains undeterred in his new self’s mission, thinking himself poised to realize his dream. In act 3 the brash beach boy becomes a tragic figure. Alexandra learns that her comeback is a success breaking box-office records. She knows the success is only a reprieve because she “can’t turn back the clock any more than can Chance” (94), but it is a reprieve giving her time in which to pull herself together and prepare for a problematic future. She has the strength, however, “to face an uncertain, potentially bleak future” 22 as evidenced by her understanding that when past achievements fade, one must find “something else.” And she is a decent person. Although she no longer needs

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Chance or has to honor the contract, she offers him a role as her gigolo. Since it is imaged as being led by an invisible chain through hotel lobbies, he declines that offer. Knowing that Heavenly’s family threatens him with castration, she pleads with him to leave with her, at least to the “next town” (94), where he can start anew with something else because the one thing he thought he had that brought him back to his hometown—his “youth” (92)— is gone. Chance also declines this offer in the final act of the final play in the section on the 20th-century’s three tragedians. He has such self-recognition in the play’s final speech that he asks the audience to recognize that time is forever fleeting for them too. He therefore has what some of Miller’s characters do not have in a dual sense, for he has something else too. When Alexandra reminds him that his mission is hopeless because of the rot he put in his girl’s body, instead of striking her he “strikes down at his own belly…with a sick cry” (93). Moments later he remarks about “rot” (95) in himself. He means as an indicator of aging, but the repetition reveals the degree to which the word as an indicator of guilt registered on him. Thus by staying, he accepts the consequence of his violation of Heavenly. Chance claims the dignity that comes with remorse not experienced by characters like Joe Keller and Eddie Carbone. While warning Chance to get out of town, Heavenly’s aunt asks him why he ignores reality to “live on nothing but wild dreams now.” He likes her image: “Isn’t life a wild dream?” (60) With O’Neill’s characters, he needs a sustaining dream or hope. There is another connection with O’Neill’s theatre. A guilt-ridden Jim Tyrone confesses to Josie that on the train bringing his mother’s coffin home, he bribed the porter to get a message to a whore he spotted to come to his compartment. Chance also bribed a conductor on the train bringing him and Heavenly home from the national contest to allow them to use a vacant compartment for the greatest sex he ever had, sex he wants to recapture in his new self. Yet not driven by guilt so much as driven by the recognition that his youth on which his hope or dream for the future was based is past, he surrenders to the Finley clan, aborting the mission and canceling the new self. He is a tragic figure in the sense that Brick is in the play’s original version. While Alexandra continues Maggie’s commitment to life after the dream is over, Chance continues Brick’s withdrawal from life after the dream is over. The combined imaginative worlds of O’Neill, Miller, and Williams dramatize the tragic American condition. Creating a new self can be tragic because one has to in order to participate in life, yet the creating can cause suffering in oneself and others. Not creating a new self can also be tragic because the refusal is a withdrawal from participation in life and therefore a betrayal of one’s potential for self-realization, causing suffering in others. The section on the three tragedians abounds in images of the first possibility:

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the closing scenes of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, and A Streetcar Named Desire. It closes with an image of the second possibility in the extreme. Alexandra pleads with Chance to leave with her while he can as her gigolo, a role he rejects, “What else can you be?” she asks. Denied youth in which to realize himself, he refuses to reinvent himself, drawing a comparison with two other characters who refuse. Not creating a new self, he is “Nothing” (94) so much so that, unlike Con Melody, whose daughter mourns him, and Brick, who forces Maggie to lie, his surrender affects no one other than the Finley clan, who will castrate him.

Chapter Six

More Contemporary Tragedy

In its effort to answer the introduction’s questioning of tragedy’s vitality and relevance, the study extends the examination into more contemporary instances of the art form with plays that ally with the three tragedians’ plays. The four instances do not dramatize tragedy that results from the creating of a new self or the withdrawal from the creating. They dramatize tragedy that results from one’s failure to recognize or know another’s created self. This chapter also introduces the problem of discovering instances of contemporary American tragedy. One possibility for discovery is in purchasing a ticket for a play whose title implies or suggests the genre. Such an instance is Blood Play. But there are reasons other than title alone that had me attending a performance in January 2013. Winter in New York boasts a few festivals of offbeat works in the venues that make the city the theatre capital that it is. Blood Play was one of the dozen offerings of the annual Under the Radar festival performed in 2013 in the Public Theater. The venue was another reason for attending. Since I have been seeing plays at the Public for decades, I wanted to experience its completed renovation project. The work was performed in an intimate space on the third floor, one of the building’s multiple spaces. The Debate Society created the play written by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, who also acted in it, and directed by Oliver Butler. Blood Play is set in the basement of a new house in a Chicago suburb. In it the husband and wife owners are entertaining another couple, though the wife is a late arrival, and a door-to-door photographer invited to partake of the hospitality that features exotic drinks that the host concocts and exotic games that the hostess concocts, though her games have to be qualified. Some may be concoctions, and some may be bona fide games kids play. The first game seemed to be a concoction. The participants started with an equal number of pins to be 145

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surrendered by one who sat cross-legged or put his/her drink down to another one spotting the crossed leg or released drink. Since the players were relaxed while drinking and telling jokes, inevitably one seated on a bar stool unconsciously committed the infraction and another spotted it and received a pin. The one with the greatest number of pins was declared the winner. A later game seemed to be bona fide. In this game the players divided into teams with a player from one team competing against a player from the other team. Each competitor tied a cord around his waist from which dangled a potato. With the non-competitors cheering them on, moving cautiously to prevent the potato from falling to the floor, they thrust forward with their pelvises. The first to cross the finish line, potato still dangling, was the winner. The games were silly, but so were the players, squealing with delight at the proposal of another game or drink, picking teams and then going into seclusion in different areas of the house to devise winning strategies, gushing with laughter as they shared stupid jokes or scored advantages in a game, trying new dance steps, and imbibing new drinks. They were silliness incarnate not only because the activities were silly but because the participants were adults acting like children. They also acted like parents, however. At one point when the two women were together and the men in another area of the house, the wife who arrived late started to confide in the hostess that something was wrong with her son, a preteen, because she and her husband would find him crying from time to time, but she changed the subject when the men returned to the barroom. At another point the visiting couple’s babysitter phoned to inform the parents that their son was crying. The wife wanted to leave, but the husband, arguing that the boy was all right and to be sure they would check on him when they got home, convinced her to stay. Blood Play was advertised as a “darkly comic thriller.” The comedy is apparent in the opening moments. These two mini-scenes hint at the thriller. So that the reader can appreciate how the play develops the hint, the study returns to an earlier chapter. The 2013 season had revivals of three major Williams plays. In the tragedian’s chapter, the study quoted the minimal but highly imaginative design for The Glass Menagerie. The other two revivals were extremes. With “no scenery, no props, no fancy lighting,” Suddenly Last Summer resembled a “dress rehearsal.” 1 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof went in the opposite direction by relying too heavily on sound effects. “When a summer storm arrives, it’s the scenery-rattling, curtain-whipping kind you associate with vintage dark-house suspense movies. There’s lots of thunder and lightning, of course. But Mother Nature shouldn’t have to do the work of actors.” 2 The basement of Blood Play was naturalistically designed so that the host behind the bar had the ingredients to make the drinks for the others gathered in front of the bar, one or two on bar stools, talking and telling jokes. The

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design is important. The audience is viewing adults in an adult environment, but they are at odds with the environment because in playing the pin game, for example, they behave like children. The sound effects are also important. Periodically the stage would darken followed by a thunder clap. In the darkness the host would call to his preteen son, Ira, camping in the backyard, who would assure him that all was well. According to the play’s description in the Under the Radar brochure, the “kids are away camping with their Jr. Cherokees Troop.” I assume that each kid was in a tent in his backyard because in the final scene Ira emerges alone from his tent. But before the final scene, the periodic thunder clap, the voices calling in the darkness, and the undercurrent of ominous sounds during the calling build the thriller dimension, completed when Ira, unlike the visiting couple’s son, appears not crying. Eventually the party breaks up, the guests leave, and in this fully realized production, the scene reverses. When the darkened lights come up for the final time, the audience is viewing a tent so lit as to magnify the shadow that the movement in the tent cast. At the rear of the stage, another light in rectangular shape silhouetted the host’s head at the basement window calling to Ira. As the shadow gradually took the form of a Cherokee headdress and Ira in Indian costume came out from the tent, his father’s head disappeared in the darkening window and the photographer appeared in the backyard to visit with the boy before leaving the property. Played by co-author Thureen, a tall, angular man whose hand kept rubbing his buttocks, he was the silliest of the adults but not in this scene. His presence temporarily suspending the thunder, distant screams, and feral atmosphere, he chatted with a respectful preteen who dutifully allowed him to take his photograph before departing. Now alone onstage, standing up outside the tent and with the ominous sounds resuming, Ira delivered the closing monologue as he faced the audience. He promised that when school resumed, the kids would play their games. Whether Ira with his Cherokee Troop members was promising a bullying or worse of non-troop members should be ambiguous in a play that builds suspense through the power of imagination. Yet not everything in Blood Play is ambiguous. When adults and kids interact, cultural norms prevail. Adults behave like adults, for example. When not interacting, however, the norms suspend, for just as adults by themselves in their natural setting are at odds with the environment, so are kids by themselves in their natural setting at odds with the environment. They behave like adults, and as they do, the foreboding progressively becomes menacing and then frightening. Two patterns develop from this summary of the first of the four plays. Though Blood Play is not a tragedy, the increasing foreboding augurs tragedy in the future, and parents do not know their children. When the study examines the fourth play, the two patterns will fuse with the fusion erupting in violence. A second possibility for discovering instances of contemporary American tragedy is drawing upon expert opinion. In 2012 longtime theatre reviewer

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for the Village Voice Alexis Soloski reviewed the formation and dissolution of 13P, a playwrights’ collective formed in 2003 and slated to dissolve in 2012 after achieving its objective of full productions, as opposed to readings, for one play by each of the thirteen. In a sidebar she cited four of the plays that “deserve a longer life.” One is Rob Handel’s Aphrodisiac, which she described as a “tragedy disguised as a comedy.” 3 Blood Play has six actors playing six roles. Including taped voices of an interviewer, a television anchorperson, and a lawyer, Aphrodisiac has three actors playing eight roles. That in itself is not significant, since role-playing is fundamental to theatre. The study has encountered some reasons for the role-playing in plays examined or alluded to. One reason is budgetary, keeping down the production’s cost, as in the Gothic re-enactment taped for television viewing in After Ashley in which the actress who played Ashley is the victim and the actor who will play the sex therapist is the rapist. Another reason is for comic effect. To impress the stringer so that she will give the party a good review, ex-professor Tony in The Perfect Party arrives with a black mustache, a pronounced limp, and an Italian accent as his dissolute brother Tod. Still another reason is essaying a new self to see if it fits and one can grow into it, as Marion does in Abingdon Square when she dons a hooded cloak and follows the man who will be her lover. Aphrodisiac has another reason, but it does not become clear until the third scene. The play opens in an out-of-the-way Korean restaurant in Washington, DC, where a young woman complains to the somewhat older man with her that she lost her internship. Although he expresses sympathy and offers to help, the conversation quickly deteriorates. Single, she is pregnant presumably by him, a married man, because over his repeated objection she expects him to visit her in New York, where she is going to have the baby and live. The scene also ends quickly when after releasing her from his grasp to leave with him, he leaves by himself as she continues smashing plates and glasses on the floor. Only one name is spoken in that scene. He calls her “Ilona.” 4 It is spoken again in the second scene that opens in darkness with a taped interview playing in which the interviewer asks a congressman about his relationship with Ilona Waxman, who has disappeared. The lights come up on the man in the first scene listening to the interviewee’s voice acknowledging that he knew Ilona but denying any role in her disappearance. As he listens, the woman in the first scene joins him, and as they converse, they clarify the play’s action. She is Alma, who reminds her brother Avery of their motivation: “We’ve got to figure out what happened.” Avery agrees though he favors “more traditional methods” than breaking “some poor restaurant’s dishes.” He proposes asking Dad, who must be the interviewed Congressman Ferris. Alma, however, does not think the proposal is a good idea because their father will “deny everything” (14).

