Read drama.pdf text version
32 Reading a Play
In many parts of the country, students rarely if ever see plays other than school or other amateur productions, and the instructor may encounter some resistance to the whole idea of studying drama. But all students are steeped in film and television drama, and it may be useful to point out that such drama begins with playscripts. One might reason somewhat like this. Movies and television, it's true, give plays hard competition in our society, and a camera does have advantages. In moments, film can present whole panoramas and can show details in close-up that theaters (with their cumbersome sets and machinery) cannot duplicate. Movies used to be called "photoplays," but the name implies an unnecessary limitation, for there is no point in confining the camera to recording the contents of a picture-frame stage. But a play--whether staged in a proscenium theater or in a parking lot--has its own distinct advantages. It is a medium that makes possible things a camera cannot do. Unlike movies and television, a play gives us living actors, and it involves living audiences who supply it with their presences (and who can move one another to laughter or to tears). Compared, say, to the laughter of live spectators at a comedy, the "canned" laughter often dubbed into television programs is a weak attempt to persuade television viewers that they are not alone.
A PLAY IN ITS ELEMENTS
Susan Glaspell TRIFLES, page 1199
The recent comeback of Trifles may be due, we think, not only to Glaspell's pioneering feminist views but also to its being such a gripping, tightly structured play. Whether or not you have much time to spend on the elements of a play, we think you will find Trifles worth teaching; students respond to it. Topic for writing or discussion: What common theme or themes do you find in both Trifles and Antigonê? (A conflict between the law and a woman's personal duty.) The Provincetown Players, who performed in a theater on an abandoned wharf, had a fertile summer in 1916. Besides Trifles, with Glaspell herself playing Mrs. Hale, their season included the first Eugene O'Neill play to be produced, Bound East for Cardiff. Glaspell has said that she derived the plot of Trifles from a murder case she had investigated as a reporter in Des Moines. Ruth E. Zehfuss of DeKalb College has pointed out a meaningful way to compare Trifles with another classic drama in this book: The key idea in Trifles, the conflict between outer or legal authority and inner or moral law, was . . . more than simply a feminist statement. The universality of the question Glaspell poses can be compared to Sophocles' Antigonê. In each play, the question is whether individuals have a right to follow their own moral beliefs when their beliefs conflict with the law of the state. ("The Law and the Ladies in Trifles," Teaching English in the Two-Year College [Feb. 1992], 4244).
(text pages) 11991224 To compare the themes of Trifles and Antigonê, and how the characters of the two plays embody them, might be a rewarding topic either for class discussion or for a term paper. (See also the entry on Antigonê in this manual, on page 366, for more ways to set the two plays side by side.)
TRAGEDY AND COMEDY John Millington Synge RIDERS TO THE SEA, page 1215
The narrative of Synge's play is gaunt in its simplicity. At the start, old Maurya has already lost six men of her family to the sea: her husband, father-in-law, and four sons. In the course of the play, suspicions are confirmed: a man reported drowned is indeed Michael, son number five. At the end, Maurya has lost Bartley, her sixth and last son, and the sea can do no more. If you use the play to illustrate the elements of drama, you might point out the exposition: the early conversations of the girls and their mother, informing us that Michael is missing, feared drowned, and that Maurya dreads Bartley's going on a journey from which he will never return. While the major dramatic question seems plain--Will Bartley survive?--there is also a minor question: Was the missing Michael the man drowned in Donnegal? From the beginning we are given to suspect that he was, and this question is definitively answered in mid-play. The crisis occurs when Cathleen gives her mother the bundle and confirms that Michael's body has been found. The climax follows almost immediately--two blasts of emotion in a row!--with the bringing in of the dead Bartley. The resolution, we would say, is Maurya's rise to nobility. And the theme? That the sea is merciless, or perhaps more accurately (since after all, the islanders derive their living from the sea), the sea indifferently gives and takes away. Or it might be argued that Maurya sums up the theme in her memorable closing line. Does the play have a protagonist? Some may prefer to see Maurya instead as a central character. She is not a protagonist in the sense that she causes things to happen--she can't even prevent Bartley's journey--unless we regard what happens in this play as mainly what happens inside Maurya herself: her attaining a generous compassion for all humankind. Riders to the Sea does not fit the mold of classic Greek tragedy, as Aristotle defined it, for its central character is a peasant, not a person of high estate, and she does not bring about her own downfall. Still, unquestionably the play has the tragic spirit. Like Oedipus the King and Antigonê, it shows the central character facing and accepting the inscrutable workings of the universe, finally rising to serene dignity. Maurya may begin as quarrelsome and complaining, but in the end she becomes as noble as a queen. Beholding these events, hearing the play's wonderful language, the spectator is stirred, perhaps overwhelmed, but far from depressed. And Synge's play is undoubtedly (as Aristotle would expect of a tragedy) serious, complete in itself, of a certain magnitude, and written in a language embellished with artistry. It even has a chorus: the band of keening old women. But you probably won't want to wrestle with how it is similar or dissimilar to a Greek tragedy until your students have read Sophocles. Then, Synge's play will surely reward another glance. The world of this play--intense, stark, informed with the language of poetry--
(text pages) 12151224 seems to turn into a symbol virtually every ordinary object it contains. Even the rope that hangs from a nail hints of death (death by hanging). On one level, Cathleen's halting her spinning wheel merely indicates her sudden fear that Michael has drowned. On another level, her spinning, a routine of daily life, is (like that life itself) suddenly interrupted and shattered by death, or the fear of it. On still another level, a spinning wheel is associated with the famous three mythological Fates, who spin, measure, and cut off the thread of life. In abruptly ceasing to spin, perhaps, Cathleen symbolically breaks Michael's thread. Definite in its hints, the sea-wind that blows open the door, like the sea itself, is hostile, powerful, and irresistible. Other suggestive objects invite symbol-hunting: the drowned man's clothes, for instance, tied into a sea-soaked bundle with a tight, unopenable black knot--like a terrible, impenetrable secret to be hidden from the old mother. Then, too, there's the bread that Maurya fails to convey to Bartley before his death: life-sustaining food of no use to a dead man, an undelivered good like the blessing that the old mother fails to impart. What of the fine white coffin-boards that ironically cannot be held together for lack of nails? Perhaps Maurya's forgetting them suggests her unconscious wish not to coffin another son. Boards are harbingers of death, for Bartley's body arrives on a plank. Suggestive, too, are the red mare that Bartley rides--red, the color of blood?--and the gray pony that knocks the young man into the sea, the very steed on which Maurya in her vision or waking dream saw the dead Michael ride. Maurya herself, it seems, has beheld riders to the sea--like Egyptians about to be drowned by the wrath of God. (For this Biblical allusion, see in the text the footnote on the title of the play.) A more obvious symbol is the empty, inverted cup that Maurya places on the table with a gesture of finality, as though to signify that all is gone, that the last drop of life (or of suffering) has been drained. Maurya's vision of her two sons presages the play's resolution. Bartley, to be sure, might not have been a vision--actually, he may have been riding that red mare, and perhaps Maurya did try (and fail) to speak with him. When he passes her and she is unable to utter a sound and fails to give him the bread and her blessing, his doom is sealed. The apparition of Michael riding that fateful gray pony seems a clear foreshadowing--as perhaps Cathleen knows when she cries, "It's destroyed we are from this day." Bartley's death is foreshadowed from early in the play when Maurya hopes the priest will stop him from going on his errand. Presumably the young priest isn't about to stop Bartley from taking a reasonable risk and making a needed horse sale. But the priest turns out to be a bad prophet, quite mistaken in his confidence that the Lord would not claim an old woman's last remaining son. Maurya never believed the priest's assurances: "It's little the like of him knows of the sea." (We get the impression that the characters in this play are faithful Christians living in an inscrutably pagan universe, or else one run by some cruel Manichean sub-deity.) No one but Maurya strongly feels that Bartley shouldn't take the horses to the Galway fair. The young assume that life must go on, for as Cathleen declares, "It's the life of a young man to be going on the sea." But the old mother has seen enough men claimed by the sea to fear that it is ready to claim one more. Although Maurya has suffered the trauma of having her worst fears confirmed within minutes--learning of the death of one son and beholding the body of another--and although the sea has robbed her of a husband and six sons, she is not "broken," as Cathleen thinks, but is strong and rises to tragic serenity. In her moving speeches at the play's end, she goes beyond suffering to accept the nature of life and to take a long view of the mortality of all humankind. For discussion: James Joyce's remark that the play suffers in that disaster is worked by a pony, not by the sea. (This seems to us a quibble: the pony may kick Bartley into the sea, but the sea conveys him out to the rocks and finishes him off.)
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David Ives SURE THING, page 1227
In 1993 I (DG) attended the original off-Broadway production of David Ives's six one-act comedies, All in the Timing. By the end of the evening I knew that one of these little comic gems would have to go into the next edition of Literature. When All in the Timing opened, Ives was a relative unknown in American theater. Soon he became a minor celebrity. A shy but witty man, Ives wore his newfound fame with comic nonchalance. When New York magazine listed him as one of the "100 Smartest New Yorkers," Ives told a reporter from the Columbia University Record that he didn't approve. "Lists," he explained, "are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small." Audiences of all kinds respond to Ives's work. All in the Timing has gradually become one of the most widely produced contemporary plays in America. Sure Thing demonstrates how quickly innovative theatrical technique is incorporated into mainstream drama. Ives bases his play in equal parts on modernist experimental theater and popular comedy--half Luigi Pirandello, one might say, and half Groucho Marx. One might add further that Ives uses the modernist techniques of dramatic distancing, stylization, and fragmentation to tell the most traditional story possible--a young man and woman meeting to fall in love. (Youthful romance has been a central subject of comedy since Menander and Plautus.) The resulting work is both surprising and familiar. The best new art often works exactly as Ives's Sure Thing does by creating a meaningful conversation between the ancient and the new. If the fragmentary technique of Sure Thing isn't just a clever theatrical gimmick, what meaningful conversations does it open up? By dramatizing every moment of mutual attraction and rejection, Ives's disjointed narrative structure provides a candid and detailed anatomy of modern romance. It also shows how individuals both speak and listen in social code. Sure Thing is as much about language as romance. Ives embodies the mutual exploration of these two characters entirely in language. There is no physical comedy in the play. The only non-verbal element is the bell that punctuates the action to announce that one of the characters has lost interest in the other. (The bell editorializes only once with multiple rings after Betty begins to talk about astrological signs, but this auditory gag is merely an intensification of its normal role.) Perhaps the most interesting idea found in Sure Thing is the notion that human personalities are so changeable that the timing of an experience is critical to its proper reception. (And, of course, in no mode of human communication is timing more important than in comedy.) When Betty says that she can't believe she has waited so long to read Faulkner, she initiates a crucial exchange that comments on both the theme and style of the play: BILL. You never know. You might not have liked him before. BETTY. That's true. BILL. You might not have been ready for him. You have to hit these things at the right moment or it's not good. BETTY. That's happened to me. BILL. It's all in the timing. Bill's final phrase became the title of Ives's award-winning night of comedies as well as the title for his collection of fourteen one-act plays, All in the Timing (New York: Vintage, 1995). One suspects it wasn't just the theatrical pun that made the phrase so attractive but also the aesthetic it suggests.
(text pages) 12271242 Instructors should remember how easy it is to produce Sure Thing in the classroom. All one needs is two actors, two chairs and a bell (or whistle or buzzer). The play takes less than fifteen minutes to perform. Students can also be asked to write and perform additional scenes of their own. Students interested in writing on Ives should be directed to the other plays in All in the Timing. It contains two short plays that provide interesting parallels to Sure Thing. This first is Words, Words, Words, which presents three monkeys (named Milton, Swift, and Kafka) who have been placed in a laboratory at Columbia University with three typewriters to produce the text of Hamlet. The second play is The Universal Language in which a young woman takes an introductory lesson in a phony universal language (a parody of Esperanto) that proves to be an educational scam. Both of these plays are not only hilarious, but they offer an insightful critique of language. Ives's preface to All in the Timing is in itself a brilliant comic performance.
Garrison Keillor PRODIGAL SON, page 1237
Garrison Keillor's amusing revision of the Gospel parable illustrates the basic elements of comedy in a way that many students will find especially engaging. Its form, the short satiric sketch, is one that will be familiar to them from television. The short length and simple structure of Keillor's sketch should make it easy to examine, while its gently satiric relation to the original parable (found on page 207) should reward repeated readings.
1. Divide this play into elements. How much of the play is exposition? Who is the protagonist? What is the climax of the play, the moment when the tension is at its height? It may be illuminating to students that even a short comic sketch like this one displays the traditional elements of dramatic structure. The exposition of the play is in the opening, where the principal characters and their motivations are presented--the affectionate and indulgent Dad, the hard-working and critical Dwight, and prodigal, easygoing Wally. The protagonist is Wally, who sets the plot in motion with his request to "get away for a while" to "get his head straight." The climax of the play is a little harder to pinpoint because of Keillor's deliberately understated humor. He gets laughs by underplaying the big moments. Keillor's narrative climax is the same as the original parable's--the moment when the prodigal son, having squandered his money, hits bottom and decides to return to his father. Wally is not one to take on much tension, so his climactic moment is comically brief. 2. Comedy usually portrays human failings. What weaknesses does Wally have? Do Dad and Dwight also have weaknesses? Wally is quite likable, but not even his doting Dad would declare him weakness-free. Among his more conspicuous failings are laziness, gullibility, drunkenness, and prodigality. Your students can surely uncover more. Dad and Dwight also have their failings. If the father of the original parable was wisely compassionate, Keillor's Dad is fatuously indulgent to prodigal Wally but takes his hard-working son for granted. Whatever his faults, Dwight is surely the sanest person in the sketch. His faults are modest compared to Wally's. He cares too much about business and has a tendency toward self-pity, though it is hard to blame Dwight for feeling sorry for himself at the play's conclusion. 3. Does Keillor change any important elements of the plot from the original parable? ("The Parable of the Prodigal Son" is found on page 207.) If so, what part or parts of the
(text pages) 12371244 plot does he alter? While Keillor contemporizes the setting of the parable, he changes surprisingly few plot elements. His main alteration is to achieve comic effects by denying the characters any spiritual growth. Wally does not learn anything from his dissipation; he just spends Dad's money and returns home to mooch some more. Dad lacks the parental wisdom of the original father in the parable. The most interesting figure in the sketch is Dwight. He closely resembles the older brother of the original Gospel story. Keillor adds new elements to the plot, however, by introducing satiric versions of characters from other parables--the Stewards, Harry Shepherd and his lost sheep, the wise and foolish virgins, and the pushy Samaritans. Keillor also illustrates the prodigal son's dissipation, which the original parable treats tersely. Keillor's most important change is to end the play on the older brother's complaints rather than the father's attempt at reconciliation. In the original parable, we might assume that the older brother learns to share his father's compassion, but in Keillor's retelling, we have no illusions about Dwight's real feelings. He is seething with the moral indignation only a virtuous big brother can feel. 4. How does Keillor turn this famous parable into a comedy? What elements of setting, characterization, or tone does he shift to get his comic effects? There is no doubt that Keillor makes the parable into a comedy--specifically into a farce, a comic form that revels in low humor and ridiculous situations and characters. It may be worth remembering that farce originated as comic interludes in liturgical plays, and so the genre bears a traditional relation to sacred stories, just like Keillor's sketch. Keillor achieves his comic effects by updating the setting, making the characters mix biblical and contemporary language (especially the lingo of self-help books), and by revising the story into purely secular terms. How many comic allusions to the Bible can your students spot? 5. Is Keillor's parody disrespectful of the original parable, or does he explore the same theme in a different way? Is it possible for a comedy to pursue the same themes as a more earnest work? Keillor's version is extremely respectful to the original parable. There should be nothing in his sketch to offend the most devout student. He explores the same themes as the original parable, but, being a comic writer, he is less hopeful of humanity's moral improvement. The characters suffer more or less the same tribulations as in the original story, but they achieve no discernible spiritual growth. 6. How can this play be considered a comedy if Dwight is so unhappy at the end? Dwight's final, peevish monologue is really just a tantrum. He is not really going to live in the pigpen. Nor is it likely that Wally will get his big brother's room. Dwight indulges in exaggerated self-pity. While the audience will probably sympathize with his emotions, they will also find his angry monologue funny. Comedies are full of unhappy people-- usually much less happy than Dwight. Think of what happens to the characters in a typical slapstick comedy. The purpose of comedy is not to make its characters happy, but to amuse the audience by ridiculing human failings. Dwight's final monologue comically portrays the older brother's all-too-human fallibilities.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Susan Glaspell on Drama CREATING TRIFLES, page 1243
Over the past quarter century Susan Glaspell has slowly regained her rightful position as an important innovator in modern American drama. Trifles is now securely in the twentieth century canon, but the rest of Glaspell's work remains too little known; and despite
(text pages) 12431244 some fine recent work, her critical coverage is still incommensurate with her achievement. (Glaspell wrote thirteen plays, ten novels, and nearly fifty short stories.) There is also not yet a comprehensive, full-length modern biography. Much important scholarship needs to be done. Given the lack of critical and biographical commentary, it is puzzling that Glaspell's 1927 autobiography, The Road to the Temple, is not better known. The excerpt from her autobiography in the "Writer's Perspective" has never appeared in any textbook before (though surely some other enterprising editor will soon lift it--with our compliments). In this section of The Road to the Temple, Glaspell provides a first-hand account of two important events in the history of American drama--the creation of the Provincetown Players and the unusual genesis of her first play, Trifles, in 1916. As her autobiography makes abundantly clear, Glaspell and George Cram "Jig" Cook's marriage was deeply fulfilling for both partners. It is a gentle irony that Glaspell's feminist play was written at the prompting of her supportive husband. (He also helped create the Provincetown Players to spur her talent.) American literature has had few nicer moments than this one. The Road to the Temple (New York: Stokes, 1927) is now long out of print. It took me (DG) several months to search out a copy by canvassing major dealers in modern literature, but most large university libraries will have a copy. Glaspell's style is very casual, but the book is fun to read. In addition to her own life story, she provides interesting accounts of American theatrical and bohemian life in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Cambridge's edition of Susan Glaspell's Plays (1987), edited by C. W. E. Bigsby, reprints four one-act plays and has excellent scholarly apparatus and a fine introduction. It is indispensable for students of this pioneering playwright.