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Although the brother and sister contrast traditional and non-traditional methods for discovering what happened to the missing intern, applied to the theatre the contrast continues exploring the issue that Eno’s Tragedy raises. If by itself the traditional conception of tragedy is moribund, then to flourish again the conception will have to be both experimental and traditional. Scene 1 is not a flashback, which would be fairly traditional. It is experimental in that Avery and Alma experiment in understanding the relationship and the disappearance by performing a scene in which they imagine their father and the intern interacting until the interaction becomes violent, though they stop before accusing him of being violent with her. At most, knowing him to be a womanizer, they suspect him of having had a sexual relationship with her. Thus the reason for role-playing is that by performing an imagined situation—in this case, in the past—they hope to gain insight into the situation, A blurb from a review on the published script’s back cover calls the play a “‘cynical black comedy.’” There is comedy. Having just said that asking their father about the situation would be pointless, Alma nevertheless visits him in his apartment to hear him repeat his position on having had a relationship but denying an involvement in the disappearance while adding that he lied to the police. Only when the scene ends with Alma and Avery laughing does the spectator realize that he/she was drawn into a scene imagined by the daughter and son, who played the father. With the scenes dissolving into reforming scenes without any indication of the changes, the engaged spectator finds himself/herself in a lag and having to catch up to the changes. The spectator has to keep reminding himself/herself that as the two imagine worst-case and best-case scenarios, they reveal as much about themselves as about their father. Identifying with the intern, Alma, who is about the same age, can understand how a young woman fresh out of college and interested in a career in government would feel discovering that a congressman was interested in her yet is disgusted with the thought of her father hitting on her. Son and daughter, who in one scene plays the mother, respect their mother for being loyal to their father yet think of her as a “bimbo” (28) for being loyal to a womanizer. They also turn over possible explanations for Ilona’s disappearance from the intern’s perspective. There must be something more than cynical black comedy, however, for Soloski and this study to think of Aphrodisiac as a tragedy because without the something Alma and Avery would continue role-playing to “try to figure out what it [the relationship] was like” (41). When the scene shifts to New York, Alma plays their father and Avery plays his sister, but they make no progress. The something is the entrance of Monica Lewinsky in the Greenwich Village coffee shop where the two are spinning their imaginations. The entrance of the Washington intern whose affair with then President Clinton was the scandal of his administration is the first of two dramaturgical shifts in the New York setting in that Lewinsky is a real person interacting with

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two fictional characters. The second shift is in her narrative of her relationship with Clinton, although the narrative begins in the traditional method when she tells how he ended the relationship by distancing himself from what he came to perceive as an “error of judgment” (41). The error is an interpretation of the Aristotelian hamartia: the explanation for the tragic hero’s misfortune. As she narrates, the traditional method merges with the experimental method in a second merging of fact and fiction. This shift merges Clinton’s extramarital involvement with her and his taking her through White House secret passageways. Lewinsky is not in the play; an actress plays the intern. Her narrative is not historical fact; it is the play’s imagination of what happened between her and the president. Yet the fact that she, unlike Ilona, whose decomposed body has been found, is alive to tell of her relationship propels the action to its end. The stage directions for the final scene specify that the siblings are “really in a car” and “not pretending” to be in one (46). Avery, who becomes the father, is silent as Alma, who becomes Ilona, is increasingly apprehensive trying to convince him that although pregnant with his child, she would never do anything to hurt his career. With the sound of the doors “auto-locking” (48) preventing her from alighting, the car speeds away to her death. Ilona’s fate is a tragedy, as is the gulf separating the father and the siblings, a separation that begins to develop one of the two patterns that Blood Play forms. Just as parents do not know their children in the Debate Society play, so children do not know their parents in the Handel play. The second pattern also begins to develop. Violence was committed so much so that medical experts need dental records to identify the decomposing body. Violence attacks the victim’s self—the victim’s identity. Reading Isherwood’s review of Amy Herzog’s Belleville that begins, “Tragedy slips into the room quickly and quietly,” 5 I knew I had to see the play. The issue of identity and the threat of violence develop the tragedy. The identity issue is present in the play’s opening scenes, and one of the two principal characters speaks the word “identity,” though in a later scene. The two characters are a young, recently married American couple who have taken an apartment in the Belleville section of Paris. Halfway through the performance, he carries her, drunk, into the apartment after a night of partying. The next morning as she recovers from a hangover, she asks him why he did not stop her the preceding evening. He replies that when he tried, she accused him of trying to control her. Acknowledging that she could have said that, she goes on to accuse him, in effect, of not knowing or understanding her: not recognizing her “identity.” Abby displays the identity she wants recognized in the opening scenes. Arriving home earlier than usual from her part-time job, she removes her winter coat, warms her limbs, and unwinds by stretching—to stop when she

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hears sounds in the bedroom. She shrieks when husband Zack appears in the doorway explaining that he took the afternoon off from the position he as a medical school graduate accepted in Paris, the reason that brought them to France. He absents himself to shower, so that while he is in the bathroom, she entertains the landlord. With him sitting on the sofa, munching the goodies she gave him, speaking only to answer her, and otherwise smiling at her, she moves about the living room, talking incessantly. Her body language is the scene’s focus. She hunches her shoulders, extends and retracts her legs when seated, compulsively strokes her braided hair, and gestures with her hands and arms. Hence when learning that she stopped taking her medicine but still takes tranquilizers, the audience has to wonder what she would be like without them. The audience does not have to wait long. With her in the bedroom, Zack displays his body language. He moves stealthily to get pot from a drawer, prepare the pipe, and share it with the landlord but not without Abby’s knowledge, for as soon as she returns, she knows they have been smoking. His primary position, however, is with arms crossed on his chest and not speaking: his holding-in the opposite of her effusiveness. The landlord does the speaking. If Zack does not pay the overdue rent, the couple will have to vacate the apartment. They reach a temporary resolution before Abby returns with two outfits she can wear to the party and asking the landlord which he prefers. He chooses and leaves; Abby puts it on and shows Zack; he compliments her, and she loses control, screaming at him. Holding control, he tells her that he just wants her to be happy, intensifying her screaming that a happy state is not the state of being she desires. She removes the outfit and replaces it with a hoodie. Up to this point, with his taking the day off from work; secreting himself in the bedroom to play with the laptop computer, perhaps for pornography viewing; and being delinquent with the rent, Zack would seem to be the cause of the widening fracture in the marriage. Her bizarre outburst changes that perception, though not the perception that the marriage is in trouble. Two visual images encapsulate the couple’s connection and disconnection. Belleville has two sex scenes, one of which is very graphic. Early in the play, a scene ends with Abby seated on the sofa that faces the audience and Zack standing in front of her, his back to the audience. She drops his jeans to fellate him as the lights come down. Although they have sharing moments, sex appears to be the experience that connects them given the image typical of the disconnection. Because he does not want her communicating with her father in America, even to check on her pregnant sister’s condition, she assures him that she will not use her cell phone in his absence. Instead of leaving, though, he disappears in the shadows of a set with subtle shifts in lighting from area to area. She waits an appropriate length of time after

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hearing the apartment door close before reaching for the phone, at which time he steps out from hiding to confront her. The threat of violence also develops the tragedy. Rising from the sofa in the dark, Abby stubs her toe, putting her back on the sofa with limited mobility. Hence when Zack approaches her carrying an imposing kitchen knife, the image is ominous, misleading because he brought it into the living room to cut bread but nevertheless adding to the increasing threat. Alone, she cuts her toe, spilling blood on the floor. Entering, he proceeds to clean the stains until the landlord and his wife, who followed him, accuse him of breaking into their apartment, where they apprehended him, and order the couple out of the apartment. Apparently Abby’s wound was intentionally inflicted because in the locked bathroom that Zack has to force open with his body to rescue her, she tries to drown herself. The violence climaxes in a scene that ends in tragedy. To prevent her from communicating with her father, he confiscates her phone, ignoring her pleas for it. When she starts calling for help, he presses her against the wall, hand over her mouth, until she consents not to scream, and he releases her. Mutual revelations follow. Although he attended medical school, he did not graduate, is not a doctor, and has no job to go to. He brought her to Paris because her family thought living in Paris for a few years would be a wonderful experience for them. She in turn confesses that by hastily marrying him to please her dying mother, she has come to realize that she made a terrible mistake. Belleville continues developing the two patterns formed in Blood Play. The first is that partners do not know each other. The second, the violent one, issues from the first. Abby’s father phones, and since the truth is out, Zack gives her the phone, which she takes into the bedroom’s privacy. Now he approaches with the knife and the look of a man who could kill but stops at the bedroom door and instead goes into the bathroom to commit suicide; it is the last that the audience sees of him. Unable to force open the bathroom door, Abby runs out of the apartment; it is the last that the audience sees of her. Accepting the consequence of his lies, his deception, and his role in causing his wife’s suffering, Zack is a tragic hero. Playwright Guare gives the best explanation for him when he writes, “I’m not interested so much in how people survive as in how they avoid humiliation. Chekhov says we must never humiliate one another, and I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives.” 6 Zack himself speaks the word more than once in apologizing to the landlord and his wife for breaking into their apartment. He can escape that humiliation by leaving Paris, which he would have to do without a job, but he cannot avoid the humiliation with his in-laws. Abby has to tell her father and sister the truth about her husband’s identity, and they in turn will tell the other family members. He cannot live with that humiliation.

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The New York Theatre Workshop production, as opposed to the play, had a serious flaw that has to be mentioned because of its impact on the possibility of tragic resonance. Belleville does not end with Abby running out of the apartment. The final scene has the landlord and his wife removing all of the couple’s possessions in a prolonged scene with the two silently and methodically moving around the set filling garbage bags. They finally speak, but that was the problem. On hands and knees at center stage, parallel to the audience the wife rubbed the remnants of Abby’s bloodstains. Like her in being at the front of the stage and parallel to the audience but off toward the kitchen and facing her rear, the landlord spoke to her. She answered without turning toward the audience or him. I have no clue as to what they said, and the problem was not my hearing. People around me leaned forward straining to hear, and the person next to me turned to me for help that I could not give. The study wants to think that in the role of chorus, they are commenting on the action. I will not know, however, until the play’s text is published. Isherwood’s review brought Belleville into the study’s group of four. Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review brings Horton Foote’s The One-Armed Man as a “fully formed tragedy” 7 into the group. The one-act play is published, though with a curious history. It was first produced as one of three plays collectively called Harrison, TX. When Vincentelli reviewed it, it was still one of three in Harrison, TX but not the same three, and it is published in an edition of four one-act plays. Since The One-Armed Man is not part of a trilogy of dramatically progressing Foote plays, the study examines it as the final play in the study’s group of four. Performed in fifteen minutes, the play is tightly structured. In 1928 a bookkeeper, Pinkey, enters the office of the manager of a cotton gin, Rowe, to inform him that a former employee, McHenry, who lost his arm in a machinery accident and who has been coming into the plant for weeks now to recover it is once again in the plant. Rowe does not want to talk to the amputee. Telling Pinkey to get rid of him, he wants to talk about something else. Learning that his bookkeeper is in debt, the manager lectures him on how to live within his means, and in so doing he lectures him on how to create a self. Using himself as an example, he lists the ways in which one can gain an identity in the following typical passage: “I pay dues every month to the Lions, the Chamber of Commerce, I’m the third most generous giver to the Baptist church.… I am deacon of the church, a member of the choir, helped to start a building and loan association and am an officer in the White Man’s Union.” 8 The manager’s interaction with the bookkeeper in which he dominates the scene is the play’s first half. His interaction with the amputee is the second half, reversing the first half. Resisting Rowe’s attempt to buy him off and repeating the demand, “Give me back my arm” (56-57), McHenry dominates the scene, telling, for example, how by losing his arm he lost his job in the

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cotton gin so that the only place he can work is the pool hall. The final humiliation comes when Rowe attempts friendship. Resisting the manager’s attempt to address him by his first name, he demands to be addressed by his name in the pool hall: “Knub” (57). Having lost his identity—his place in the community—and with it his sanity, with drawn gun he forces Rowe to pray before killing him and turning the gun on Pinkey as the lights fade. The One-Armed Man completes not only the two patterns formed in Blood Play by fusing violence with the refusal to know or accept the member of one’s community, it also completes a pattern begun in Nelson’s Jungle Coup. Unable to transmit a self, journalist Hopper leaves the jungle answering to the name Nobody. A play such as Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth develops the pattern. Seeing himself as Nothing because he is no longer the youth he was and refusing to create a new self, Chance surrenders to the men who will neuter him. McHenry neither walks away nor surrenders. His identity rejected and denied a new self, in murderous rage he kills those he blames for being reduced to Knub. There is a full-length contemporary American play that combines the denial of a new self and the murderous rage, and because it is full-length, it can do things that the one-act cannot. The play is Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. Since I have examined it elsewhere, 9 the study condenses this examination. The key scene that explains the couple in whose apartment the action takes place occurs toward act-1’s end. Artie is a zookeeper who aspires to be a songwriter. Prodded by his mistress Bunny, he phones his boyhood friend Billy, a Hollywood director, to invite himself and Bunny to visit and there secure the break he needs to compose songs for Hollywood films. He has a mistress because his wife Bananas is described as “sick,” 10 so sick that he has made arrangements to have her committed to the House of Blue Leaves, an institution for the psychologically ill. She knows she is ill, at one point summarizing her condition as roaming “around the house all day crying about the way my life turned out” (29), though she was not always sick. Remembering when they “used to have fun,” Artie in a moment of tenderness tells her that sometimes he misses her “so much” (47). The good times were in the past, however. In the present he tells Billy that Bananas is “dead” for him (40). With Bunny, who resides in the same apartment house, out of the couple’s apartment, Artie narrates the event in which she died for him. Caring for her for six months, one day he realized that she was missing. A search in a blizzard with police proved futile until he discovered her on the roof. Bananas then narrates the event from her perspective, but her mode of narrating is different from his. He begins reliving the event in the present tense, mixes in the past tense, and relates the event to her by speaking to her, as in the line in which he rescues her: “You just look at me with that dead look you got right now” (45). She relives the event in the present tense but by speaking

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more to herself than to him. Driving their car in Manhattan, she comes upon four celebrities—Cardinal Spellman, Jackie Kennedy, Bob Hope, and President Johnson—on the four corners of an intersection. She offers the four rides, but they fight with her rather than get in her car and run to get in four taxicabs. That night she receives her final humiliation when two of the celebrities appearing on television with Johnny Carson tell the story, inducing thirty million viewers to laugh at her. She ends the narrative with a word all too familiar: “I’m nobody.… Why can’t they love me?” (46) Home, with the snow falling, she went up on the roof. Since the event could not have happened as she narrates it, it reveals her psychological condition that had Artie caring for her for six months prior to the aborted suicide. At some point in the marriage, having outgrown zookeeping, Artie began to create what he hoped would be a new self as a songwriter. In Bunny, whom he met only two months prior to the time of the action, he found encouragement. Bolstering his confidence, she even envisions him winning an Oscar for the year’s Best Song. Bananas did not discourage him as evidenced by an act-2 scene. Believing that she cannot keep her husband from leaving her for Bunny, she requests that he play the first song he wrote, which he does, and then that he play “White Christmas.” They are the same. She always knew he had no talent as a songwriter. Her problem was not in trying to deflate his dream by recalling him to reality, as she does in this scene, but in trying to keep pace with his aspiration to be a celebrity and, as the relived narrative reveals, failing. Becoming sick when she could not create a new self, she became a “nobody.” Neither does Artie have Bunny. In an act 2 that generates one wildly comic scene after another, she leaves with Billy, who, having come to New York to claim the body of his girlfriend blown up in a mix-up, claims her as his muse. The comedy, however, cannot prevent the tragedy. Alone in the apartment with the man she loves, Bananas has her reality realized. Since he is not going to Hollywood, she has him to herself. Sitting “on her haunches like a little dog smiling for food ” (86), she rubs against him to show how pleased she is to be reunited with her zookeeper. Bananas’ reality, however, is not Artie’s reality. For him, they are forever estranged because he cannot be a zookeeper anymore; that self is dead for him. In his mind he is a songwriter. He is also a tragic hero in suffering the consequence of his act that he does not deny. Strangling Bananas, he becomes a songwriter in the House of Blue Leaves to which he is committed. Guare’s A Free Man of Color has the action’s same motivating force, the creating of a new self, but expands the creating from that of an individual to that of a nation. In an early scene in 1801, Tallyrand, France’s foreign minister, advises Napoleon, whose dream of expansion the British blocked in Egypt, to sail into the Mississippi River, for the “river to the Orient surely lies here within America,” 11 but fearing an encounter with the superior Brit-

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ish fleet, Napoleon rejects the advice. Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Meriwether Lewis requests Thomas Jefferson to release him from his position as the president’s personal secretary so that he can explore the territory west of the Mississippi River. His request denied, he nevertheless rhapsodizes on what it would mean for him and the nation to “find the hidden river connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific, the East to the West. The Indies! Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, Magellan can finally sleep rested. Their task accomplished” (14). Yet a few years later, after being sent with William Clark to explore the acquired Louisiana Purchase, he has to admit that “there’s no direct water route across this continent” (97). A route can still exist, however. Indirectly, for example, or, as the play’s protagonist proposes, magically. Born a slave, the son of a white father and the father’s black possession, Jacques Cornet purchased his freedom. In 1801 New Orleans, the principal site of Guare’s play, he is the fashion plate whose clothes reflect the city’s palette of colors because New Orleans is the “freeest city in the world. Imagine the unimaginable. Race is a celebration!” (5) He is also an aspiring playwright. When asked by Murmur, his slave, what his play is about, he replies, “The sanctity of surfaces. The value of veneer.” He is here thinking about himself as the fashion plate because he has put himself in his play until Murmur tells him that a shipment of silk from Shanghai took three years to reach New Orleans. Nettled, Cornet revises the play’s “true subject” to revealing the “magic route to deliver me the treasures that I need like bread and water” (2-3). He believes that there has to be a route connecting the East and the West, just as there has to be a river connecting California, where shipments of silk arrive, and the Mississippi River, but even though his conception of a play is also entitled A Free Man of Color, it does not explore the magical route. By adding history and fiction, for example, to the skin tones, Guare’s play does. The route that connects the mix of elements is the created play. Drama—theatre—is the magical route. Guare’s A Free Man of Color is divided into two acts with a different dramatic or theatrical genre informing each act. Since Cornet’s interest in act 1 in the connecting route is in expediting shipments of silk so that he can maintain his image setting New Orleans’ stylistic trends, the act-1 genre is comedy because its subject is “The sanctity of surfaces. The value of veneer.” Of the act’s two forms of comedy, the first that the audience should recognize was specified in the commission New York’s Public Theater made to Guare in 2002. “The play was to be modeled on 17th century English Restoration comedies, reflecting their interlocking, ribald plots that lampooned the social classes.” 12 Among this form’s other characteristics are casts that include “sexually voracious young widows and older women” and “sexual intrigue” for the “principal theme.” 13 After the opening scene, characters arrive at Cornet’s home to sell him maps that he buys in the hope of locating the route that will bring his clothes “quicker” (4), but they play cards

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to pass the time while he is occupied with girls a bawd supplies. Females are attracted to Cornet not only because he possesses money and a peerless wardrobe but also because he possesses a prodigious clavis, Latin for key, that unlocks all portals and an equally prodigious stamina: endowments that satisfy the voracious appetites of women served lesser fare in their homes. The girls’ orgasmic moans herald his appearance in a silken robe in the doorway but only for a moment before returning to the bedroom with the clarion announcement, “Ladies! Round Two!” (9) The audience should recognize the second form once a character portraying the playwright famous for it makes a cameo appearance. Georges Feydeau is a creator of modern farce that also lampoons social classes by interrogating the concept of identity. Considered but rejected as a genre informing Miller’s The Ride down Mount Morgan, farce works in Guare’s play, the opening scenes of which take place on Mardi Gras. A character costumed for the city-wide celebration terrifies characters gathered at Cornet’s home by identifying himself as Toussaint Louverture, a former slave who led a rebellion against the French planters on the island of Santo Domingo (Haiti), before unmasking and revealing his true identity. The two forms converge as the act unfolds. New Orleans men are confident that their wives do not know Cornet, but as Murmur informs the audience, his master is no stranger to their bedrooms. With that renowned prowess, Cornet’s half-brother, Pincepousse, has double reason to see him as the enemy. The son of their white father and a white woman, Pincepousse sees himself as the rightful heir to the family’s property appropriated by his halfbrother. His wife Margery, a woman of color, gives him a second reason. Since she sees Cornet and he sees her, Pincepousse hustles her out of the room, identifying her as him: his mistress’ brother who is dressed as a woman for the costume ball. Now it is Cornet’s turn to be suspicious, confirmed in a later scene when he is observing the axiom that a “seduction doesn’t count unless it’s taking place under the husband’s nose” (31) by delighting the wife of the Spanish intendante of New Orleans, which is under Spanish control, as he searches in the next room for a cipher breaker to read a coded message from Spain. The search for it in a “long black tube” (31) gives rise to one of the play’s many bawdy jokes while Margery’s arrival gives rise to Cornet’s curiosity about the young man who dresses as a woman and Pincepousse’s apprehension about her interest in his half-brother. With the scene, like act 1, building in frantic pace, the intendante’s wife pulls Cornet back into bed from spying on Margery, and Pincepousse orders his wife to dress as a boy, giving the audience reason to expect more unmasking and bedroom frolicking. The two forms individually and combined constitute approximately one half of act 1. “Unfortunately the lowdown sexual shenanigans that find Jacques chasing around New Orleans pursuing the wives of half the city’s

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inhabitants are never as entertaining—or as interesting—as the games Mr. Guare plays with the larger ideas the play considers.” 14 Of the larger ideas that act-1’s other half plays with, two are paramount. In return for Napoleon giving the Spanish Infanta’s husband the throne of Etruria, Spain retrocedes the Louisiana territory to France. This is the message decoded in New Orleans and Washington that gives rise to nations creating new selves. In New Orleans Morales, the Spanish intendante, sees in the disruption caused by the transfer of power the opportunity to unite “North and South America. One nation from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, ruled by me…. I am Jorge Washington of Nova Spania” (39). In Washington Jefferson sees an “enemy” in any nation holding the “country west of the Mississippi” River. “This is an act of war!” (36) In Paris Tallyrand sees France creating a new self, although the route comes from the second paramount idea, to be discussed below. His vision expanding, the foreign minister exclaims, “The birth of Nouvelle France!” (46) The idea is serious. The presentation is comic in rapidly changing scenes interspersed among the sexual shenanigan scenes. When the Infanta chokes on grapes, her father, the King of Spain, has to perform the Heimlich maneuver on her. Morales has to smack “dunce” Pincepousse (37) to remind him of the plan for seizing power that they talked about earlier. Jefferson would rather play his violin and make arrangements for a dinner party than plan foreign policy. Napoleon appears in a bathtub seeking to soothe an itch that bedevils him as much as do Josephine’s nagging and Tallyrand’s importuning. The second idea is serious and also interspersed among the sexual shenanigan scenes. The difference is that it is presented seriously. Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the rebellion against the French planters on Santo Domingo, speaks eloquently of the revolution’s ideals. Needing “outside support” (10), he petitions Napoleon and then Jefferson as leaders in their countries’ struggle for freedom for assistance in food and ammunition. Napoleon initially denies it, and Jefferson initially promises it. The first situation changes, however, when Tallyrand prods Napoleon into accepting the pretext of sending support while actually crushing the rebellion before the French fleet under Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Le Clerc, sails into New Orleans to found Nouvelle France. The larger ideas of nations creating new selves awaken Cornet to his need to create a new self. As he says, “I need to play a role in this Hobbesian juggernaut called history. I need to know where I fit” (44). But since he has more money and a finer wardrobe than the men of New Orleans and a history of seducing their wives, they shun him when he tries to fit in. Vexed, he devises a scheme whereby he will pretend to die leaving a variety of wills, each one naming the recipient as the sole beneficiary. As a backup scheme to allay their fears when he reappears, he will pretend to have been emasculated

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so that act 1 ends in a wild scene in which Murmur fires two bullets into the crotch area of his breeches held up by a doctor friend who functions as a sometimes narrator. Guare’s A Free Man of Color, however, is a mixture of history and fiction for which the playwright spent years researching the events leading up to the Louisiana Purchase. One should therefore pay attention to a pattern of interspersing of scenes. The two closing scenes with Cornet, Murmur, and the doctor alternate with scenes in which Napoleon agrees to Tallyrand’s plan to crush a rebellion led by a black slave and Jefferson commissions Robert Livingston to go to France and purchase New Orleans. Together these scenes prepare for both the consequence of a nation creating a new self to an individual, a freed mulatto slave who has been enjoying all that life in New Orleans offers, and to the nation doing the creating. Cornet takes his new selves into act 2, but they are the superficial selves of act 1 in keeping with comedy’s subject of the sanctity of surfaces and the value of veneer. Guare takes them to the point where nothing more can be done with them. Visited by Pincepousse, who wants to reconcile with him before he dies, Cornet lies in bed as if dying, a sight that distresses Margery, dressed as a boy and believing the man she has fallen in love with is emasculated. That is, until Cornet takes her hand and slides it under the covers. When Pincepousse leaves the room, believing his wife is kissing a dying man good-bye and believing his half-brother thinks he is kissing a boy, Margery jumps into bed with the rejuvenated man. Out of bed and seeking amorous adventures, Cornet visits the home of a couple who escaped the Santo Domingo revolution with little more than a microscope with which the wife, a scientist, hopes to discover the cause of the disease plaguing the island: yellow fever. Flinging his cape open, he utters a blasphemous overture: “Lent is over.… Easter morning arrives. He is arisen” (63). The pattern of scene arrangement that closes act 1 also continues into act-2’s opening. Scenes that change the course of history alternate with the sexual shenanigan scenes. The French fleet arrives in Santo Domingo to crush the revolution, and Jefferson, who initially promised aid to Toussaint, reneges because he fears that France, offended by the aid, will not sell New Orleans. Betrayed by Napoleon and Jefferson, Toussaint is taken prisoner to die in a dungeon in France. Changing history, the events change Cornet’s life, enabling him to create a really new self. His troops decimated by Santo Domingo’s plague, Le Clerc packs a ship with blacks to sail to New Orleans. Since Cornet is the only one with enough money to dissuade the ship’s captain from vomiting the “wretched blacks” upon the coast, the men shunning him appeal to him. He accepts, seeing himself in a new role of “hero” (68-69). Approximately at this point, Vincentelli, reviewing the “overstuffed” A Free Man of Color, saw a “brand-new play” unfolding with a “change as swift as it is impres-

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sive.” 15 For one of the characters, the entrance of the slave ship is the entrance of “tragedy” (68) into the New Orleans port. In this study act-1’s comedy ceases to be the appropriate genre, for tragedy enters the play in act 2. Although act-2’s second-half characteristics contrast with act-1’s characteristics, Cornet himself is a less than exemplary tragic hero, despite being betrayed in a manner that recalls Jesus’ betrayal in Gethsemane. After killing Pincepousse in a duel, he rejects Margery, even though she is carrying his child, offering instead to give her money if she will leave him alone. He never again has any contact with her or any contact at all with his son. A former slave who purchased his freedom, he has slaves whom he is forever talking about freeing but does not. Hence when Murmur betrays him for a “bag of coins,” it is the price Murmur had to pay to purchase his freedom, for his former master’s repeated promise was “dangling carrots of freedom” (90) rather than executing it. The Louisiana Purchase takes away the former master’s freedom, rendering him less than equal with his white counterparts, yet he was no champion of equality when at the height of his renown, seeing his taste in clothes a mark of his superior rank. Though initially less than exemplary, Cornet is nevertheless at the center of six characteristics of tragedy. The playwright and the director share credit for the first characteristic, though both could cite John Mortimer’s definition of farce as a source of inspiration: “tragedy played at about a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute.” 16 If farce is tragedy accelerated, tragedy is farce decelerated. Guare ends the frantically paced sex scenes with Cornet flashing the scientist while mouthing the blasphemous overture, and George C. Wolfe staged the succeeding scenes as tableaux: for instance, the shackling of Cornet in the betrayal scene. With the pace slowed, the focus shifts from comedy’s exterior life to tragedy’s interior life, the shift dramatized in a single scene. Accompanied by a few of New Orleans’ prominent citizens, Cornet boards the slave ship. While the transaction with the captain is taking place, he wants to see the “deported blacks” (70). The hold opened, he falls into the ship’s interior and his own interior because once rescued, he is a changed man. Discovering his interior life, he begins to question what he feels, something he did not do in act 1. When one of the wives he was seducing in that act asked him if he loved “only” her, he replied, “I love only you,” before extending the love to others: “And you and you” (38-39). Love was a word for bandying because women wanted to hear it. For his wife Dona Athene, whom he avoids throughout the play, his words are “phantom”: ceasing to exist after getting what he wanted—her, for example, in a marriage that for him is of no consequence beyond the “moment’s spur” (24-25). After the rescue scene, however, he identifies with people: with the deported blacks. “Why am I moved?” begins a soliloquy in this third characteristic. “Those