33 The Theater of Sophocles
Sophocles OEDIPUS THE KING, page 1254
One problem in teaching this masterpiece is that students often want to see Oedipus as a pitiable fool, helplessly crushed by the gods, thus stripping him of heroism and tragic dignity. (A classic bepiddlement of the play once turned up on a freshman paper: "At the end, Oedipus goes off blinded into exile, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.") It can be argued that Oedipus showed himself to be no fool in solving the riddle of the Sphinx or in deciding to leave Corinth; that no god forced him to kill Laïos or to marry Iocastê. Another problem in teaching this play is that some students want to make Oedipus into an Everyman, an abstract figure representing all humanity. But Oedipus's circumstances are, to say the least, novel and individual. "Oedipus is not `man,' but Oedipus," as S. M. Adams argues in Sophocles the Playwright (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1957). On the other hand, Freud's reading of the play does suggest that Oedipus is Everyman--or, better, that every man is Oedipus and like Oedipus wishes to kill his father and marry his mother. A passage from Freud's celebrated remarks about the play is given on page 1948. Despite Freud's views, which usually fascinate students, critical consensus appears to be that Oedipus himself did not have an Oedipus complex. Sophocles does not portray Oedipus and Iocastê as impassioned lovers; their marriage was (as Philip Wheelwright says) "a matter of civic duty: having rid the Thebans of the baleful Sphinx by answering her riddle correctly, he received the throne of Thebes and the widowed queen as his due reward" (The Burning Fountain [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954]). Wheelwright also notes, incidentally, that the title Oedipus Tyrannus might be translated more accurately as "Oedipus the Usurper"--a usurper being (to the Greeks) anyone who gains a throne by means other than by blood succession. Actually, of course, Oedipus had a hereditary right to the throne. (Another interpretation of the play sees Laïos and Iocastê as having incurred the original guilt: by leaving a royal prince to die in the wilderness, they defied natural order and the will of the gods.) For the nonspecialist, a convenient gathering of views will be found in Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. Luci Berkowitz and Theodore F. Brunner (New York: Norton, 1970). Along with a prose translation of the play by the editors, the book includes the classic comments by Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Freud, and discussions by recent critics and psychologists. Seth Bernardete offers a detailed, passage-by-passage commentary in Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Woodard (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1966). Francis Fergusson has pointed out that the play may be read (on one level) as a murder mystery: "Oedipus takes the role of District Attorney; and when he at last convicts himself, we have a twist, a coup de théâtre, of unparalleled excitement." But Fergusson distrusts any reading so literal, and questions attempts to make the play entirely coherent and rational. Sophocles "preserves the ultimate mystery by focusing upon [Oedipus] at a level beneath, or prior to any rationalization whatever" (The Idea of a Theatre [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949]). Refreshing, after you read many myth critics, is A. J. A. Waldock's Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1951; reprinted in part by Berkowitz and Brunner). According to Waldock, the play is sheer entertainment, a spec-
(text pages) 12541295 tacular piece of shock, containing no message. "There is no meaning in the Oedipus Tyrannus. There is merely the terror of coincidence, and then, at the end of it all, our impression of man's power to suffer, and of his greatness because of this power." Pointing out how little we know of Sophocles's religion, Waldock finds the dramatist's beliefs "meagre in number and depressingly commonplace." Although the religious assumptions of the play may not be surprising to Waldock, students may want to have them stated. A good summing-up is that of E. R. Dodds, who maintains that Sophocles did not always believe that the gods are in any human sense "just"; but that he did always believe that the gods exist and that man should revere them ("On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex," Greece and Rome [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966] Vol. 13). "Possibly the best service the critic can render the Oedipus Rex," says Waldock, "is to leave it alone." If, however, other criticism can help, there are especially valuable discussions in H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1961), and Poiesis (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966); Richmond Lattimore, The Poetry of Greek Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1958); and Patrick Mullahy, Oedipus, Myth and Complex (New York: Grove, 1948). In the "Suggestions for Writing" at the end of the chapter (page 1300, there is one especially challenging topic (number 3): to compare translations of the play. For any student willing to pick up the challenge, we think this topic might produce a great term paper. The differences between versions, of course, are considerable. Sheppard's rendition, or Kitto's, is more nearly literal than that of Fitts and Fitzgerald and much more so than that of Berg and Clay. In the latter team's version of 1978, the persons of the tragedy all speak like formally open lyrics in current little magazines. Lots of monosyllables. Frequent pauses. Understatement. Lush imagery. Berg and Clay perform this service brilliantly, and it might be argued: why shouldn't each generation remake the classics in its own tongue? Still impressive is the film Oedipus Rex (1957), directed by Tyrone Guthrie, a record of a performance given in Stratford, Canada. Although the theater of the play is more Stratfordian than Athenian, the actors wear splendid masks. The text is the Yeats version. The film (88 minutes long, 16 mm, in color) may be bought or rented from Contemporary/McGraw-Hill Films, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, or from their regional distributors. In July 1984, the Greek National Theater presented a much-discussed Oedipus Rex at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Bernard Knox offers an admiring account of it in Grand Street for Winter 1985. The director, Minos Volankis, staged the play on a "circular, dark brown plate, tilted toward the audience" and etched with a labyrinth pattern. In Volankis's version, Oedipus and Iocastê cannot see the pattern and ignore it as they move about the stage, but the chorus and Teiresias are aware of the labyrinth and respectfully trace its curves in their movements. Oedipus is a clean-shaven youth, the only young person in the play--"caught in a web spun by his elders." In a useful recent article on teaching Oedipus, W. A. Senior of Broward Community College suggests ways to present the play as meaningful to freshmen who wonder how anything so ancient and esoteric as classical drama can help them in their lives today and advance their pursuit of a C.P.A. degree. His approach is to demythify the character of Oedipus, stressing that the protagonist is no god or superman, but a confused, deceived human being at the center of a web of family relationships (to put it mildly) and political responsibilities. Like a business executive or professional today, Oedipus has to interrogate others, determine facts, and overcome his natural reluctance to face painful realities. To help students come to terms with the central character, Senior has used specific writing assignments. "I have them compose a letter to Oedipus," he reports, "individually
(text pages) 12541299 or at times in groups, at the height of the action in the third act to advise him on what to do or to explain to him what he has done wrong so far. In a related essay taking a page from Antigonê and its theme of public versus private good, which is foreshadowed in Oedipus Rex, I ask them to write an editorial on Oedipus as politician; each student must adopt a position and defend it." ("Teaching Oedipus: The Hero and Multiplicity," Teaching English in the Two-Year College [Dec. 1992], 27479.)
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Aristotle on Drama DEFINING TRAGEDY, page 1297
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. According to Aristotle, what sort of man is the most satisfactory subject for a tragedy? A man neither entirely virtuous nor completely vicious: "a man of great reputation and great prosperity" who comes to grief because of some great error. 2. Try this description of a man on the character of Oedipus. How well does it fit? Like a tailor-made sweater. Oedipus may be Aristotle's finest illustration of a tragic hero of middling virtue. Far from perfect, Oedipus is impulsive and imperious. 3. Consider the advice that any extravagant incidents should be kept outside a tragedy. In Oedipus the King, what "extravagant" events in the story are not shown on stage? The most fantastic is probably the meeting of Oedipus with the Sphinx: we are merely told, in the closing speech of the Chorus, that Oedipus "knew the famous riddle."
34 The Theater of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare THE TRAGEDY OF OTHELLO, page 1303
For commentary on the play, some outstanding sources of insight still include A. C. Bradley's discussion in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; rpt. ed. [New York: St. Martin's, 1965]); and Harley Granville-Barker, "Preface to Othello," in Prefaces to Shakespeare, II (Princeton UP, 1947), also available separately from the same publisher (1958). See also Leo Kirschbaum, "The Modern Othello," Journal of English Literary History 2 (1944), 23396; and Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of "Othello" (Berkeley: U of California P, 1961). A convenient gathering of short studies will be found in A Casebook on Othello, ed. Leonard Dean (New York: Crowell, 1961). For a fresh reading of the play, see Michael Black, who in The Literature of Fidelity (London: Chatto, 1975) argues that the familiar view of Othello as a noble figure manipulated by the evil Iago is wrong and sentimental. According to Black, we see ourselves and our destructive impulses mirrored in both characters; hence, we are disturbed. Lynda E. Boose has closely read the confrontation scene between Othello and Brabantio, the father of Desdemona, in front of the Duke (I, iii), and has found in it an ironic parody of the traditional giving away of the bride at a marriage ceremony. Instead of presenting his daughter to Othello as a gift, the thwarted Brabantio practically hurls her across the stage at the Moor. (The scene resembles Lear's casting away of Cordelia in King Lear, I, i.) In most of Shakespeare's plays, the father of the bride wants to retain and possess his daughter. Prevented by law and custom from doing so, he does the next best thing: tries to choose her husband, usually insisting on someone she does not desire. But Shakespeare, in both comedy and tragedy, always stages the old man's defeat ("The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," PMLA 97 [May 1982]: 32547). Still another opinion that students might care to discuss: "No actress could credibly play the role of Desdemona if the character's name were changed to, say, Sally" (Frank Trippett, "The Game of the Name," Time, 14 Aug. 1978). General question 3: "How essential to the play is the fact that Othello is a black man, a Moor, and not a native of Venice?" That Othello is an outsider, a stranger unfamiliar with the ways of the Venetians, makes it easier for Iago to stir up Othello's own selfdoubts; and so the fact seems essential to the plot. (See especially III, iii, 21523, 24447, 27484.) Venice in the Renaissance had no commerce with black Africa but Shakespeare's many references to Othello's blackness (and Roderigo's mention of the Moor's "thick lips," I, i, 68) have suggested to some interpreters that Othello could even be a coastal African from below the Senegal. On the modern stage, Othello has been memorably played by African-American actor Paul Robeson and by Laurence Olivier, who carefully studied African-American speech and body language for his performance at the Old Vic (and in the movie version). A critic wrote of Olivier's interpretation: He came on smelling a rose, laughing softly with a private delight; barefooted, ankleted, black. . . . He sauntered downstage, with a loose, bare-heeled roll of the but tocks; came to rest feet splayed apart, hips lounging outward. . . . The hands hung big and graceful. The whole voice was characterized, the o's and the a's deepened, the consonants thickened with faint, guttural deliberation. "Put up yo' bright swords,
(text pages) 13031401 or de dew will rus' dem": not quite so crude, but in that direction. It could have been caricature, an embarrassment. Instead, after the second performance, a well-known Negro actor rose in the stalls bravoing. For obviously it was done with love; with the main purpose of substituting for the dead grandeur of the Moorish empire one modern audiences could respond to (Ronald Bryden, The New Statesman, I May 1964). For a fascinating study of the play by a white teacher of African-American students at Howard University, see Doris Adler, "The Rhetoric of Black and White in Othello," in Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (Spring 1974): 24857. Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio hold negative and stereotyped views of black Africans which uncomfortably recall modern racial prejudices. In their view, Othello is "lascivious" (I, i, 126), an unnatural mate for a white woman (III, iii, 24549), a practitioner of black magic (I, ii, 7475). Under the influence of Iago's wiles, Othello so doubts himself that he almost comes to accept the stereotype forced on him, to reflect that in marrying him Desdemona has strayed from her own nature (III, iii, 243). Such, of course, is not the truth Shakespeare reveals to us, and the tragedy of Othello stems from a man's tragic inability to recognize good or evil by sight alone. "Eyes cannot see that the black Othello is not the devil," Adler observes, "or that the white and honest Iago is." In answer to general question 4 ("Besides Desdemona and Iago, what other pairs of characters seem to strike balances?"): Alvin Kernan in his introduction to the Signet edition of Othello comments, The true and loyal soldier Cassio balances the false and traitorous soldier Iago. . . . The essential purity of Desdemona stands in contrast to the more "practical" view of chastity held by Emilia, and her view in turn is illuminated by the workaday view of sensuality held by the courtesan Bianca. . . . Iago's success in fooling Othello is but the culmination of a series of such betrayals that includes the duping of Roderigo, Brabantio, and Cassio. The last general question ("Does the downfall of Othello proceed from any flaw in his nature, or is his downfall entirely the work of Iago?") is a classic (or cliché) problem, and perhaps there is no better answer than Coleridge's in his Lectures on Shakspere: Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago--such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed in Iago's honesty as Othello did. We, the audience, know that Iago is a villain from the beginning; but in considering the essence of the Shaksperian Othello, we must perseveringly place ourselves in his situation, and under his circumstances. Then we shall immediately feel the fundamental difference between the solemn agony of the noble Moor, and the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes. . . . Othello had no life but in Desdemona: the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart; and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute unsuspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which do we pity the most? On the suggestion for writing: Thomas Rymer's famous objections to the play will not be easy to refute. At least, no less a critic than T. S. Eliot once declared that he had never seen Rymer's points cogently refuted. Perhaps students will enjoy siding with the attack or coming to the play's defense. Was the Othello-Desdemona match a wedding of April and September? R. S. Gwynn of Lamar University writes: "Has anyone ever mentioned the age difference between Othello and Desdemona? Othello speaks of his arms as `now some nine moons wasted.' Assuming that this metaphor means that his life is almost 9/12 spent, he would
(text pages) 13031402 be over 50! Now if a Venetian girl would have normally married in her teens (think of the film version of Romeo and Juliet), that would make about 30 years' difference between him and his bride." This gulf, Othello's radically different culture, his outraged father-inlaw, and Iago's sly insinuations, all throw tall obstacles before the marriage. "If we are to read the play that Shakespeare wrote," maintains Bruce E. Miller, "we must acknowledge that Othello as well as Iago commits great evil." In Teaching the Art of Literature (Urbana: NCTE, 1980), Miller takes Othello for his illustration of teaching drama and stresses that Othello went wrong by yielding to his gross impulses. In demonstrating why the play is a classic example of tragedy, Miller takes advantage of students' previously having read Willa Cather's "Paul's Case." The latter story illustrates "the difference between sadness and tragedy. Paul's death is sad because it cuts off a life that has never been fulfilled. But it is not tragic, for Paul lives and dies in this world of human affairs." But Othello's death has the grandeur of tragedy. Realizing at last that Desdemona has been true and that in staying her he has destroyed his own hopes of happiness, the Moor attains a final serenity of spirit, intuiting the true order of things.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE W. H. Auden on Drama IAGO AS A TRIUMPHANT VILLAIN, page 1402
Auden wrote several brilliant essays on Shakespeare's plays and poetry. His discussion of Iago comes from a 1961 essay, "The Joker in the Pack," reprinted in his critical collection, The Dyer's Hand (1962). In analyzing Othello, Auden notes how differently the villain operates in the play compared to Shakespeare's other tragedies. Iago and not the title character stands at the center of Othello, Auden observes, since he motivates the crucial dramatic actions. It is not Fate that dooms Othello; it is another human being. Auden's view of Iago neatly complements Maud Bodkin's identification of Iago as a diabolical figure (included in the "Critical Approaches to Literature" chapter of the book). The devil, after all, leads persons to voluntary doom by evil advice. Anyone interested in Auden's relation to Shakespeare should read his superb introduction to The Sonnets, which is reprinted in Forewords & Afterwords (New York: Random, 1973). Auden also wrote a sequel to The Tempest--his 1944 dramatic poem, The Sea and the Mirror.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What aspects of Othello does Auden consider unique? ("I cannot think of any other play . . . ") 2. What character does Auden assert stands at the center of Shakespeare's play? What is unusual about this character? 3. What is peculiar about Othello's fall in relation to the fall of most tragic heroes?