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men and women were me. Is what I feel ‘love’? This love seems not to be a weakness but rather the beginning of a strength” (73). Guare’s play has allusions to the Shakespearean tragedies Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello, but they do not form a pattern because the play also has allusions to Byron’s and Dante Rossetti’s poetry and the Bible. The language, however, changes from act 1 to act 2. The play opens with a speech typical of Cornet’s act-1 self-centered flippancy: “All men equal? Clothes tell the ranks. / I have taste. For that I give my daily thanks” (1). After he falls into the hold, however, his language is stately, measured, and elegaic. It is Miltonic: “O miserable mankind, to what fall / Degraded, to what wretched state reserved!” And it is expressive of the newfound feelings: “I could not, but weep.” Contrasted with his act-1 language, his lamenting also contrasts with the other New Orleanians’ singing the ditty “Row row row your boat” as they return to shore (72). Cornet suffers in act 1 but superficially. Dona Athene’s importunity he has Murmur “block” as one of his “duties” (25). Another of the slave’s duties is washing his master’s hand to remove any trace of the gratitude Cornet has to suffer from people he despises kissing the hand. The inconvenience of not getting information about global events is annoying. Unnerving is the thought of the restoration of Le Code Noir, a 17th-century edict governing black slaves, but he allays his fear by reminding himself that he lives in the 19th century. His act-2 suffering is real in this, the fifth, characteristic. It is twofold. One is the degradation being shackled; being sold to the man who bought Pincepousse’s estate with all its chattel, the man whose debt Cornet once paid; and being forced to labor in that man’s field. Two is the tormenting memory of a “time when I had my maps, when I wrote my play, when New Orleans meant paradise…” (100). The final characteristic is isolation. In act 1 Cornet’s self-centeredness and wealth, wardrobe and legendary sexual prowess privilege him. In act 2 his degradation isolates him socially, and it is terrible, but even more terrible is his perception that morally isolates him. Shackled, he protests, “You cannot buy what is not for sale” (91). Receiving no response, he seeks redress from the president, appealing to him to heed the words he wrote in the Declaration of Independence and “change the future now” (96), a future whose Civil War threatens the Union or whose Jim Crow laws make a mockery of the concept of equality. The portrait of Jefferson is unflattering. He reneges on his promise to aid Toussaint, owns slaves, has children by a slave, justifies slavery as necessary to the South’s economy, and repudiates the principle that “All men are created equal” (93) by arguing that the Constitution and not the Declaration of Independence is the repository of the nation’s laws. Sometimes he even “curse[s] writing those words” (96). Receiving no redress, Cornet suffers a greater isolation than that of McHenry in The One-Armed Man, who is denied membership in the Harrison, Texas, commu-

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nity. He is denied membership in the national, American, community. Escaping from the field where he labors, he disappears from the play before returning for the closing scene. The doctor delivers the closing line: the subtitle of Cornet’s play that has the same title as Guare’s play. Throughout the writing of his play, Cornet gave it various subtitles to reflect his situation as it changed from his 1801 situation in which he led “The Happy Life of a Man in Power” (23). The change was not a downward spiral. When he decided to feign death to gain the New Orleanians’ confidence, the subtitle became “The Things We Do for Power” (46). By play’s end, however, the subtitle is “How One Man Became an American” (101), the doctor’s ironic subtitle because Cornet, who returns to deliver the preceding line, is in chains. Guare’s A Free Man of Color therefore dramatizes not only the betrayal of the American Dream for people of color but also the betrayal of the principles—the ideals—on which the people’s nation was founded. This is the consequence to the nation creating a new self. The ending can be interpreted differently, however, if one sees Guare’s play as an Aristotelian tragedy in which the United States misjudged the consequence of allowing slavery to exist, though the misjudgment could be and was rectified albeit in bloodshed—in desegregation, for example. Meriwether and not Jefferson is the first to speak a new principle born from the failure to find a route connecting the East and the West. The nation must continue searching for routes that realize humankind’s aspirations. This is the American Dream that cannot be betrayed. Cornet, the second to speak the new principle, adds “Freedom” (99) to Meriwether’s list of aspirations. His last line, the play’s penultimate line, therefore foresees the new principle’s power and progress. Looking at his chains, he says, “The last time men dressed like this” (101). In this recognition he gains in stature over the heroic role in which he saw himself in the New Orleans port, for it is a tragic hero’s recognition that the suffering of chains gives birth to the shedding of chains in a new life. Guare’s play also gains in stature with the recognition that its power is in creating a magical route that connects diversity. Arriving in New Orleans and enchanted by the spectra of languages, skin tones, and foods, Margery says, “No city on this planet can be more varied, more motley, more multifarious” (40-41). If ‘art’ is substituted for “city,” the same can be said about a play in which Restoration comedy transforms into epic and Feydeauvian farce into tragedy, history melds with fiction and prose with poetry. In Guare’s theatre the shedding of monolithic forms gives birth to new dramatic life. J.T. Rogers’ Blood and Gifts expands the creating of a new self to an international arena in a covert CIA operation through its operative stationed in Pakistan to supply weapons to the rebels fighting the Russian army occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s. For the operative, Jim Warnock, the reason

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is the Cold War. As he says to the counterpart British agent, Simon Craig, “We break their army, they can never do that again.… Stopping the Soviets, once and for all. What our life has been has been about here.” 17 The play also introduces the word “tragedy” late in the action in a conversation between Warnock and the counterpart Russian agent with whom he forms a friendship of sorts. “You know, Jim,” Dmitri Gromov says, “they say tragedy is comedy, plus time. But Afghanistan? It is tragedy, plus time” (116). Although Gromov’s definition is akin to the definitions of farce as accelerated tragedy and tragedy as decelerated farce, it does not open up Rogers’ play as those definitions opened up Guare’s play. In his review of the New York production, however, David Cote provides an access: “As the stakes and parties remain distinct, Rogers and [the director Bartlett] Sher allow a growing sense of mystery about these agents’ inner lives.” 18 The access is one of tragedy’s characteristics examined in the section on Guare’s play, but before the study can examine the inner lives, it has to clarify the parties and the stakes. Since the operation is covert, the aid to the rebels has to be funneled through the Pakistani Army’s intelligence branch, headquartered in Islamabad, the site of an early scene, where Colonel Afridi demands absolute cooperation from the American and British representatives: “And you will have no contact, in person or in any other form, with anyone in the Afghan resistance” (9). He rejects Craig’s proposal that the majority of weapons go to warlord Massoud because he is a member of a minority people of Afghanistan, dictating instead that the weapons go to warlord Hekmatyar because he is a member of the majority people, is in Pakistan, and is training mujahideen or resistance fighters. In the colonel’s office, Warnock and Craig agree to the demand, but once outside, the American, who is new to the station, relies on the Englishman’s knowledge of the parties and the stakes to arrange a meeting near the border of Afghanistan with an Afghan warlord, Abdullah Khan, and his subordinate, Saeed. Warnock wants the meeting because in an operation that exchanges weapons for information, he needs someone in the beleaguered nation that he can trust, a word that resonates throughout the action unfolding on a moral landscape ever-shifting because the stakes are high for the Asian nations: weapons confer power over the Russians and competing warlords, and for the other involved nations: success confers power in the region. On this landscape Warnock forms a bond with Abdullah and to a lesser degree with Saeed, who without Abdullah’s knowledge wants to cut a separate deal with the CIA agent. Although the word “suffering” (97) does not resonate throughout the action, the experience does, beginning with the reference to refugee camps in Pakistan for Afghans who have fled across the border to escape the war and to Soviet troops “killing people in Kabul left and right” (28). As the fighting escalates, so do the suffering and the weaponry; their interaction increases

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each exponentially. The initial American arms shipments consist of boltaction rifles that are subsequently upgraded to sniper rifles capable of shooting the enemy “in the head from a mile away” (31). For their part the Russians bring in special forces who litter the roads “with corpses, birds picking flesh from bones” (37). With the United States “moving a million tons of ammo—monthly—now” (49) from Pakistan over the border and Afghanistan drenched in blood, Russia installs a puppet government in Kabul headed by a man named Najibullah, who recruits Afghan troops to fight the Afghan rebels, and in Islamabad Colonel Afridi calls for a regional Islamic revolution—“a strict, correct Islam”—to crush the “Soviet infidels” (48). No mention of suffering, however, can overlook the Afghan commander Hekmatyar, whom Afridi supports. Though he has troops that he trains for the war, he stays in Pakistan waging sectarian violence against Afghan refugees who are “not pious enough” (41). The word “sacrifice” and the experience do resonate and as early as the scene in which Afridi dictates that the arms go to Hekmatyar, whose “‘Army of Sacrifice’” is “ready to sacrifice all” (8). Here, though, the word is ironic because the commander’s troops sacrifice Afghan refugees not of his sect. Saeed opines that Afridi favors him because he is grooming him to head a Pakistani puppet government in Afghanistan after the Russians withdraw. Hence when the Russian army starts making incursions into Pakistan, Afridi retaliates by sending Hekmatyar’s army across the border to “strike the soft underbelly of the Soviets’ outer republics” (104). Not confined to the battlefield, the ironic sense surfaces in a US senator’s cant language. Warnock arranges to have Abdullah come to Washington to present the case for greater weaponry to a Senate committee whose most powerful member asks private donors to “sacrifice” (87) by generously giving at a fundraiser. So that he can recommend government funding, he asks Abdullah what he has “sacrificed” (92), forcing the warlord to lie about his wife being killed, though he could have related his experience being grievously wounded. Warnock too has experiences in which he sacrificed by being separated from his wife to serve in Pakistan. Sacrifice for the service is a common experience. Warnock’s CIA superior tells him about his “sacrifice” (83) for the agency in that he never married, and for Gromov, his “entire family sacrifices” (27) in Moscow by being separated from him. Sacrifice as it affects four of the principal men’s relationships with their wives and children takes the examination into their inner lives and the tragedy. Craig tells Warnock that he did not want children, but if he was to be a father, he preferred a daughter and not the twin sons his wife delivered in London. When the Russians withdraw, he confides in Warnock that despite taking periodic leaves home, he is not returning to England because his wife took the sons and left him and because Pakistan has become his home. Their teenage daughter’s pregnancy and childbirth prevented Gromov’s wife from

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joining him. When the Russians withdraw, he goes home to Moscow, although as he confides in Warnock to a strained relationship with his wife and daughter because the years of separation have alienated them. After years of trying, Warnock’s wife finally gives birth to a daughter. She dies, however. A second attempt is more successful, for by play’s end the couple have a thirteen-month-old son. “A son is a gift from God” (16) and a wife who does not bear a son is “less than dirt” (35) are two tenets of Abdullah’s religiouscultural beliefs that he reveals to his American ally. His one son is especially precious to him because by lying to the Senate committee, he forfeits any right to a second son. The ambushed killing of Saeed and the desecration of his body by the puppet government leader Najibullah’s army is therefore heartrending for him with his son’s death the sacrifice exacted for his role in the freedom fighting. “God makes us suffer only so our eyes may be opened” (98) are his words to console Warnock upon learning of his daughter’s death. The creating of a new self as the tragedy’s cause is not as obvious in Blood and Gifts as it is in A Free Man of Color because the Afghans are resisting the Russian attempt to create a new self. The tragedy in Abdullah’s family is real nevertheless and the cause of another tragedy. Warnock boasts of the United States and the Afghan fighters as having “won” (113, 122) by expelling the Russians. The boast is consistent with the idealism he shows throughout in believing that America’s involvement in the conflict is “right” (25). Abdullah’s son’s death, however, opens the warlord’s eyes to what is right. Throughout the action Abdullah, seeing Hekmatyar as much an enemy as the Russians because he turns his army loose on Afghans, refused to join forces with him. Now he not only sells to the Iranians the sophisticated weaponry the Senate committee approved, he also joins forces with Hekmatyar’s forces to destroy Najibullah’s army, repeating Colonel Afridi’s call for a new Islamic state: “Afghanistan is a wound that must be cleansed. Only Islam can purify us. A true Islam” (124). The inflicting of suffering on the killed and wounded, the psychologically scarred and physically uprooted that is inevitable in the jihad’s commitment to create a new self clarifies Gromov’s definition of Afghanistan as “tragedy, plus time” (116). The prediction of tragedy begetting tragedy—endless tragedy—is a fitting end to the study’s body. But not to the study. An issue remains that has to be examined. Broached in this chapter, the conclusion will pursue it.

Conclusion Questing for Tragedy’s Vitality and Relevance

A recent Theatre Development Fund publication examines the factors that affect a new American play’s fate: whether or not it gets produced, for example. For theaters’ artistic directors, the three most severe obstacles to that goal are cast size and composition (scale of production), cost, and technical demands. Cooperating playwrights therefore downsize their plays. Production, though, may retard rather than advance their careers. “For playwrights who write comedies, this downsizing may be particularly damaging. Large audiences can be essential for comedy. Laughter feeds laughter, while too close quarters and too few people can inhibit it, making everyone selfconscious.” 1 Ruminating on this idea, one might come up with the corollary idea that tragedians benefit from downsizing because tragedy, unlike comedy, which dramatizes the sanctity of surfaces and the value of veneer, dramatizes the inner life. The TDF publication, however, does not mention tragedy, and this study dispenses with any discussion of conditions that might favor the creating of it because ever since the three plays in the introduction implied that tragedy as an art form is dying in the contemporary American theatre, the study has been investigating the possibility that it is alive though not in traditional art form. No matter what road the pursuit of discovering contemporary American tragedies takes, “all roads lead to the audience” 2 and the divide between playwrights’ belief that concern about audience reception is a major obstacle to a theater accepting a new play for production and the theaters’ position that the concern is a minor obstacle. The disagreement is not the issue for this study. What is, is playwrights’ criticism of theaters’ marketing of new plays under the “‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to selling their work.” 3 Here there is 167

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greater agreement with theaters’ perception of audiences as preferring “uplifting, happy endings” and having “ever-shorter attention spans.… Moreover, audiences are hesitant to see a play—and pay a great deal for tickets— unless they are sure they will enjoy it.” 4 Audiences want to sit in a darkened space and not have to be imaginatively engaged in a work that subverts their expectations about recognizable characters interacting in a linear narrative. In short, audiences want to be entertained, and theaters’ marketing departments oblige—in the New York area with which this study is familiar—by promoting the artistic creations under the classifications of musical and dark comedy. Except for revivals of a play such as Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, one does not encounter the word tragedy outside of reviews, which is why they are an essential source for discovering productions of the genre. Apparently marketing departments are afraid that people will not buy tickets to a play that is perceived as bleak and despairing in a culture in which television’s smiling face is a constant reminder that happiness is the cardinal virtue. That fear is not only unfortunate but unfounded. Tragedy is not automatically unhappy—witness the first and perhaps the greatest: the Oresteia—but even if it were, playwrights such as O’Neill and Miller and scholars such as Sewall and Eagleton show how it is uplifting. As a way of structuring experience, the art form gives meaning to misfortune and suffering, which are part of life, enabling the audience to understand the misfortune and suffering. Thus the issue broached in the preceding chapter is discovering tragedies and not only because artistic creations are promoted as musical comedies or dark comedies but also because the genre is not fixed. A good way therefore of seeing the genre undergoing change is to start with the original conception. Identifying himself as “‘of the Aristotelian school’” of playwriting, David Mamet identified American Buffalo as a “traditionally structured drama based on tragedy.” 5 Since a “tragedy has to be the attempt of one specific person to obtain one specific goal,” 6 a theatregoer with only superficial knowledge of the play might conclude that the specific goal is stealing the American buffalo coin. The setting is a Chicago resale or junk shop whose owner, Don, sold the coin to a customer a week prior to the time of the play. Reflecting on a browsing customer paying ninety dollars for a coin that he valued at “‘two bits,’” 7 Don realizes that it must be worth much more, and he is determined to retrieve it by having his gopher, a young man named Bob, that night break into the home of the customer, who lives close by. He has made contact with a collector who will pay much more for it. Yet in another interview, Mamet said that the “junk store owner…is trying to teach a lesson in how to behave like the excellent man to his young ward.” 8 Thus the crime of stealing the coin is the vehicle for the lesson, the learning experience, which is the specific goal.

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In more than one interview, Mamet identified choice as a defining element of tragedy, and though he did not cite the Aristotelian hamartia or misjudgment, that is what he meant when he agreed with Don Marquis that “whatever we choose is going to be wrong…. And that’s what tragedy is about.” 9 Two early scenes involving the young ward influence the junk store owner’s choice. Bob’s role when American Buffalo opens is checking on the movements of the customer, referred to as the guy, so that Don will know when the time is right for breaking into his home. Leaving his post to check on a back exit, he disappoints his mentor, who criticizes him, not because he is mad at the ward but because he is “trying to teach” him “something here” (797). Sent to a diner for takeout food and coffee, he fails to get everything that Don and Teach, a friend of the owner who stopped by the shop, ordered and has to go back to the diner. And he violates Teach’s injunction against speaking to a certain person, even though she spoke to him. Although he redeems himself somewhat by telling his mentor that he saw the guy leaving with a suitcase, earning Don’s approval: “Now you’re talking. You see what I mean?” (816), it is too little too late. In his absence Teach learns of the coin and of the intent to get it back. Despite Don’s feeling for the “good kid” (826) and against his better judgment, he accepts Teach’s argument that the “job is beyond” (828) Bob and replaces him with his friend. Teach does not recover the coin because the break-in never takes place, but that was not the play’s one specific goal anyway. American Buffalo is a family tragedy with Bob initially suffering the consequence of the father figure’s choice. The ward returns to the shop that night with a coin that he says he found and wants to sell to the father figure. It is during their exchange that Teach returns for the break-in. Paranoid, he is suspicious of Bob’s presence, questioning why he is in the shop. Bob’s presence should arouse suspicion, for although intellectually challenged he can guess that Teach has replaced him. Returning a second time with the information that Fletcher, the third man on the job, having been mugged is in the hospital with a broken jaw, he arouses the suspicion of his mentor, who phones the hospital to learn that Fletcher is not a patient. When Teach “viciously” attacks the young man for trying to force himself into the action by lying about Fletcher so that he can take his place, Don makes no attempt to intervene, even blaming his ward for his misfortune: “You brought it on yourself ” (884). In Aristotelian tragedy the tragic hero suffers but a different kind of suffering than a physical beating. His suffering is the knowledge he gains about himself in the recognition (anagnorisis) and the reversal (peripeteia) parts of the plot that are most effective when they are combined, as Mamet explained when he applied the combining in the “crucial moment” to his play. 10 Don receives a phone call informing him that Fletcher is in the hospital with a broken jaw. Realizing that Bob was telling the truth but in his confusion had the wrong hospital, Don now suffers the consequence of his

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wrong choice. He realizes that by abdicating a “moral position” for personal gain, he allowed Teach to beat the “young fellow whom he loves” as a son. He also realizes that Bob is not the one who needs “lessons in being an excellent man”; he himself needs them. 11 Since Teach will not heed his warning to leave Bob alone, even saying that he “hit him. For his own good” (890), Don hits him and then orders him to get his car so that they can take Bob to the hospital. Although American Buffalo ends with the father and son figures together as they wait for Teach to bring his car around, the reversal is not in the visual image. In the opening dialogue, Don criticizes Bob for leaving his lookout post, rejecting as not “good enough” his excuse that he went to check on the back of the guy’s house because he was not coming out the front. The ward apologizes—“I’m sorry” (796)—and his mentor accepts the apology. In the closing dialogue, Don apologizes to Bob for allowing the beating, even with Bob’s revelation that he lied about seeing the guy leave with a suitcase. Don’s “I’m sorry” (896) reverses for the crucial moment their roles with the younger man becoming the mentor and the older man the ward. The reversal, however, is not permanent. It lasts but a moment, for the closing lines repeat opening lines, restoring the original relationship, albeit changed by the day’s action. American Buffalo confirms Mamet’s description of it as an Aristotelian tragedy. Mamet said that Oleanna is one too when he included it with American Buffalo and two other plays as the four “classically structured tragedies” that he was “proudest of.” 12 Yet in an interview that took place a few months later, he talked about each character’s point of view in the twocharacter play being “correct,” 13 a statement repeated with a slight change in an interview aired on television about the same time when he said that each character “is saying something absolutely true.” 14 A radical change in his statements about the play he characterized as a “tragedy about power” 15 occurs from his identifying the professor as the protagonist to his identifying the professor and the student as the two protagonists. A tragedy in which there are two protagonists, each one right, on a collision course as in Sophocles’ Antigone is Hegelian. 16 Encountering a production of the play in 1992, however, one would not even think of it as a tragedy. A poster outside New York’s Orpheum Theatre announced Oleanna as “A Power Play,” not ‘A Power Tragedy,’ and male theatregoers were handed a playbill whose cover had a seated female with a circular bull’s-eye target on her chest while female theatregoers were handed a playbill with a male seated behind a bull’s-eye target: a marketing strategy suggesting comedy rather than tragedy. Since I have written elsewhere about the 1992 production, 17 this study will examine Oleanna to see whether it conforms to the Aristotelian conception of tragedy. That is, it accepts one protagonist over the two protagonists

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because the professor and not the student utters a phrase associated with the Aristotelian conception in the third of the three acts set in the office of a university professor. In act 1 a student has come unscheduled to his office while he is in the midst of one of many distracting phone conversations with his wife about issues they are having purchasing a home. Although John is pressed for time, having told his wife that he would meet her in ten to fifteen minutes, he stays in the office talking with Carol because she is insistent that she does not understand anything in the course she takes with him and cannot afford to fail. Of three concepts that affect an Aristotelian interpretation, the first is the hamartia or misjudgment. The tact he takes with her is to be “personal ”: to get her to understand that her problems are not unique, that he had similar problems as a boy. 18 But the tact has her questioning his motive. For example, when she asks why he stays when he has an appointment and he says, “Because I like you” (21), she asks why he likes her. Her questioning forces a focus on his motive, as he offers to change her grade if she will return to meet with him a few more times, uses an off-color anecdote as an example, and puts his arm around her when she screams, “I DON’T UNDERSTAND” (36). Yet as the act ends, John does not see himself as having committed a misjudgment. The above instances are the basis of the complaint she brought against him to the university’s tenure committee and the basis of act-2’s meeting to which he asked her. Although he offers to make amends, he does not think he did anything wrong. Hamartia is still not the focus; peripeteia or reversal is. He does not understand what he did to have her make the complaint: why, for example, she would call him “sexist” (47). She has no interest in reviewing the complaint; that is the committee’s function. Her interest is in getting him to understand that he no longer has the power to “strut” and “posture” and “‘perform’” (51) while mocking education in front of students who need the education to advance their lives. Having made her argument, she is about to leave when he tries to restrain her so as to continue the discussion. Act 3 opens with John’s admission of acting against his “better judgment” (59). The phrase combines hamartia and anagnorisis or recognition. Although he is willing to apologize to Carol, the apology is not for his mode of teaching. It is for asking her to come to his office. The implication is that since the act-2 meeting weakened his position, he recognizes that the current meeting might further weaken it, and this admission occurs before he learns that his attempt to restrain her from leaving is the basis for her charge that he attempted to rape her. Yet John wants to talk to her because with the committee denying him tenure, he has lost his job, the new house, and the deposit on it. Carol, on the other hand, wants him to understand the dynamics of power. That is what he lost and what she gained. The reversal does not create the problem with Oleanna as an Aristotelian tragedy. We saw in the examination of American Buffalo that the recognition

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and the reversal are most effective when combined, as they are in that play’s closing moments. Not being combined is not, however, a flaw in Oleanna. The problem is that the scene at play’s end does not dramatize what Mamet said it does. About Aristotelian tragedy he said that at play’s end the hero or heroine realizes that “he or she is the cause of their own problems.” 19 About Oleanna he said that when at play’s end the professor undergoes the reversal and recognition, “he realizes that perhaps he is the cause of the plague on Thebes.” 20 Even if one argues that at act-3’s opening John’s admission of acting against his better judgment goes beyond asking Carol to come to his office to include his earlier office behavior and therefore that perhaps he is the cause of the situation, that is not his recognition at play’s end. In American Buffalo Don apologizes to Bob for allowing Teach to hit him. In Oleanna John knocks Carol to the floor and threatens to hit her with a chair but does not because with her fabricated charge and substituted agenda, he recognizes that she is not worth hitting. For him, she is a “little cunt” (79). Mamet’s play is a tragedy without adhering to a strict Aristotelian structure in which two characters betray “their own best interests” 21 by protecting their positions instead of pursuing those interests. Had John not been so determined to exhibit his pedagogical techniques, he could have helped Carol and therefore would have gained tenure as a professor. Had she not been so determined to substitute her and her group’s texts for his, she could have understood more about the subject and therefore would have gained confidence as a student. Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter jettisons the Aristotelian structure. Matt is an emerging playwright who, according to his editor friend Davis, can quote the “various statutes of Aristotelian Poetics.” 22 To Christina, the third of the play’s three characters, the synopsis of his project “sounds very sad,” which is Eagleton’s best definition of tragedy. Matt agrees: “It’s sort of a tragedy” (21). One year later when the two meet again and he tells her his progress writing a new play, it “definitely isn’t…your typical Aristotelian, three-act, architecturally sound type of thing” (81). Since the plot of Rapp’s play in which two characters who “need each other the most wind up missing their opportunity” (xvii) is similar to the plot of Mamet’s play and since Rapp’s play, like Mamet’s play, is “laced with tragedy” (xvii), Red Light Winter can be compared with Oleanna. The difference is immediate. As soon as John puts the phone down from his conversation with his wife, Carol tells him that she has come to his office because she does not understand anything in the course she takes with him. Act 1 of Red Light Winter takes place in a hotel room in Amsterdam to which Davis has brought from the Red Light District prostitute Christina for a session with fellow American Matt. The scene between the opening on Matt’s abortive suicide and his play synopsis functions as a sort of prologue in which the subject is his intestinal infection and the conversation is laced with references to his bowel movements. The scatology is typical of Rapp’s theatre—

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in Stone Cold Dead Serious and The Hallway Trilogy, for example—and best understood in Matt’s championing of Henry Miller’s genius, as in the work Christina cites, Tropic of Cancer. Miller gives the artist’s task in the autobiographical novel: When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. 23