35 The Modern Theater
REALISM AND NATURALISM Henrik Ibsen A DOLL'S HOUSE, page 1413
At the heart of the play, as its title indicates, is its metaphor of a house of make-believe. In the play's visible symbols, we see Ibsen the poet. In Act I, there is the Christmas tree that Nora orders the maid to place in the middle of the room--a gesture of defiance after Krogstad had threatened her domestic peace and happiness. In the Christmas gifts Nora has bought for the children--sword, toy horse, and trumpet for the boys, a doll and a doll's bed for the girl Emmy--Nora seems to assign boys and girls traditional emblems of masculinity and femininity and (in Rolf Fjelde's phrasing) is "unthinkingly transmitting her doll-identity to her own daughter." When the curtain goes up on Act II, we see the unfortunate Christmas tree again: stripped, burned out, and shoved back into a corner-- and its ruin speaks eloquently for Nora's misery. Richly suggestive, too, is Nora's wild tarantella, to merry music played by the diseased and dying Rank. Like a victim of a tarantula bite, Nora feels a kind of poison working in her; and it is ironic that Rank has a literal poison working in him as well. (The play's imagery of poison and disease is traced in an article by John Northam included in Rolf Fjelde's Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1965]). Significant, too, is Nora's change of costume (page 1464): taking off her fancy dress, she divests herself of the frivolous nonsense she has believed in the past and puts on everyday street attire. Ibsen's play was first performed in Copenhagen on December 21, 1879; no doubt many a male chauvinist found it a disquieting Christmas present. Within a few years, A Doll's House had been translated into fourteen languages. James Gibbons Huneker has described its fame: when Nora walked out on Helmer, "that slammed door reverberated across the roofs of the world." With the rise of feminism, A Doll's House gradually became Ibsen's most frequently performed play--not only on the stage but also in television and film adaptations. In 1973, for example, two screen versions were issued almost simultaneously: Joseph Losey's overly solemn version starring Jane Fonda, and Hilliard Elkin's superior adaptation featuring Claire Bloom (expertly assisted by Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Richardson, Denholm Elliott, and Edith Evans). Ibsen, to be sure, was conscious of sexual injustices. In preliminary notes written in 1878, he declared what he wanted his play to express: A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society; it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view. She has committed a crime and she is proud of it because she did it for love of her husband and to save his life. But the husband, with his conventional views of honor, stands on the side of the law and looks at the affair with male eyes. Clearly, that is what the finished play expresses, but perhaps it expresses much more besides. A temptation in teaching Ibsen is to want to reduce his plays to theses. As Rich-
(text pages) 14131469 ard Gilman says, the very name of Henrik Ibsen calls to mind "cold light, problems, living rooms, instruction" (The Making of Modern Drama [New York: Farrar, 1964]). But is the play totally concerned with the problems of the "new woman"? Ibsen didn't think so. At a banquet given in his honor by the Norwegian Society for Women's Rights in 1898, he frankly admitted, I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than people have generally been inclined to believe. I thank you for the toast, but I must decline the honor of consciously having worked for women's rights. I am not even quite sure what women's rights really are. To me it has been a question of human rights. Elizabeth Hardwick thinks Ibsen made this statement because he had "choler in his bloodstream" and couldn't resist making a put-down before his admirers. She finds Ibsen nevertheless admirable: alone among male writers in having pondered the fact of being born a woman--"To be female: What does it mean?" (Seduction and Betrayal [New York: Random, 1974]). Perhaps there is no contradiction in arguing that Ibsen's play is about both women's rights and the rights of all humanity. Another critic, Norris Houghton, suggests a different reason for the play's timeliness. "Our generation has been much concerned with what it calls the `identity crisis.' This play anticipates that theme: Ibsen was there ahead of us by ninety years" (The Exploding Stage [New York: Weybright, 1971]). Houghton's view may be supported by Nora's declared reasons for leaving Torvald: "If I'm ever to reach any understanding of myself and the things around me, I must learn to stand alone" (page 1466). The play is structured with classic severity. Its first crisis occurs in Krogstad's initial threat to Nora, but its greatest crisis--the climax--occurs when Helmer stands with the revealing letter open in his hand (page 1463). We take the major dramatic question to be posed early in Act I, in Nora's admission to Mrs. Linde that she herself financed the trip to Italy. The question is larger than "Will Nora's husband find out her secret?"--for that question is answered at the climax, when Helmer finds out. Taking in more of the play, we might put it, "Will Nora's happy doll house existence be shattered?"--or a still larger question (answered only in the final door slam), "Will Nora's marriage be saved?" Ibsen's magnificent door slam has influenced many a later dramatist. Have any students seen Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) on stage or on television? At the end, Todd slams a door in the faces of the audience, suggesting that he would gladly cut their throats. For a dissenting interpretation of Ibsen's play, see Hermann J. Weigand, The Modern Ibsen (New York: Dutton, 1960). Weigand thinks Nora at the end unchanged and unregenerate--still a wily coquette who will probably return home the next day to make Torvald toe the line. A topic for class debate: Is A Doll's House a tragedy or a comedy? Much will depend on how students interpret Nora's final exit. Critics disagree: Dorothea Krook thinks the play contains all the requisite tragic ingredients (Elements of Tragedy [New Haven: Yale UP, 1969]). Elizabeth Hardwick (cited earlier) calls the play "a comedy, a happy ending--except for the matter of the children." To prevent North German theater managers from rewriting the play's ending, Ibsen supplied an alternate ending of his own "for use in an emergency." In this alternate version, Nora does not leave the house; instead, Helmer makes her gaze upon their sleeping children. "Oh, this is a sin against myself, but I cannot leave them," says Nora, sinking to the floor in defeat as the curtain falls. Ibsen, however, thought such a change a "barbarous outrage" and urged that it not be used. Students might be told of this alternate ending and be asked to give reasons for its outrageousness. Citing evidence from the play and from Ibsen's biography, Joan Templeton argues
(text pages) 14131479 that those critics who fail to see A Doll's House as a serious feminist statement have distorted its meaning and unintentionally diminished its worth ("The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen," PMLA: January 1989). For a cornucopia of stimulating ideas, see Approaches to Teaching Ibsen's A Doll's House, edited by Yvonne Shafer (New York: Modern Language Association, 1985), one of the MLA's likable paperback series "Approaches to Teaching Masterpieces of World Literature." June Schlueter writes on using the play as an introduction to drama, and notes that, unlike Oedipus, the play does not create an inexorable progress toward disaster. "At any point, we feel, justifiably, that disaster might be avoided." Irving Deer recommends approaching the play by considering "how it deals with decaying values and conventions." J. L. Styan urges instructors to have a class act out the play's opening moments, before and after discussing them, so that Ibsen's wealth of suggestive detail will emerge, which students might otherwise ignore. Other commentators supply advice for teaching the play in a freshman honors course, in a course on women's literature, and in a community college. Joanne Gray Kashdan, author of this latter essay, reports that one woman student exclaimed on reading the play: "I realized I had been married to Torvald for seven years before I divorced him!"
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE George Bernard Shaw on Drama IBSEN AND THE FAMILIAR SITUATION, page 1470
1. How, according to Shaw, does A Doll's House reflect Ibsen's originality? In the play's time, what was so new about it? 2. How does Shaw explain the origin of drama? 3. Which playwright does Shaw prefer: Ibsen or Shakespeare? Why?
TRAGICOMEDY AND THE ABSURD Edward Albee THE SANDBOX, page 11474
The Sandbox (1960) was not only one of the plays that first brought Edward Albee to national prominence; it is also one of the works that defined the Theater of the Absurd in America. Since the play's action is so overtly unrealistic, the audience is forced to reach for some other sort of significance. What is that significance? Certain obvious themes come to mind: the inability of people to communicate; the meaninglessness of modern existence; the horrible absurdity of death in a universe without divine providence; the hypocritical emptiness of contemporary family life. Whatever interpretation one reads into The Sandbox, the play's theatrical creativity, dark humor, and stinging satire still make it lively and uncomfortable viewing.