If Rapp made the artist’s task his task, then the scatology alerts the audience not to expect a traditional Aristotelian structure. It also alerts the audience not to expect a traditional love story. Davis brought Christina to the room the two Americans share while in Amsterdam to have Matt end his three-and-a-half-year abstinence from sex, abstinence resulting from the girl he loved, Sarah, deserting him for Davis. The strategy works. Act 1 ends with Matt, orgasm achieved, in love with Christina, who turns out to be an American woman married to a wealthy gay man and prostituting the six months the couple live in Amsterdam, in love with Davis, who, although professing to love Sarah to whom he is engaged, is in love with himself, a man women find irresistible. The love triangle is the chaos from which Rapp has to create a new order in act 2 so that the dead may be restored to life. Act 2 takes place one year later in Matt’s apartment in New York to which Christina, now afflicted with AIDS and divorced, has come hoping to reconnect with Davis, who gave her Matt’s address when she asked for his. She does not remember him. He, however, unable to forget the woman who left her imprint on him offers to share the room with her for the night and to pay her train fare to her parents’ home in the morning. After telling her of the imprint, he leaves to get food for both of them, and while he is gone, Davis arrives to retrieve his cell phone. Not remembering Christina until she reminds him of Amsterdam does not prevent him from achieving an orgasm before leaving to join Sarah. When Matt returns with groceries, he discovers that a “devastated ” (96) Christina is gone. Unlike Oleanna, Red Light Winter has for Matt, who is the protagonist, no Aristotelian error in judgment or recognition. It is laced with tragedy nevertheless. The tragedy is the study’s first category of isolation: the “pervasive, almost disabling, melancholic loneliness” (xvii) that prevents one from fulfilling life’s potential. Davis, who does not suffer loneliness, does not want to understand what lies ahead for him when Christina tries to tell him. An afflicted Christina suffers loneliness but walks away from the opportunity to share her life, a sharing that even if it cannot heal her body can heal her spirit. Since the play does not go inside her as it does Matt, the audience

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can only conjecture what she will do with the sleeping pills she takes with her. Matt has always suffered the loneliness of the nerd, yet Rapp intimates in the introduction that he will recover. The imagery intimates that too. Christina turns off the cassette, leaving the room silent as she leaves. Matt turns it on again, filling the room with the sound of life as the play’s lights fade. Matt experiences a reversal. It is not the Aristotelian reversal from good fortune to misfortune that Professor John experiences, but it is a reversal. The play opens with him trying to commit suicide without provocation; the play closes with him not trying, although he has provocation. The implication is that in telling Christina how he feels about her, he breaks out of his shell, discovering a new order and restoring to life his emotional nature that died following Sarah’s desertion. Red Light Winter is the last of the study’s plays that also experiences a reversal from the first of the study’s plays. The implication of Eno’s Tragedy is that the classically structured form is inadequate for giving meaning to contemporary tragedy: the suffering of loneliness, for example. Red Light Winter takes the implication to the inevitable conclusion. If Aristotelian form is dead, a new order of forms can restore the genre to life, and these are among the forms the study examines. Not all of the plays are tragedies. Some, like Rabbit Hole, are responses to tragedies. Their inclusion, however, should stimulate thinking about new art forms that give meaning to misfortune and suffering. In chapter 4 the study quotes one scholar, Steven R. Centola, on Miller’s plays being tragedies, even if they do not conform to traditional form. The study closes by quoting another scholar, Brenda Murphy, on modern and contemporary American plays in general, some of which she names. Plays can have a tragic vision, “even if they do not exemplify all of the conventions associated with the genre.” 24 I hope that this study demonstrates that the genre, whether in traditional form or newer forms, is vital and relevant in the contemporary American theatre.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Will Eno, Tragedy, in New Downtown Now: An Anthology of New Theater from Downtown New York, ed. Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006) 52. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. Gina Gionfriddo, After Ashley, in Humana Festival 2004: The Complete Plays, ed. Tanya Palmer and Adrien-Alice Hansel (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2005) 59. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 3. Charles Isherwood, “A Mother’s Untimely End, a Father’s Effort to Cash In,” New York Times 1 Mar. 2005: E5. Michael Feingold, “TV or Not TV,” Village Voice 2-8 Mar. 2005: 76. 4. Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1962) 9, 21. 5. Sewall 18. 6. Ben Brantley, “An Earthy Take on a Heavenly Book,” New York Times 20 Sept. 2012: C1.

1. ISOLATION AND LOSS OF LIFE 1. A.R. Gurney, introduction, The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays (New York: PlumePenguin, 1989) x. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in vol. 2 of The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1959) lines 25 and 29. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically by line number. For the divisions with their technical names of Antigone, see Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance, new ed. (New York: Basic, 1968) 12-17. 3. Williams 18. The passage in Antigone is lines 369-71. Williams also quotes from the U of Chicago P ed. but with British spelling. 4. Neil LaBute, iphigenia in orem, in bash: three plays (New York: Overlook, 1999) 26. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. The study retains the play’s lowercase letters, even in the initial letters of sentences. 5. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Charles R. Walker, in vol. 4 of The Complete Greek Tragedies (1960) lines 511-12. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically by line number.

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6. David Raeburn, preface, Electra, in Sophocles: Electra and Other Plays, trans. and ed. Raeburn (London: Penguin Classics, 2008) 131. 7. Neil Simon, The Play Goes On (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999) 240-41. 8. Neil Simon, Broadway Bound (New York: Samuel French, 1987) 27. 9. Donald Margulies, Collected Stories (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998) 15. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10. A.R. Gurney, Later Life, in Later Life and Two Other Plays (New York: Plume-Penguin, 1994) 10. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 11. Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle, in vol. 11 of The Complete Tales, ed. Leon Edel (Philadelphia; Lippincott, 1964) 359. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 12. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 3. 13. Edward Albee, The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2003) 54. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 14. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 239. 15. For the scapegoat’s role in tragedy, see Eagleton 277-96 and Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 135-36. 16. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949) 36. 17. John Simon, “Baa, Humbug,” New York magazine 25 Mar. 2002: 134. 18. Michael Patterson, The Oxford Guide to Plays (New York: Oxford UP, 2007) 170. 19. Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006) 30. 20. Wallace 5. For other approaches to The Goat as tragedy, see John Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” American Drama 13.2 (2004): 1-32; J. Ellen Gainor, “Albee’s The Goat: Rethinking Tragedy for the 21st Century,” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee 199-216; and an expanded argument with a somewhat different approach, Robert J. Andreach, The War Against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2008) 86-94. 21. Simon 134. 22. Barbara Lebow, playwright’s notes, A Shayna Maidel (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1988). Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 23. David Lindsay-Abaire, author’s note, Rabbit Hole (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006) 64. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 24. Ben Brantley, “Mourning a Child in a Silence That’s Unbearably Loud,” New York Times 3 Feb. 2006: E1. 25. Paul Rudnick, introduction, Jeffrey (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995) 4. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 26. Louis Botto, “Hope in Laughter,” Playbill 93.8 (1993): 37. 27. Botto 34-37. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 28. Milan Stitt, The Runner Stumbles (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1976) 6. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 29. Women Who Write Plays: Interviews with American Dramatists, ed. Alexis Greene (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2001) 452. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 30. Naomi Wallace, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, in In the Heart of America and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001) 289. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

2. LOSS OF HOPE AND SUFFERING 1. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1963) 8. For a concise introduction, see chapter 9, “Endings,” in Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 112-23. 2. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966) 55. 3. Eagleton 27.

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4. Wallace 62-63. 5. Horton Foote, introduction, The First Four Plays of the Orphans’ Home Cycle (New York: Grove, 1988) xii. 6. Tom Donaghy, Northeast Local, in The Beginning of August and Other Plays (New York: Grove, 2000) 61. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 7. Women Who Write Plays 130. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8. John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, in Five Plays of the English Renaissance, ed. Bernard Beckerman (New York: Meridian Classic-NAL, 1983) 2.1.1. 9. Migdalia Cruz, Salt, in El Grito del Bronx and Other Plays (South Gate, CA: No Passport, 2010) 185. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10. Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, introduction, El Grito del Bronx and Other Plays 23. 11. Catechism of the Catholic Church (St. Paul: Ohio, 1994) 312. 12. Thomas Middleton, The Changeling, in Five Plays, ed. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor (London: Penguin Classics, 2006) 3.2.9-13. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13. Melanie Marnich, Tallgrass Gothic, in Humana Festival 2004 311. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 14. Ethan Coen, Four Benches, in Almost an Evening (New York: Three Rivers, 2009) 39. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 15. Wakako Yamauchi, And the Soul Shall Dance, in Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays, ed. Misha Berson (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990) 150. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 16. Women Who Write Plays 526. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 17. Sophocles, Elektra, in An Oresteia, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009) line 181. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 18. Ellen McLaughlin, Electra, in The Greek Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005) 41. 19. Marsha Norman, ’night, Mother (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983) 22. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 20. Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro, in In One Act (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 7. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 21. Werner Sollors, “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy’s Drama,” American Literature 63.3 (1991): 513. 22. Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987). Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 23. Sollors 510. 24. Kenneth Muir, introduction, King Lear, ed. Muir in the Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1989) xlii. 25. K. Leander Williams, “Radical Shakespeare,” New York magazine 4-11 Jan. 2010: 69. 26. Young Jean Lee, author’s note, Lear, in The Shipment / Lear (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2010) 59. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 27. William Shakespeare, King Lear, in The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952) 4.2.12. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 28. Harry Kondoleon, Christmas on Mars, in Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991) 109. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 29. Harry Kondoleon, The Houseguests (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993) 14. 30. Harry Kondoleon, Love Diatribe (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1991) 30. 31. Harry Kondoleon, Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise 11. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 32. Ben Brantley, “A Writer Is Reborn, His Halo in Place,” New York Times 24 Nov. 2000: E1. 33. August Wilson, Fences (New York: Plume-NAL, 1986) 51. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 34. Kim Pereira, August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995) 36. 35. Pereira 53. 36. Wallace 83-85.

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37. Anita Gates, “Deferred Dreams Still Resonate in ‘Raisin’ Revival,” New York Times 24 Apr. 2011: NJ11. Wallace includes the play in her list of American tragedies but does not discuss it 222. 38. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Signet- NAL, 1988) 44. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 39. Adam Rapp, Nocturne (New York: Faber and Faber, 2002) 17. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 40. William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (New York: Random, 1939) 321. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 41. Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Noonday, 1964) 229. 42. Anita Gates, “Deception and Betrayal All in the Family,” New York Times 23 Sept. 2012: NJ13. 43. Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002) 89. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 44. For the significance of Booth not wanting the stocking opened, see Jon Dietrick, “Making It ‘Real’: Money and Mimesis in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog,” American Drama 16.1 (2007): 47-74. 45. Beth Henley, Revelers, in vol. 2 of Collected Plays: 1990-1999 (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2000) 173. 46. Maria Irene Fornes, Abingdon Square, in Womens Work: Five New Plays from the Women’s Project, ed. Julia Miles (New York: Applause, 1989) 13. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 47. Len Jenkin, Margo Veil (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2008) 20. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

3. EUGENE O’NEILL 1. Seamus Deane, introduction, Selected Plays: Brian Friel (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1988) 13. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. Jon Robin Baitz, The End of the Day, in The Substance of Fire and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993) 153-54. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 3. Allan Havis, Morocco, in Plays (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1989) 41. 4. John Guare, Marco Polo Sings a Solo, in The War Against the Kitchen Sink (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996) 59. 5. Tom Donaghy, author’s note, Northeast Local (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996) 5. 6. Ted Tally, Coming Attractions, in Plays from Playwrights Horizons (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1987) 311. 7. Richard Nelson, Conjuring an Event, in An American Comedy and Other Plays (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1984) 173-74. 8. Richard Nelson, Jungle Coup, in Plays from Playwrights Horizons 272. 9. Harvey Fierstein, The International Stud, in Torch Song Trilogy (New York: Samuel French, 1979) 28. 10. Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001) 94. 11. Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles, in The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1991) 224. 12. John Guare, Rich and Famous, in The War Against the Kitchen Sink 182. 13. A.R. Gurney, The Perfect Party, in The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays 199. 14. David Henry Hwang, Family Devotions, in FOB and Other Plays (Plume-NAL, 1990) 133. 15. For Brenda Murphy, the three are Maxwell Anderson, O’Neill, and Miller. “Tragedy in the Modern American Theater,” A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 488-503.