1. What is unusual about the names of the characters in The Sandbox? How does this
(text pages) 14741479 quality affect our perceptions of the characters? The names of all the characters are generic--Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, The Young Man, The Musician. The characters, Albee implies, are not individuals as much as archetypes, symbolic characters acting out some representative action. The names also emphasize the familial and generational nature of the action. In "The Theater of Edward Albee" (Tulane Drama Review, Summer 1965), Lee Baxandall notes: Three generations comprise Albee's archetypal family: Then, the epoch of a still-dynamic national ethic and vision; Now, a phase which breaks down into several tangents of decay; and Nowhere, a darkly prophesied future generation. Only two characters are left over from Then: Grandma and a paterfamilias or patriarch who is occasionally mentioned but never appears. These establish a polarity based upon the axis of female and male principles. It has been often remarked that Grandma is the sole humane, generous creature in the Albee ménage. She tries to relate to others in a forthright and meaningful fashion, but at her age she no longer commands the requisite social weight. The others, her offspring, do not want Grandma involved in their dubious lives. They ask her to stifle her "pioneer stock" values. Her pleas that she be put to use--"beg me, or ask me, or entreat me . . . just anything like that" are not heeded, because she is of a different epoch. As the names suggest, the basic action of The Sandbox takes place within the family unit. The names are also one of the many antirealistic elements in the script. Since the play cannot be understood in realistic terms, we tend to view it allegorically or symbolically. 2. Where does the play take place? What does the presence of the sandbox suggest? The play takes place on the beach (as Mommy's first line makes clear). The sandbox suggests a number of things, most notably a burial plot or grave. A sandbox also brings to mind early childhood play, an odd association for a dying old woman but also one that suggests both her ironically childlike dependence on Mommy and Daddy, and the absurd playfulness of this play about death. 3. Does The Sandbox contain any traditional elements of plot structure? Does the play have a climax? If so, where? Although it is absurd in most respects, The Sandbox has a visible structure: an exposition (when Mommy and Daddy enter, then carry on Grandma); an intentionally hokey climax (the violent off-stage rumbles that precede the second day and announce Grandma's death); and a bizarre dénouement (in which Grandma discovers that she is dead and that the Young Man is the Angel of Death). It would be hard to think of a more traditional way to end a play than by the central character's death. Albee employs all these elements with deliberate irony. 4. Describe how Mommy and Daddy treat Grandma. How do they speak to her? Mommy and Daddy treat Grandma with a polite but merciless detachment. They talk about her, but hardly talk to her, except to say, "Be quiet, Grandma . . . just be quiet and wait." Mommy reveals no emotional attachment whatsoever to her own mother. Daddy at least worries that Grandma is uncomfortable, but Mommy shuts him up. The outward emotions of concern they display are overtly hypocritical. Grandma, by contrast, seems relatively normal--at least once her initial childish fit is over. Her reactions and comments seem sincere, if not particularly profound. 5. Albee tells the audience quite specifically that the Young Man is the Angel of Death. What other occupation does he have? The Young Man is an actor, though apparently not either an experienced or particularly talented one. When he delivers his big line, "I am the Angel of Death," the stage directions state he says it "like a real amateur," and then he muffs his next line. By making The Young Man an actor, Albee pokes fun at his own
(text pages) 14741480 dramatic scheme while self-consciously reminding the audience that everyone on the stage is an actor. Theater of the Absurd frequently reminds the audience that the performance is an artifice. 6. What purpose does the Musician serve in the play? Would The Sandbox have the same effect without this character? By bringing The Musician on stage, Albee further heightens the overt artificiality of the play. (Music usually comes from offstage.) He also increases the amusing stage business. The Musician also supports the symbolic atmosphere of the play. Rituals, like funerals, usually have music. The Sandbox would lose a great deal without The Musician. (Of course, the play would lose its live music, too.) 7. What, in your own words, do you think is the theme of The Sandbox? What parts of the play support your opinion? It is hard to state the theme of The Sandbox in definitive terms. Albee has made a great deal of his play being deliberately elusive. However, one might suggest a theme like "The Sandbox pokes absurd fun at middle-class family values by satirizing the hypocrisy and indifference family members exhibit toward one another." 8. What aspects of the play seem comic? What aspects appear unpleasant? The Sandbox seems simultaneously both comic and unpleasant. The basic dramatic premise of Mommy and Daddy bringing Grandma to the beach to die is rather nasty, but the way Albee presents it (as in the couple unceremoniously dumping the old gal in the sandbox or the Young Man muffing his most dramatic line) is deliberately funny. The way in which Albee intermingles the dark and light aspects of his play seems intrinsic to his style. The Theater of the Absurd characteristically portrays the darkest existential material in slapstick comic terms. We laugh, but part of what we laugh at is the absurdity and ephemerality of our own existence.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Edward Albee on Drama THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD, page 1480
1. What, according to Albee, should a play do besides entertain? 2. What paradox does he find in the nature of "the supposed Realistic theater"?
36 Evaluating a Play
This chapter may be particularly useful for students to read before they tackle a play about whose greatness or inferiority you have any urgent convictions. The chapter probably doesn't deserve to be dealt with long in class, but it might lead to a writing assignment: to comment on the merits of any play in the book. If you assign students to write a play review (see "Writing about a Play" page 1920), you might like to have them read this chapter first. To help them in forming their opinions, they may consult the list of pointers in the "Writing Critically" section on pages 14871488.
37 Plays for Further Reading
Sophocles ANTIGONÊ, page 1491
1. Some critics argue that the main character of the play is not Antigonê, but Creon. How can this view possibly be justified? Do you agree? Antigonê disappears from the play in its last third, and we are then shown Creon in conflict with himself. Creon suffers a tragic downfall: his earlier decision has cost him his wife and his son; Eurydicê has cursed him; and in the end, he is reduced to a pitiable figure praying for his own death. Still, without Antigonê the play would have no conflict; surely she suffers a tragic downfall as well. 2. Why is it so important to Antigonê that the body of Polyneicês be given a proper burial? "I say that this crime is holy." (Prologue; line 56. See also the footnote on line 3). 3. Modern critics often see the play as centering around a theme: the authority of the state conflicts with the religious duty of an individual. Try this interpretation on the play and decide how well it fits. Does the playwright seem to favor one side or the other? The pious Sophocles clearly favors Antigonê and sees divine law taking precedence over human law; but Creon's principles (most fully articulated in Scene I, lines 2841 and 98124) are given fair hearing. 4. Comment from a student paper: "Antigonê is a stubborn fool, bent on her own destruction. Her insistence on giving a corpse burial causes nothing but harm to herself, to Haimon, Eurydicê, and all Thebes. She does not accomplish anything that Creon wouldn't eventually have agreed to do." Discuss this view. 5. Explain the idea of good government implied in the exchange between Creon and Haimon: "My voice is the one voice giving orders in this city!"--"It is no city if it takes orders from one voice." (Scene III, 1056). 6. What doubts rack Creon? For what reasons does he waver in his resolve to punish Antigonê and deny burial to the body of Polyneicês? In changing his mind, does he seem to you weak and indecisive? Not at all; he has good reason to pull down his vanity and to listen to the wise Haimon and his counselors. 7. In not giving us a love scene in the tomb between Antigonê and Haimon, does Sophocles miss a golden opportunity? Or would you argue that, as a playwright, he knows his craft? David Grene has pointed out that the plots of the Antigonê and the Oedipus have close similarities. In both, we meet a king whose unknowing violation of divine law results in his own destruction. In both, the ruler has an encounter with Teiresias, whom he refuses to heed. Creon relents and belatedly tries to take the priest's advice--Oedipus, however, defies all wise counsel (introduction to "The Theban Plays" in Complete Greek
(text pages) 14911520 Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore [University of Chicago Press, 1959] II: 23). Charles Paul Segal views the clash between Creon and Antigonê as the result of two conflicting worldviews--one female, the other masculine: It is again among the tragic paradoxes of Antigone's position that she who accepts the absolutes of death has a far fuller sense of the complexities of life. Creon, who lacks a true "reverence" for the gods, the powers beyond human life, also lacks a deep awareness of the complexities within the human realm. Hence he tends to see the world in terms of harshly opposed categories, right and wrong, reason and folly, youth and age, male and female. He scornfully joins old age with foolishness in speaking to the chorus (26768) and refuses to listen to his son's advice because he is younger (68485). . . . All these categories imply the relation of superior and inferior, stronger and weaker. This highly structured and aggressive view of the world Creon expresses perhaps most strikingly in repeatedly formulating the conflict between Antigone and himself in terms of the woman trying to conquer the man. He sees in Antigone a challenge to his whole way of living and his basic attitudes toward the world. And of course he is right, for Antigone's full acceptance of her womanly nature, her absolute valuation of the bonds of blood and affection, is a total denial of Creon's obsessively masculine rationality. ("Sophocles' Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone," in Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bernard Knox [Twentieth Century Views Series: Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966].) Students with experience in play production might be asked to suggest strategies for staging Antigonê today. In their commentary on the play, translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald make interesting suggestions. The Chorus had better not chant the Odes in unison, or the words will probably be unintelligible; let single voices in the Chorus take turns speaking lines. The solemn parados might be spoken to the accompaniment of a slow drumbeat. No dancing should be included; no attempt should be made to use largerthan-life Greek masks with megaphone mouths. More effective might be lifelike Bendatype masks, closely fitting the face. "If masks are used at all, they might be well allotted only to those characters who are somewhat depersonalized by official position or discipline: Creon, Teiresias, the Chorus and Choragos, possibly the Messenger. By this rule, Antigonê has no mask; neither has Ismenê, Haimon, nor Eurydicê" (The Oedipus Cycle: An English Version [New York: Harcourt, 1949] 24243). Entertaining scraps from our sparse knowledge of the life of Sophocles are gathered by Moses Hadas in An Ancilla to Classical Reading (New York: Columbia UP, 1954). The immense popular success of Antigonê led to the playwright's being elected a general, although as he himself admitted, he was incompetent in battle. Many reports attest to his piety, his fondness for courtesans and boys, and his defeat of an attempt by his sons to have him declared an imbecile. Plutarch relates that when Sophocles, then past ninety, read to the jury from his latest work, Oedipus at Colonus, he "was escorted from the lawcourt as from a theater, amid the applause and shouts of all." One account of the playwright's death is that he strangled while reading aloud a long, breathless sentence from Antigonê. Suggestions for Writing. Compare and contrast the character of Creon in the two plays. (In Oedipus the King, he is the reasonable man, the foil for the headstrong Oedipus.) How important to the play is Haimon? Ismenê? Eurydicê? How visibly does the family curse that brought down Oedipus operate in Antigonê? Does fate seem a motivating force behind Antigonê's story? (In Antigonê fate plays a
(text pages) 14911522 much less prominent part; the main characters--Creon, Antigonê, and Haimon--seem to decide for themselves their courses of action.) Ruth E. Zehfuss has noticed that Antigonê cries out for comparison with Susan Glaspell's Trifles: both are plays in which the protagonists find their moral convictions at odds with the law of the state. Interestingly, Zehfuss sees other parallels. "The settings of both Trifles and Antigonê emphasize the relative positions of authority figures and those whose lives they control. Antigonê is played out in front of the palace, the locus of authority." Similarly, in the stage directions for the beginning of Trifles, the Sheriff and the County Attorney are in charge: as guardians of the law, they occupy center stage, near the warm stove, while the women stand off near the cold door. Like Creon, they represent officialdom. Other characters in both plays also reveal similarities. Sophocles's Ismenê, like Glaspell's Mrs. Peters, are both weak characters reluctant to challenge the authority of the law. But both Antigonê and Mrs. Hale have the strength to question it and finally to defy it ("The Law and the Ladies in Trifles," Teaching English in the Two-Year College [Feb. 1992], 4244.)