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16. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 92. 17. Eugene O’Neill, Ile, in Seven Plays of the Sea (New York: Vintage, 1972) 125. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 18. Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays, ed. Virginia Floyd (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981) 296. 19. Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (New York: Paragon, 1968) 385. 20. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, in Complete Plays: 1932-1943 (New York: Library of America, 1988) 729. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 21. John Henry Raleigh, “Communal, Familial, and Personal Memories in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Modern Drama 31.1 (1988): 68. 22. Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape, in Nine Plays (New York: Modern Library, 1941) 40. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 23. Bogard 415. 24. Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, in Complete Plays: 1932-1943 639. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 25. Richard F. Moorton, Jr., “Eugene O’Neill’s American Eumenides,” Classical and Modern Literature 10.4 (1990): 360. 26. Laurin R. Porter, “The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O’Neill’s Long Journey,” Modern Drama 31.1 (1988): 57. 27. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. Sir Paul Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946) 55. 28. Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, in Complete Plays: 1932-1943 857. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 29. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985) 140. 30. Ben Brantley, “A Love Story to Stop the Heart,” New York Times 20 Mar. 2000: E1. Brantley praised the 2000 Broadway production. Frank Scheck praised the 2012 Off-Broadway production. “You’ll Swoon over ‘Moon,’” New York Post 20 Mar. 2012: 34. 31. Barbara Gelb, “A Second Look, and a Second Chance to Forgive,” New York Times 19 Mar. 2000: 7. 32. Aeschylus, The Eumenides, trans. Richmond Lattimore, in vol. 1 of The Complete Greek Tragedies (1959) lines 757-58. 33. Robert Brustein, “The Iceman Cometh,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Iceman Cometh, ed. John Henry Raleigh (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968) 98. 34. For an early exploration of the significance of Mildred’s disappearance, see Robert J. Andreach, “O’Neill’s Use of Dante in The Fountain and The Hairy Ape,” Modern Drama 10.1 (1967): 48-56. 35. Eugene O’Neill, letter to George Jean Nathan, Intimate Notebooks (New York: Knopf, 1932); O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill, et al. (New York: New York UP, 1961) 115. 36. Mary B. Mullett, “The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O’Neill,” American Magazine Nov. 1922: 112-20, excerpted in Sheaffer 419. 37. Deborah R. Geis sees another similarity in that “monologic speech expresses deeply rooted human alienation and longing, as is evident in his [O’Neill’s] later plays (e.g. Long Day’s Journey into Night, especially Mary’s speeches, and Hughie).” Postmodern Theatric(k)s (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995) 22. 38. Eugene O’Neill, Hughie, in Complete Plays: 1932-1943 837. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 39. Vincent Canby, “Pacino’s Star Turn in a Pipe Dream,” New York Times 23 Aug. 1996: C1. 40. C.W.E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 24-31. 41. Eugene O’Neill, A Touch of the Poet, in Complete Plays: 1932-1943 202. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

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4. ARTHUR MILLER 1. Arthur Miller, All My Sons (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000) 17. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” The Theater Essays, ed. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1996) 4. 3. The Theater Essays 266. 4. Barry Gross, “All My Sons and the Larger Context,” Essays on Modern American Drama, ed. Dorothy Parker (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987) 57. 5. The Theater Essays 429. 6. Steven R. Centola, “All My Sons,” The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, ed. Christopher Bigsby, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) 60. 7. Ben Brantley, “American Dreamer, Ambushed by the Territory,” New York Times 16 Mar. 2012: C1. 8. The Theater Essays 6. 9. Arthur Miller, “The Nature of Tragedy,” The Theater Essays 9. 10. The Theater Essays 132. 11. The Theater Essays 421. 12. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998) 1. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13. The Theater Essays 5. 14. The Theater Essays 4. 15. Eagleton 99. 16. Charles Isherwood, “A Play That Resounds in the Heart and the Gut,” New York Times 22 Apr. 2012: AR6. 17. The Theater Essays 67. 18. Rebecca W. Bushnell, Prophesying Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) xiv. 19. John Orr, Tragic Drama and Modern Society (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981) 228. 20. Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009) 10. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 21. The Theater Essays 426. 22. The Theater Essays 261-62. 23. The Theater Essays 4. 24. The Theater Essays 166. 25. Janet N. Balakian, “The Holocaust, the Depression, and McCarthyism: Miller in the Sixties,” The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller 118-40 and Lawrence D. Lowenthal, “Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy: a Sartrean Interpretation,” Essays on Modern American Drama 94-106. 26. Lowenthal, “Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy: a Sartrean Interpretation.” 27. Richard Foreman, “On the Plays,” Paradise Hotel and Other Plays (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2001) 7. 28. Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self (New York: Basic, 1993) 8. 29. Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy (New York: Penguin, 1985) 6. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 30. The Theater Essays 269. 31. The Theater Essays 490. 32. The Theater Essays 266. 33. Arthur Miller, The Ride down Mount Morgan (New York: Penguin, 1999) 38. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 34. The Theater Essays 269. 35. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 122. 36. Stephen Barker, “Critic, Criticism, Critics,” The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller 265. 37. Steven R. Centola, “Arthur Miller and the Art of the Possible,” American Drama 14.1 (2005): 74.

Notes

181

5. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 1. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions, 1970) 23. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper, 1975) 34-35. 3. Eliade 36. 4. Patrick Healy, “Reimagining a Classic, Goo Included,” New York Times 27 Jan. 2013: AR7. 5. C.W.E. Bigsby, “Entering The Glass Menagerie,” The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 37. 6. Brian Parker, “The Composition of The Glass Menagerie: An Argument for Complexity,” Essays on Modern American Drama 22. 7. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 2004) 73. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8. Mary Ann Corrigan, “Realism and Theatricalism in A Streetcar Named Desire,” Essays on Modern American Drama 34. 9. Felicia Hardison Londré, “A Streetcar Running Fifty Years,” The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams 45-66. 10. Women Who Write Plays 527. 11. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, ed. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York: Beech Tree, 1987) 329. 12. Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in vol. 3 of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1991) 122. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 51. 14. Robinson 52. 15. Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, in vol. 3 of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams 391. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 16. Catechism of the Catholic Church 347. 17. Matthias Joseph Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. Cyril Vollert (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1946) 431. 18. John M. Clum, “The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female in Suddenly Last Summer…and Sweet Bird of Youth,” The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams 133. 19. Orr, 220-21. 20. Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth (New York: New Directions, 2008) 23. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 21. Charles Ludlam, Galas, in The Complete Plays (New York: Harper, 1989) 760. 22. Clum 144.

6. MORE CONTEMPORARY TRAGEDY 1. Frank Scheck, “Stark Production No Fine ‘Summer’ Day,” New York Post 19 Feb. 2013: 32. 2. Ben Brantley, “A Storm from the South, Brewing in a Bedroom,” New York Times 18 Jan. 2013: C1. 3. Alexis Soloski, “A Curtain Call for a Grand Experiment,” New York Times 15 July 2012: AR5. 4. Rob Handel, Aphrodisiac (New York: Samuel French, 2010) 10. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 5. Charles Isherwood, “Everything’s Fine, Until It Isn’t,” New York Times 4 Mar. 2013: C1.

182

Notes

6. John Guare, introduction, The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2002) 5. 7. Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Tension Mounts As ‘Blind’ Leads the Sublime,” New York Post 15 Aug. 2012: 38. 8. Horton Foote, The One-Armed Man, in The Tears of My Sister and three other plays (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993) 54. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 9. Robert J. Andreach, John Guare’s Theatre: The Art of Connecting (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009) 7-12. 10. Guare, The House of Blue Leaves 21. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 11. John Guare, A Free Man of Color (New York: Grove, 2011) 11. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 12. Patrick Healy, “Guare’s Gamble of Epic Proportions,” New York Times 14 Nov. 2010: AR6. 13. “Restoration,” The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 820. 14. Charles Isherwood, “Theatrical Stumbles of Historic Proportions,” New York Times 12 Dec. 2010: AR1. 15. Elisabeth Vincentelli, “All’s Well That Ends Well in Overstuffed Play,” New York Post 19 Nov. 2010: 45. 16. John Mortimer, introduction, Georges Feydeau: Three Boulevard Farces, trans. Mortimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 9. 17. J.T. Rogers, Blood and Gifts (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011) 107. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 18. David Cote, “Blood and Gifts,” Time Out New York 24-30 Nov. 2011: 70.

CONCLUSION 1. Todd London, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play (New York: Theatre Development Fund, 2009) 191. 2. London 206. 3. London 225. 4. London 210. 5. David Mamet in Conversation, ed. Leslie Kane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001) 40, 48. 6. Conversation 119. 7. David Mamet, American Buffalo, in Nine Plays of the Modern Theater, ed. Harold Clurman (New York: Grove, 1981) 822. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8. Conversation 67. 9. Conversation 196. 10. Conversation 66. 11. Conversation 67. 12. Conversation 118. 13. Conversation 125. 14. Conversation 164. 15. Conversation 125. 16. The study never meant to imply that the Aristotelian is the sole conception of tragedy. For a survey of conceptions or theories, see Wallace 117-37. For fuller discussions, see the entries under “Aristotle,” “Hegel,” and “tragedy” in Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, exp. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). 17. Robert J. Andreach, Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998) 98-101. 18. David Mamet, Oleanna (New York: Vintage, 1993) 19. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 19. Conversation 145.

Notes

183

20. Conversation 119. 21. Conversation 125. 22. Adam Rapp, Red Light Winter (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006) 19. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 23. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove, 1961) 253. 24. Brenda Murphy, “Tragedy in the Modern American Theater,” A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 503.

Index

abandonment by father, 122 Abingdon Square, 66, 148 action, linear, 42, 45 Aeschylus, 80, 82, 86 After Ashley, xi–xiii, 41, 69, 148; as threetiered drama, xii; TV talk show, xi AIDS, 20–21, 52, 173 Albee, Edward, 10–13, 61 All My Sons, 97–100, 110 allusion: of oppositions, 128; to Shakespeare, 161 Almost an Evening, 38 American Buffalo, 168–170, 172 “American epic tragedy”, xi, xiii The American Play, 62 American Repertory Theater, 124 American tragedy, 71, 143; contemporary, 145–165 anagnorisis, 169, 171 And the Soul Shall Dance, 39–41, 42, 131 Angels in America, 51 Another Antigone, 1–4, 48 Antigone, 1 Aphrodisiac, 147, 148–150 Aristophanes, 21 Aristotelian tragedy, 56, 149, 162, 169, 170, 171–172 Aristotle: definition of tragedy, x; imitation (re-enactment), xiii audience, importance of, 167

Baitz, Jon Robin, 69 baptism in water, 33 bash: iphigenia in orem, 4–5 The Beast in the Jungle, 9 Belleville, 150–153 “better judgment”, 171 Bigsby, C. W. E.: on American occupation, 103; on Death of a Salesman, 101, 107; on Hughie, 92 black father/white mother, 44 Blood and Gifts, 162–165 Blood Play, 145–147; naturalistic design of, 146 Bogard, Travis, 71; on Iceman as most ‘Greek’ play, 80, 107 Bos, Hannah, 145 Bradshaw, Thomas, xiv–xv Brantley, Ben: on Christmas on Mars, 53; on Hoffman performance in Death of a Salesman, 100; on Job, xiv; on Rabbit Hole, 18 Brighton Beach Memoirs, 6 Brighton Beach Trilogy, 6 Broadway Bound, 6–7 The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, ix Carson, Anne, on Elektra, 40 “The Catastrophe of Success”, 124 Catholic Church, 21–24 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 132–136, 146; alternate endings, 135 185

186

Index

celebrity status: difficult to achieve, 71; as goal of self-invention, xi, 71 Centola, Steven R., 174; on tragic hero, 119–120 change: hope of, 40, 41; as opposition, 29, 39 The Changeling, 33–38 children, sexual abuse in Salt, 30–33 Christmas on Mars, 49–53 “classically structured tragedies”, 170 Classic Stage Company, 14 Coen, Ethan, 38–39, 42–46 Collected Stories, 7, 131 Coming Attractions, 70 The Confidence-Man, 103 conflict between reality and mythic state, 123 conflict externalization, 128 Conjuring an Event, 70 contradictions, 44 Corrigan, Mary Ann, on conflict externalization, 128 Cote, David, 163 creation of a new self, 100, 121, 123, 154, 155; by countries/nations, 157–158; success or failure of, 95–96, 145–165 creation of a self, 153 Crowley, Bob, 124 Cruz, Migdalia, 30–33; on Jacobean drama, 31 “cynical black comedy”, 149 Dante, 69 Deane, Seamus, introduction to Friel plays, 69 death: is essential to tragedy, 116; keeping it at bay, 92 Death of a Salesman, 100–107, 110, 143; setting has “air of a dream”, 101 Debate Society, 145, 150 Der Rosenkavalier, 128 despair and change, opposition of, 39 determinism, 41 Di Pietro, Anthony, 79 Donaghy, Tom, 30, 69 Eagleton, Terry, ix, 10; definition of tragedy, 172; on Salesman, 107; tragedy through the hero, 29

East and West, route connecting, 155–162 Electra, 6–7, 40 Eliade, Mircea: on concentrated time, 122; on poetry, 124 Elizabethan tragedy, 45–49; reimagining of, xv The End of the Day, 69 Eno, Will, ix–x, 149, 174 escape, means of, 124 “Eumenides”, 10 The Eumenides, 86–91 Euripides, 14 event: gravity of, x; reporting of, x existentialism, Sartrean, 112 family, divided, 45 Family Devotions, 71 fantastic play, 50 farce: classical, 117, 118; definition of, 160; modern, 157 Faulkner, William, 59 Feingold, Michael, on After Ashley, xii Fences, 53–56 Fergusson, Francis, 10 Feydeau, Georges, 117, 157, 162 Fierstein, Harvey, 70 Flea Theater, xiv Foote, Horton, 122, 153; on dealing with change, 29; on opposition, 29 Ford, John, 30–33 Foreman, Richard, 66, 112 Fornes, Maria Irene, 66 Four Benches, 38–39, 69 fourteen-room house metaphor, 117–118 A Free Man of Color, 155–162 Friel, Brian, 69 “fully formed tragedy”, 153 Funnyhouse of a Negro, 42–46 Galas: A Modern Tragedy, 141 games, of children, 145–147 Gates, Anita: on Raisin in the Sun, 56–58; on Topdog/Underdog, 61 Gavin, David, xi Gay Pride parade, 20 The General of Hot Desire, 51 gentlemen callers, 122 ghosts, 37 Gilded Age, 103