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Robert Fitzgerald on Drama TRANSLATING SOPHOCLES, page 1521
Now half a century after they first appeared, Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts's versions of Sophocles remain the finest translations in English. They not only capture the dignity, power, and beauty of the Greek, Fitts and Fitzgerald also created eminently stageworthy versions of the ancient classics. In an afterword to his 1941 solo translation of Oedipus at Colonus, Fitzgerald offered a commentary on the challenges of translating Sophocles. His remarks examine the issue of finding poetic language that was neither too elevated nor too common. Instructors may be interested to know that Dudley Fitts was the young Robert Fitzgerald's Latin master at the Choate School. They became lifelong friends and collaborated on three celebrated translations of Greek tragedies. When they corresponded, they usually wrote their letters in Latin. Fitts's mentorship helped guide Fitzgerald to his career as the most distinguished American translator of Greek and Roman classical poetry, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. Fitzgerald later became the Boylston Professor at Harvard. For an account of Fitzgerald's teaching methods, see Dana Gioia's memoir "Learning from Robert Fitzgerald" in the Spring 1998 issue of The Hudson Review.
William Shakespeare HAMLET, page 1522
In 1964 on the quadricentennial anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, the celebrated Polish critic Jan Kott observed, "The bibliography of dissertations and studies devoted to Hamlet is twice the size of Warsaw's telephone directory. No Dane of flesh and blood has been written about so extensively as Hamlet." A few years earlier, Harry Levin of Harvard computed from A. A. Raven's 1953 Hamlet Bibliography that over a sixty-year period, a new discussion of Hamlet had been published every twelve days. No work of world literature has generated as much commentary as this play. The key to teaching Hamlet is not to be intimidated by this Mount Everest of schol-
(text pages) 15221634 arship. Familiarity with some of the criticism will enrich your teaching, but Hamlet has never needed commentary to win over an audience. For nearly four hundred years, it has been Shakespeare's most popular tragedy. Nonetheless, it might be worthwhile to review some of the best critical works, especially those that can be recommended to students. Still indispensable is A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), which is available in several inexpensive editions, including a recent Penguin paperback (1991) with a new introduction by John Bayley. This classic book contains Bradley's general observations on Shakespeare's tragedies along with detailed examinations of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. If you have never read this volume, you are in for a treat: there has never been a better general introduction written to these plays. Bradley was not only a superb scholar and critic; he remains an engaging and lucid writer. The book grew out of Bradley's lectures to undergraduates at the University of Glasgow, and in them we see a great teacher in action. Most libraries will have David Bevington's excellent critical collection, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968). This volume will probably be more useful to students than some later compilations because it presents essays written before the rise of literary theory made them too complicated for most undergraduates to follow easily. We now use Professor Bevington's authoritative text and notes for Hamlet in the current edition of Literature. Jan Kott's influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1964) is a great pleasure to read. Kott writes about Shakespeare from the perspective of an Eastern European and emphasizes the political nature of the plays. His chapter "Hamlet of the Mid-Century" describes how Polish productions of the play reflected the social and political environment around it. "Hamlet is like a sponge . . . it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time." Although he grounds his discussions in the history of modern totalitarian states, his comments are extremely illuminating. Describing a performance in Cracow in 1956, he captures a central aspect of Hamlet that has eluded most critics: In this performance everybody, without exception, was being constantly watched. Polonius, minister to the royal murderer, sends a man to France even after his own son. . . . At Elsinore castle someone is hidden behind every curtain. The good minister does not even trust the Queen. . . . Everything at Elsinore has been corroded by fear: marriage, love, and friendship. . . . The murderous uncle keeps a constant watchful eye on Hamlet. Why does he not want him to leave Denmark? His presence at court is inconvenient, reminding everybody of what they would like to forget. Perhaps he suspects something? . . . Ophelia, too, has been drawn into the big game. They listen in to her conversations, ask questions, read her letters. It is true that she gives them up herself. She is at the same time part of the Mechanism, and its victim. Politics hangs here over every feeling, and there is no getting away from it. All the characters are poisoned by it. The only subject of their conversations is politics. It is a kind of madness. (pages 6061) The most useful recent study of the play is probably Paul Cantor's Shakespeare: Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), which is part of Cambridge's generally distinguished "Landmarks of World Literature" series. Cantor's volume provides a concise, informed introduction to the tragedy. (The entire text is only 106 pages, including the notes and bibliography.) Taking recent scholarship into account, Cantor places the tragedy in an historical context and examines the central critical problems raised by the drama. It is a savvy, sophisticated volume that both instructors and students will find interesting. The best way of teaching Shakespeare is through performance--not just watching one, but by doing one. The more the instructor encourages, entices, cajoles, or compels
(text pages) 15221634 students to perform scenes from the plays, the more deeply they will become involved in Shakespeare's drama. Memorization remains unfashionable in some circles, but few students will regret having to memorize all or part of a famous soliloquy from Hamlet. Memorization helps accommodate a contemporary student's ear to Elizabethan speech more quickly than any other method. Most long-term teachers of Shakespeare will have their own stories of classroom productions, but one particularly interesting account can be found in Frederick Turner's fascinating book Rebirth of Value: Meditation on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). Turner uses his experiences teaching a "Shakespeare in Performance" course to develop a broader theory of education. Turner's discussion (pp. 15170) focuses on Hamlet, but his procedures can be applied to any play: The class method was as follows. Each student was assigned to direct a scene from Shakespeare, casting it from the class, and recording the rehearsal process for an essay that would be due later. The rest of the class voted on the performance, and the actors, the director, and any other stage personnel would all get the same grade. In other words, the performing group stood or fell together, and the reward system demanded that it please, move, and inspire a real, experienced, and perceptive audience. As the year went on the productions became more and more elaborate, daring, polished (and time-consuming in rehearsal). The students were addicted and some performed many times more than I had required. They began to use costumes, scenery, makeup, even lights and special effects, improvising with great ingenuity in our drab little classroom, and decorating it festively when appropriate. The grading system was soon forgotten, and we had to remind ourselves to keep it going. Some students even protested their own grades when they thought them too high! (pages 164165) Not all classes afford the luxury of time to perform parts of Hamlet, but all students should be encouraged to see or hear the play performed. There are several excellent film versions available on video. Laurence Olivier's classic 1948 version won him Academy Awards for best picture and best actor. Olivier's version is heavily cut and highly interpretive (very Freudian), but it remains compelling. Tony Richardson's Hamlet (1969) has Nicol Williamson, one of the most celebrated contemporary Hamlets, in the title role, but it never comes entirely alive. Franco Zeffirelli's 1991 version stars Mel Gibson. Anyone who has not seen the film has the right to be skeptical, but Gibson works surprisingly well. Zeffirelli's lushly realistic production occasionally threatens to overwhelm his superb cast (including Glenn Close, Alan Bates, and Paul Scofield), but he trusts Shakespeare's drama. Casting an actor like Gibson, best known for action-hero roles like Road Warrior or Lethal Weapon, in the title role actually seems very Elizabethan. His cinematic associations as a man-of-action underscore the divided character of the Danish prince, a hero who hesitates to begin. There is also an excellent BBC audio recording of the complete text of Hamlet (distributed in the United States by Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio publishing, available on four cassettes or three compact discs). This performance lavishly parades the wealth of British theater. Kenneth Branagh takes the title role with Judi Dench as Gertrude and Derek Jacobi as Claudius. Even the minor roles are superbly cast: John Gielgud is the Ghost; Michael Horden the Player King; and Emma Thompson the Player Queen. Hamlet has one of the most complex plots of any Shakespeare play. There is a large cast. Many characters have different private and public personalities, and Hamlet himself is probably the most multifaceted protagonist in Shakespeare. It is always helpful in class to ask questions that make students think through the basic situation, actions, and characters of the drama. Here are a few possible questions.
(text pages) 15221634
1. By what means does Shakespeare build suspense before the Ghost's appearances? Why is Hamlet so unwilling to trust what the Ghost tells him? Is it possible to interpret the play so that the Ghost is just a projection of Hamlet's disturbed imagination? 2. What is the play's major dramatic question? (For a discussion of this term, see page 1212.) At what point is the question formulated? Does the play have a crisis, or turning point? 3. How early in the play, and from what passages, do you perceive that Claudius is a villain? 4. What comic elements does the play contain--what scenes, what characters, what exchanges or dialogue? What is their value to a play that, as a whole, is a tragedy? 5. A familiar kind of behavior is showing one face to the world and another to oneself. What characters in Hamlet do so? Is their deception ever justified? 6. How guilty is Gertrude? With what offenses does Hamlet charge her (see III, iv)? Is our attitude toward her the same as Hamlet's, or different? Does our sympathy for her grow as the play goes on or diminish? 7. If the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are cut from the play, as is the case in some productions, what is lost? 8. Consider Hamlet's soliloquies, especially those beginning "O that this too too sullied [or solid] flesh would melt" (I, ii, 129159); "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" (II, ii, 477533); and "To be, or not to be" (III, i, 5689). How do these meditations round out the character of Hamlet? How do they also serve to advance the story? 9. Discuss how Shakespeare differently portrays Hamlet's feigned madness and Ophelia's real madness. 10. Is Laertes a villain like Claudius, or is there reason to feel that his contrived duel with Hamlet is justified? 11. How is Hamlet shown to be a noble and extraordinary person, not merely by birth, but by nature? See Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as "The glass of fashion, and the mold of form" (III, i, 142153). Are we to take Ophelia's speech as the prejudiced view of a lover, or does Shakespeare demonstrate that her opinion of Hamlet is trustworthy? 12. Discuss Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia (see especially Act III, Scene i). Does his behavior seem cruel, in conflict with his supposed nobility and sensitivity? 13. In what respects does Hamlet resemble a classical tragedy, such as Oedipus Rex? In what ways is Shakespeare's play different? Is Hamlet, like Oedipus, driven to his death by some inexorable force (Fate, the gods, the nature of things)? For a classroom discussion of Hamlet's character, you might present the poet-critic Jack Foley's radical notion of the character's individuality (written especially for this handbook): At the beginning of Sir Laurence Olivier's acclaimed film production of Hamlet, a disembodied voice, speaking above an image of clouds, says "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind." Someone in the theater at which I saw it answered ironically, "Oh, so that's what it's about." The meaning of Hamlet and the
(text pages) 15221635 nature of the central character are by no means as clear as Olivier wished his audience to believe. To call a play Hamlet or King Lear or Richard III or Othello is not so different from calling a television program The Johnny Carson Show or The Bill Cosby Show or Roseanne. The title implies, The Interesting Individual Show. The Renaissance, the period in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, is often described as the great age of individuality and self-assertion. Plays with titles like Hamlet implicitly promise to "tell all" about some central, charismatic character--someone usually portrayed by the most famous actor in the company--to give us a powerful psychological portrait of a fascinating "individual." Hamlet the character is, we know from hundreds of performances, just such a fascinating "individual"--and he is overwhelmingly real. Yet the moment we try to "explain" his reality--even to explain his essential problem--we find ourselves confused, uncertain. The reason for this is that Shakespeare's extremely memorable characters do not behave consistently according to any system of psychology, whether Renaissance or Modern. Freud was right. There are moments in the play when Hamlet is exhibiting clear Oedipal characteristics. But not throughout the play. Hamlet himself suggests that he is "melancholy"--a psychological condition exhaustively studied by Shakespeare's contemporary, Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy. It's true, Hamlet is melancholy, but not throughout the play. Hamlet also functions as the figure of the Avenger--as in Thomas Kyd's famous revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy. But, again, not throughout the play. The same character who tells his mother that he "knows not seems" displays a considerable interest in theater (an art of "seeming") and announces that he will put on an "antic disposition" and pretend to be mad--"seeming" to the max. On the other hand, there are several moments in the play when Hamlet really does appear to be crazy. Nor are such contradictions limited to the character of Hamlet. Polonius is throughout the play nothing but an old fool. Yet his diagnosis of Hamlet as mad for the love of Ophelia is not without some justification in Hamlet's behavior, and his "This above all: to thine own self be true" speech is one of the great set pieces of the play, something far beyond the powers of the foolish old man he is everywhere else. . . . The fact is that Hamlet seems real not because he is a coherent character of "self" or because there is some discoverable "essence" to him but because he actively and amazingly inhabits so many diverse, interconnecting, potentially contradictory contexts. Hamlet is one of the most famous fictional characters ever created. Why is this so? Foley asserts that Hamlet's reality as a character derives from his multiplicity and inconsistency as a character: Hamlet is as difficult to comprehend with a single explanation as a real person. What do your students think?
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Anthony Burgess on Drama AN ASIAN CULTURE LOOKS AT SHAKESPEARE, page 1634
Probably no modern novelist thought more deeply about William Shakespeare than Anthony Burgess. His 1964 novel, Nothing Like the Sun, is generally considered the most compelling fictional work about the enigmatic Bard of Avon. His late novel, Enderby's Dark Lady (1984), begins and ends with brilliant short stories about Shakespeare. Burgess
(text pages) 16341636 also wrote a full-length critical study of the dramatist as well as a novel about Christopher Marlowe in which Shakespeare appears. Before he began writing fiction (at the age of 38), Burgess worked for the British government as a cultural officer in Asia. The selection printed in Literature comes from a talk the polyglot Burgess gave at an international conference on translation. He addresses several interesting issues about how literary works travel across languages and cultures. He also speculates on why Shakespeare's work has proved nearly universal in its appeal. Finally, he reminds us that literary translation involves far more than finding equivalent words.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. In Burgess's experience, who seemed to be the only British author with universal appeal in Malaysia? How does Burgess account for this fact? 2. According to Burgess, what does translation involve besides words?
Arthur Miller DEATH OF A SALESMAN, page 1636
1. Miller's opening stage directions call for actors to observe imaginary walls when the action is in the present, and to step freely through walls when the scene is in the past. Do you find this technique of staging effective? Why or why not? 2. Miller has professed himself fascinated by the "agony of someone who has some driving, implacable wish in him" (Paris Review interview). What--as we learn in the opening scene--are Willy Loman's obsessions? 3. What case can be made for seeing Linda as the center of the play: the character around whom all events revolve? Sum up the kind of person she is. 4. Seeing his father's Boston side-girl has a profound effect on Biff. How would you sum it up? 5. Apparently Biff's discovery of Willy's infidelity took place before World War II, about 1939. In this respect, does Death of a Salesman seem at all dated? Do you think it possible, in the present day, for a son to be so greatly shocked by his father's sexual foibles that the son's whole career would be ruined? 6. How is it possible to read the play as the story of Biff's eventual triumph? Why does Biff, at the funeral, give his brother a "hopeless" look? 7. How are we supposed to feel about Willy's suicide? In what way is Willy, in killing himself, self-deluded to the end? 8. What meanings do you find in the flute music? In stockings--those that Willy gives to the Boston whore and those he doesn't like to see Linda mending? In Biff's sneakers with "University of Virginia" lettered on them (which he later burns)? In seeds and gardening? 9. Of what importance to the play are Charley and his son Bernard? How is their fatherson relationship different from the relationship between Willy and Biff?
(text pages) 16361707 10. What do you understand Bernard to mean in telling Willy, "sometimes . . . it's better for a man just to walk away" (page 1682)? 11. Explain Charley's point when he argues, "The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that" (page 1683). (Miller, in his introduction to the play, makes an applicable comment: "When asked what Willy was selling, what was in his bags, I could only reply, `Himself.'") 12. What do you make of the character of Ben? Do you see him as a realistic character? As a figment of Willy's imagination? 13. Suppose Miller had told the story of Willy and Biff in chronological order. If the incident in the Boston hotel had come early in the play, instead of late, what would have been lost? 14. Another death of another salesman is mentioned in this play: on page 1674 that of Dave Singleman. How does Willy view Singleman's death? Is Willy's attitude our attitude? 15. In a famous speech in the final Requiem, Charley calls a salesman a man who "don't put a bolt to a nut"; and Charley recalls that Willy "was a happy man with a batch of cement." Sum up the theme or general truth that Charley states. At what other moments in the play does this theme emerge? Why is Willy, near death, so desperately eager to garden? 16. When the play first appeared in 1949, some reviewers thought it a bitter attack upon the capitalist system. Others found in it social criticism by a writer committed to a faith in democracy and free enterprise. What do you think? Does the play make any specific criticism of society? 17. Miller has stated his admiration for Henrik Ibsen: "One is constantly aware, in watching his plays, of process, change, development." How does this comment apply to A Doll's House? Who or what changes or develops in the course of Death of a Salesman? Directed by Elia Kazan, with Lee J. Cobb superbly cast as Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman was first performed on Broadway on February 10, 1949. Originally, Miller had wanted to call the play The Inside of a Head, and he had planned to begin it with "an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up." Fortunately, he settled upon less mechanical methods to reveal Willy's psychology. In later describing what he thought he had done, Miller said he tried to dramatize "a disintegrating personality at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present." Death of a Salesman has often been called "poetic," despite its mostly drab speech. At first, Miller had planned to make its language more obviously that of poetry and in an early draft of the play wrote much of it in verse. He then turned it into prose on deciding that American actors wouldn't feel at home in verse or wouldn't be able to speak it properly. Miller's account of the genesis of the play is given in his introduction to his Collected Plays (New York: Viking, 1959). In the same introduction, Miller remarks why he thinks the play proved effective in the theater but did not make an effective film. Among other reasons, the movie version transferred Willy literally to scenes that, in the play, he had only imagined, and thus destroyed the play's dramatic tension. It seems more effective--and more disturbing--to show a man losing touch with his surroundings, holding conversations with people who still exist only in his mind. Keeping Willy fixed to the same place throughout the play,
(text pages) 16361707 while his mind wanders, objectifies Willy's terror. "The screen," says Miller, "is timebound and earth-bound compared to the stage, if only because its preponderant emphasis is on the visual image. . . . The movie's tendency is always to wipe out what has gone before, and it is thus in constant danger of transforming the dramatic into narrative." Film buffs may care to dispute this observation. Miller's play is clearly indebted to naturalism. Willy's deepening failure parallels that of his environment: the house increasingly constricted by the city whose growth has killed the elms, prevented anything from thriving, and blotted out human hope--"Gotta break your neck to see a star in this yard." Heredity also works against Willy. As in a Zola novel, one generation repeats patterns of behavior established by its parent. Both Willy and Biff have been less successful than their brothers; presumably both Willy and his "wild-hearted" father were philanderers; both fathers failed their sons and left them insecure. See Willy's speech on page 1659. "Dad left when I was such a baby . . . I still feel--kind of temporary about myself." The play derives also from expressionism. Miller has acknowledged this debt in an interview: I know that I was very moved in many ways by German expressionism when I was in school: . . . I learned a great deal from it. I used elements of it that were fused into Death of a Salesman. For instance, I purposefully would not give Ben any character, because for Willy he has no character--which is, psychologically, expressionist because so many memories come back with a simple tag on them: something represents a threat to you, or a promise (Paris Review 38 [Summer 1966]). Ben is supposed to embody Willy's visions of success, but some students may find him a perplexing character. Some attention to Ben's speeches will show that Ben does not give a realistic account of his career, or an actual portrait of his father, but voices Willy's dream versions. In the last scene before the Requiem, Ben keeps voicing Willy's hopes for Biff and goads Willy on to self-sacrifice. Willy dies full of illusions. Unable to recognize the truth of Biff's self-estimate ("I am not a leader of men"), Willy still believes that Biff will become a business tycoon if only he has $20,000 of insurance money behind him. One truth gets through to Willy: Biff loves him. Class discussion will probably elicit that Willy Loman is far from being Oedipus. Compared with an ancient Greek king, Willy is unheroic, a low man, as his name suggests. In his mistaken ideals, his language of stale jokes and clichés, his petty infidelity, his deceptions, he suffers from the smallness of his mind and seems only partially to understand his situation. In killing himself for an insurance payoff that Biff doesn't need, is Willy just a pitiable fool? Pitiable, perhaps, but no mere fool: he rises to dignity through self-sacrifice. "It seems to me," notes Miller (in his introduction to his Collected Plays), "that there is of necessity a severe limitation of self-awareness in any character, even the most knowing . . . and more, that this very limit serves to complete the tragedy and, indeed, to make it all possible." (Miller's introduction also protests against measuring Death of a Salesman by the standards of classical tragedy and finding it a failure.) In 1983 Miller directed a successful production in Peking, with Chinese actors. In 1984 the Broadway revival with Dustin Hoffman as Willy, later shown on PBS television, brought the play new currency. Hoffman's performance is available on video cassette from Teacher's Video Company at (800) 262-8837. Miller added lines to fit the shortstatured Hoffman: buyers laughing at Willy call him "a shrimp." The revival drew a provocative comment from Mimi Kramer in The New Criterion for June 1984: she was persuaded that Miller does not sympathize with Willy Loman and never did. Since 1949 certain liberal attitudes--towards aggression, ambition, and competitiveness--have moved from the periphery of our culture to its center, so that the views
(text pages) 16361710 of the average middle class Broadway audience are now actually in harmony with what I take to have been Miller's views all along. In 1949 it might have been possible to view Willy as only the victim of a big, bad commercial system. In 1984, it is impossible not to see Miller's own distaste for all Willy's attitudes and petty bourgeois concerns, impossible not to come away from the play feeling that Miller's real judgment of his hero is that he has no soul. For a remarkable short story inspired by the play, see George Garrett's "The Lion Hunter" in King of the Mountain (New York: Scribner's, 1957). A natural topic for writing and discussion, especially for students who have also read Othello and a play by Sophocles: How well does Miller succeed in making the decline and fall of Willy Loman into a tragedy? Is tragedy still possible today? For Miller's arguments in favor of the ordinary citizen as tragic hero, students may read his brief essay "Tragedy and the Common Man" in the "Writer's Perspective" following the play. For other comments by Miller and a selection of criticism by various hands, see Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales (New York: Viking, 1967). Also useful is Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1969). In Arthur Miller (London: Macmillan, 1982), Neil Carson seeks to relate Death of a Salesman to the playwright's early life.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Arthur Miller on Drama TRAGEDY AND THE COMMON MAN, page 1707
1. In arguing that a tragedy can portray an ordinary man, how does Miller find an ally in Sigmund Freud? See Miller's second paragraph and Freud's comments in "Critical Approaches to Literature," page 1948. 2. According to Miller, what evokes in us "the tragic feeling"? Compare his view with Aristotle's found in the "Writer's Perspective" on page 1297. Unlike the Greek theorist, Miller finds the sense of tragedy arising not from pity and fear, but from contemplating a character who would give his life for personal dignity. 3. In Miller's view, why is not tragedy an expression of pessimism? What outlook does a tragedy express? 4. Consider what Miller says about pathos, and try to apply it to Death of a Salesman. Does the play persuade you that Willy Loman would have won his battle? That he isn't witless and insensitive? Or is the play (in Miller's terms) not tragic, but only pathetic?