Index Gionfriddo, Gina, xi–xiii The Glass Menagerie, 121–125, 134, 146 Glengarry, Glen Ross, 103 The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?, 10–13, 61; subtitle: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy, 10, 12 God: abandonment by, 51; as “vicious host”, 51; world without, 90 Golden Boy, 168 Greek myth, 107 Greek tragedy, 10, 42, 86; form of, xiii; Miller’s reinvention of, 108, 110; reimagining of, xv grief, 61; and nothing, 59 Gross, Barry, about All My Sons, 99 Guare, John, 51, 69, 71, 154–155, 155–162; on humiliation, 152 Guernica bombing, 123 Gurney, A. R., 1–4, 7–10, 71; about Greek tragedy, 48; on his career, 1; introduction to Later Life, 10 The Hairy Ape, 79–80, 86, 90 The Hallway Trilogy, 172 hamartia, 149, 170–171 Hamlet, 161 Handel, Rob, 147 Hansberry, Lorraine, 56–58 “The Happy Life of a Man in Power”, 162 Harrison, G. B., on “nothing”, 49 Harrison, TX, 153 The Haunted, 86 Havis, Allan, 69 The Heidi Chronicles, 71 Henley, Beth, 65 Herzog, Amy, 150 homosexuality, 134 hope: loss of, xii, 29–67; of change, 41 Hotel, 103 The Houseguests, 51 The House of Blue Leaves, 154–155 “How One Man Became and American”, 162 Hughie, 90–92 humanity, as “mud and manure”, 84 humiliation, avoidance of, 152 Hwang, David Henry, 71

187

The Iceman Cometh, 73, 80–86, 86, 90; and suicide, 100; and tragic resonance, 132 “I coulda been somebody”, 70 identity: concept of, 157; search for, 57, 150–153, 153 Ile, 71–73; interpretation of, 72; romanticizing of the past, 81 images, aural, verbal and visual, 45 imitation (re-enactment), xiii immobility and change, as opposition, 29 immobility and movement, as opposition, 122 “I’m nobody”, 154 incarnations, 88–89 Incident at Vichy, 112–115 “Inferno”, 69 The International Stud, 70 I of the imagination, 73 Iphigenia and Other Daughters, 14 Iphigenia in Aulis, 4–5, 14 iphigenia in orem, 4–5, 11, 14 Isherwood, Charles: on After Ashley, xii; review of Belleville, 150, 153; on Salesman, 107 isolation, xv, 1–28, 161, 173 Jacobean tragedy, 37; reimagining of, xv James, Henry, 9 Jeffrey, 20–21 Jenkin, Len, 66, 103 Job, xiv–xv Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 53 Jungle Coup, 70, 154 Kazan, Elia, revisions to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 132, 136 Kennedy, Adrienne, 42–46; on Funnyhouse “states of mind”, 43; on her ancestry, 44 King Lear, 45–49; as bleakest Shakespeare play, 29 Kondoleon, Harry, 49–53; combines many theatre modes, 50 Kopit, Arthur, 12 Kushner, Tony, 51 LaBute, Neil, 4, 11, 14 Later Life, 7–10, 69

188

Index

laughter, as important, 18 Lear, 45–49 Lebow, Barbara, 14–17 Le Code Noir, 161 Lee, Young Jean, 45–49 Lewinsky, Monica, 149 The Libation Bearers, 80, 82 life, loss of, xv, 1–28 Lifton, Robert Jay, 112 Limbo Tales, 103 Lindsay-Abaire, David, 18–19 London Gate Theatre, ix Londré, Felicia Hardison, on Streetcar protagonist, 129 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 73–78, 143; morphine addiction in, 81; motif in, 105; romanticizing of the past in, 81 loss: of hope, xv; of life, xv, 1–28; of relationship, 131 Love Diatribe, 51 Ludlam, Charles, 141 Lysistrata, 21 “make myself a new life”, 125 Mamet, David, 103; on “drama based on tragedy”, 168 “Man Suffering”, 59 Marco Polo Sings a Solo, 69 Margo Veil, 66 Margulies, Donald, 7 marketing of plays, 167 Marnich, Melanie, 33–38 McLaughlin, Ellen, 14; adaptation of Electra, 40 Melville, Herman, 103 memory, kinds of, 76 The Merchant of Venice, 161 metaphorical play, 72 Middleton, Thomas, 33–38 Miller, Arthur, 97–120, 157; definition of tragic hero, 112; on Russian production of View, 109; and Sons not realistic, 101; on tragedy and death, 98; on the tragic character, 98 Miller, Henry, 172–173 misjudgment, 170 “Mister Nothin’”, 70 A Moon for the Misbegotten, 86–91 Moorton, Richard F., Jr., 86

Morocco, 69 Mortimer, John, definition of farce, 160 Mourning Becomes Electra, 73, 86 movement and immobility, opposition of, 122 A Movie Start Has to Star in Black and White, 45 Murphy, Brenda, 174 My Head Was a Sledgehammer, 66 mythic state and reality, 123 My Uncle Sam, 103 naturalistic play, 25, 50, 72; about addiction, 78; detailed setting, 101 “The Nature of Tragedy”, 100 Nelson, Richard, 70, 154 New Jersey Theatre Alliance, 61 “new life”, 69 “new start”, 24, 42, 69 “new step”, 69 New York Theatre Workshop, 153 New York Times, “American epic tragedy”, xi ʼnight, Mother, 41–42, 42, 69, 131 Nobody, 80, 154 Nocturne, 58–61 non-naturalistic, 26 Norman, Marsha, 41–42, 131 Northeast Local, 30 nothing, 41, 49, 57, 58; is approach to tragedy, 62 “nothing”, 29, 30; all life begins in, 113; describes the play’s world, 113 nothing going on, 65 Odets, Clifford, 168 Oedipus, as pharmakos, 10 Old Man, 59 Old South traditions, 124, 125 Oleanna, 170–172 The One-Armed Man, 153–154, 161 O’Neill, Eugene, 71–73; pattern of tragedy in plays, 78 On the Waterfront, 70 opposition, 29; in After Ashley, xi, xii, xiii; allusion of, 128; of backgrounds, 77; of characters, 43; compacting the, 38; of descriptions of characters, 44; of despair and change, 39; between

Index experience and understanding, 12; framework of, 52; between illusion and reality, 128; as immobility and change, 29; of immobility and movement, 122; of movement and immobility, 122; pattern of, 42; refined, 29, 30; in state of mind, 43; in suspension, 30, 38; between truth and mendacity, 134, 137 Oresteia trilogy, 80, 86, 168 The Orphans’ Home Cycle, 29, 122 Orpheum Theatre, 170 Orr, John: on Suddenly Last Summer, 140; on View from the Bridge, 107; on Williams’ second major tragic work, 140 Othello, 161 Page, Priscilla, afterword to Salt, 31 Parker, Brian, on Glass Menagerie, 125 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 61–66 past, romanticizing of the, 84; in Ile, 81; in Long Day’s Journey, 81 past is present, 88 Pereira, Kim, on Fences, 55 The Perfect Party, 71, 148 peripeteia, 169, 171 pharmakos, 10 Philadelphia, Here I Come, 69 philosophical naturalism, 25, 26 Picasso, 123 Poet of Job, xiii poetry: creating, 124; mythic state of, 125 “Polack”, 126 “Pop, I’m nothing!”, 106 Porter, Laurin R., on Iceman, 86 prison of disconnected self, 27 production of play: obstacles to, 167 Profiles in Justice, xi Public Theater, 145, 156 Rabbit Hole, 18–19, 61, 174 Raeburn, David, 6 A Raisin in the Sun, 56–58 Raleigh, John Henry, on memory, 76 Rapp, Adam, 58–61, 172–174 realistic play, 50; detailed setting, 101 reality and mythic state, 123 recognition, 169, 171 Red Light Winter, 172–174

189

re-enactment (imitation), xiii; benefit derived from, xiii reimagining, of tragedy, xv rejection, 51 resonance, 132; tragic, 135 Restoration comedy, 162 Revelers, 65 reversal, 169, 171 rhetorical devices, ix Rich, Frank, on Later Life, 7 Rich and Famous, 71 The Ride down Mount Morgan, 116–119, 157 Ridiculous Theatrical Company, 141 Robinson, Marc, on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 136 Rogers, J. T., 162 Rowley, William, 33–38 RPM Players, 79 Rudnick, Paul, 20–21; and laughter in tragedy, 20 The Runner Stumbles, 21–24, 42, 69 sacrifice, in Christian religion, 140 “sacrifice” as term, 164 salesmen, 103 Salt, 30–33, 38; and tragic resonance, 132 sanctuary, 127; physical/spiritual, 127 scapegoat, 10 scenarios, worst-case and best-case, 149 scenes: interspersing of, 158; reversal of, 147 Schulberg, Budd, 70 self: creation of a, 113; disconnected, 27; divided, 55; essential, 112, 117, 119; fragmented, 43; integrated, unitary, 43; not having a, 70; reinvention of, 69; sequential, 112; true, 112 self, creation of a new, 24, 42–67, 58, 97–98, 108, 110, 111; success or failure of, 69–71 self-determination, 69 self-image, 23 self-invention, celebrity status as goal, xi Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise, 52 “sentimentality”, 18 Sesame Street, 49 set design: of Blood Play, 146; of Glass Menagerie, 124

190

Index

Sewall, Richard B.: on Job, xiv; on suffering, xiii Shakespeare, William, 161; King Lear, 45–49 A Shayna Maidel, 14–17, 20 Sheaffer, Louis, on O’Neill’s plays, 73 Signature Theatre Company, 45 Simon, John, on The Goat, 11, 13 Simon, Neil, 6–7 Soloski, Alexi, review of 13P collective, 147 Sophocles, 1, 6, 10, 40 sound effects, of Blood Play, 146 Southern belle, 121, 128, 132 staging, as tableau, 160 “starting all over”, 42, 69 Steiner, George, 29 Stitt, Milan, 21–24 Stone Cold Dead Serious, 172 Strauss, Richard, 128 A Streetcar Named Desire, 125–130, 143; protagonist in, 12 structure, 26; changing perspectives of, 40 struggle, 90 Suddenly Last Summer, 137–141, 146 suffering, xv, 24, 29–67, 45–49, 53, 58, 161; as central in tragedy, xiii, xiv; to yield knowledge, xiv “suffering” as term, 163 suicide: in All My Sons, 99, 100; in And the Soul Shall Dance, 2.34 5.28; in Antigone, 4; in Belleville, 152; in Christmas on Mars, 51; in Death of a Salesman, 105, 107, 110; in Funnyhouse of a Negro, 46; in Galas , 141; in Glass Menagerie, 130; in Iceman Cometh , 85–86, 100; in Incident at Vichy, 115; in Long Day’s Journey into Night, 75; in ʼnight, Mother, 2.35 2.37-2.39 2.40 5.28; in Red Light Winter, 172, 174; in Ride down Mount Morgan, 116; in Salt, 2.13; in Streetcar Named Desire, 128; in Wild Palms, 59–60 surrealistic play, 50 Sweet Bird of Youth, 141–143, 154 Sweet Violence, ix, 10 “swine” speech, 130

tableau, staging as, 160 Tallgrass Gothic, 33–38 Tally, Ted, 70 Theatre Development Fund publication (TDF), 167 “The Things We Do for Power”, 162 Thureen, Paul, 145 Tiffany, John, 124 ʼTis Pity She’s a Whore, 30–33 Topdog/Underdog, 61–66, 69 Torch Song Trilogy, 70 A Touch of the Poet, 92–96, 119 tragedy: affects another person, 131; American, 71, 143; Aristotelian, 56, 149, 162, 169–172; choice as a defining element, 169; contemporary American, 145–165; death is essential to, 116; debate on, xii; in dramatic vs. performance art, 131; endless, 165; ends badly, 29; family, 169; as irreparable, 29; “is comedy plus time”, 162; is moribund, 149; Jacobean, 37; satire on, xii; as term, 162; vitality and relevance of, ix–xv, 145–165, 167–174 Tragedy: A Tragedy, ix–x, 149, 174 “Tragedy and the Common Man”, 97, 101 tragedy, definition of: by Jennifer Wallace, 12; by Miguel de Unamuno, 12 “tragedy disguised as a comedy”, 147 tragedy in contemporary American theatre: existence of, xv; four categories of, xv tragic figure/hero, 130, 142; in Belleville, 152; in Glass Menagerie, 130, 131; in Nocturne, 130; requirement for, 119–120 The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, 25–28, 41 Tropic of Cancer, 172 “true self”, 112 truth and mendacity, opposition between, 134, 137 Twain, Mark, 103 twins, 30–33 Two River Theater Company, 61 Tyrone, Mary, on “true self”, 112 Unamuno, Miguel de, and definition of tragedy, 12 Under the Radar festival, 145; brochure of, 146

Index A View from the Bridge, 107–111, 122; and tragic resonance, 132 Vincentelli, Elisabeth: on A Free Man of Color, 159; review of The One-Armed Man, 153 Wallace, Jennifer, ix; definition of tragedy, 12; on Fences as “arguably tragic”, 56; and King Lear, 29 Wallace, Naomi, 25–28, 41; interview with, 27; on “unchanged”, 29 Wasserstein, Wendy, 71 white mother/black father, 44 The Wild Palms, 59

191

Williams, Raymond, 2; tragedy through the hero, 29 Williams, Tennessee, 121–143, 154; revivals of, 146; shun “pat conclusions”, 134; tragedy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 132 Wilson, August, 53–56 Wolfe, George C., 160 Wooster Group, 79 Yamauchi, Wakako, 39–41 Zola, Emile, naturalism of, 25