Tennessee Williams THE GLASS MENAGERIE, page 1710
1. How do Amanda's dreams for her daughter contrast with the realities of the Wingfields' day-to-day existence?
(text pages) 17101759 2. What suggestions do you find in Laura's glass menagerie? In the glass unicorn? 3. In the cast of characters, Jim O'Connor is listed as "a nice, ordinary, young man." Why does his coming to dinner have such earthshaking implications for Amanda? For Laura? 4. Try to describe Jim's feelings toward Laura during their long conversation in Scene VII. After he kisses her, how do his feelings seem to change? 5. Near the end of the play, Amanda tells Tom, "You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!" What is ironic about her speech? Is there any truth in it? 6. Who is the main character in The Glass Menagerie? Tom? Laura? Amanda? (It may be helpful to review the definition of a protagonist.) 7. Has Tom, at the conclusion of the play, successfully made his escape from home? Does he appear to have fulfilled his dreams? 8. How effective is the device of accompanying the action by projecting slides on a screen, bearing titles and images? Do you think most producers of the play are wise to leave it out? For Williams's instructions for using the slide projector, see "How to Stage The Glass Menagerie" in the "Writer's Perspective" following the play. Personally, we think the slide projector a mistake. In trying to justify it, Williams underestimates the quality of his play's spoken lines--but what do your students think? The gracious world of the old South lives on in Amanda's memories. No doubt its glories shine brighter as the years go by, but all three members of the Wingfield family, in their drab little apartment, live at several removes from the real world. Laura is so shy that she cannot face strangers, yet her mother enrolls her in a business school where she is, of course, doomed to failure. Next, quite ignoring the fact that Laura has no contact with anyone outside her own family, Amanda decides that her daughter ought to marry, and cheerfully sets about finding her a gentleman caller. Some students will want to see Amanda as a silly biddy and nothing more, so that it may help to ask: In what ways is she admirable? (See Williams's initial, partially admiring description of her in the cast of characters.) A kindly, well-intentioned young man, Jim O'Connor, is a self-styled go-getter, a pop psychologist. Like Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman, Jim is a high school hero whose early promise hasn't materialized. He was acquainted with Laura in school but now remembers her only when prompted. Laura's wide-eyed admiration for him flatters Jim's vanity, and in her presence he grows expansive. Gradually, Laura awakens in him feelings of warmth and protectiveness, as well as a sense that her fragility bespeaks something as precious and rare as her glass unicorn. It is with genuine regret that he shatters her tremulous, newly risen hopes with the revelation that he is engaged to be married to Betty, a young woman as unremarkable as himself. Laura's collection of glass animals objectifies her fragility, her differentness, her removal from active life. Significantly, the unicorn is her favorite. "Unicorns, aren't they extinct in the modern world?" asks Jim; and he adds, a few lines later, "I'm not made out of glass." When Jim dances with Laura and accidentally breaks off the unicorn's horn, the mythical creature becomes more like the common horses that surround him, just as Laura, by the very act of dancing, comes a few steps closer to being like everyone else. Although Jim can accept the broken unicorn from Laura as a souvenir, he cannot make room in his life for her. Her fleeting brush with reality does not in the end alter her uniqueness or release her from her imprisonment. Amanda's charge that Tom manufactures illusions seems a case of the pot calling the
(text pages) 17101759 kettle black. As we know from Amanda's flighty talk and far-fetched plans for Laura, the mother herself lives in a dream world, but she is right about Tom. A would-be poet, a romantic whose imagination has been fired by Hollywood adventure movies, Tom pays dues to the Merchant Seamen's union instead of paying the light bill. So desperate is he to make his dreams come true, he finally runs away to distant places, like his father before him. In truth, each character in the play has some illusions--even Jim, who dreams of stepping from his warehouse job into a future as a millionaire television executive. And as Tom's commentaries point out, at the time of the play's action all Americans seem dazzled by illusions, ignoring the gathering threat of World War II. "In Spain, there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows" (page 1730). For a challenging study of the play, see Roger B. Stein, "The Glass Menagerie Revisited: Catastrophe without Violence," Western Humanities Review 18 (Spring 1964):14153. (It is also available in Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Stephen S. Stanton [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1977].) Stein finds in the play themes of both social and spiritual catastrophe: the failure of both Christianity and the American dream. Although some of the play's abundant Christian symbolism and imagery would seem just decoration, students may enjoy looking for it. Scene V, in which Tom tells his mother that Laura will have a gentleman caller, is titled on the screen "Annunciation." Laura says she has dreaded to confess she has left business school, because her mother, when disappointed, wears a look "like the picture of Jesus' mother." Amanda is also identified with the music of "Ave Maria." When Tom comes home drunk, he tells Laura of seeing the stage magician Malvolio, an Antichrist who can escape from a nailed coffin and can transform water to wine (also to beer and whiskey). Jim O'Connor is another unsatisfactory Savior: he comes to supper on a Friday night and (symbolically?) is given fish, but unlike the Christ whose initials he shares, he can work no deliverance. Laura is described as if she were a saint, or at least a contemplative. When she learns that Jim is engaged to Betty, "the holy candles in the altar of Laura's face have been snuffed out" (page 1755). Compare Williams's instructions to lighting technicians in his production notes: Shafts of light are focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center. For instance, in the quarrel scene between Tom and Amanda, in which Laura has no active part, the clearest pool of light is on her figure. This is also true of the supper scene. The light upon Laura should be distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas. Most suggestive of all, Williams keeps associating candles with lightning. Amanda's candelabrum, from the altar of the Church of the Heavenly Rest, had been warped when the church was struck by lightning. And when Tom, in his final speech, calls on Laura to blow her candles out, he declares that "nowadays the world is lit by lightning." The playwright suggests, according to Stein, that a hard, antireligious materialism now prevails. (At least, this line of reasoning may be worth an argument.) The character of Laura, apparently, contains traits of Williams's sister Rose. Although the painfully shy Laura is not an exact portrait of his sister (Laura "was like Miss Rose only in her inescapable `difference,'" Williams has written), the name of Rose suggests Laura's nickname, "Blue Roses." A young woman with "lovely, heartbreaking eyes," Rose felt acute anxiety in male company. She was pressed by her mother to make a painful social debut at the Knoxville Country Club. For a time she was courted by a junior executive, an ambitious young man who soon suspended his attentions. After the breakup, Rose suffered
(text pages) 17101761 from mysterious illnesses, showed symptoms of withdrawal, and eventually was committed to the Missouri State Asylum. Williams tells her story in his Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1975) 11628. Like Tom Wingfield, apparently Williams as a young man was a restless dreamer and aspiring writer who left home to wander the country. In his own memoir, William Jay Smith, who knew Williams in St. Louis as a fellow college student at Washington University, remarks on the background of the play: I am frequently amused by those who take Tom's autobiographical projection of his family in The Glass Menagerie literally and picture him as having inhabited a rundown, seedy old house, if not a downright hovel. The house on Arundel Place, with its Oriental rugs, silver, and comfortable, if not luxurious furniture, was located in an affluent neighborhood. . . . Our entire bungalow on Telegraph Road would have fitted comfortably into one or two of its rooms. Mrs. Williams presided over it as if it were an antebellum mansion. (Army Brat [New York: Persea, 1980] 190) Tennessee William reads excerpts from The Glass Menagerie on cassette tape, available from the American Audio Prose Library, Inc., Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205; phone number for orders, (800) 4472275. An excellent reading of the complete play with Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, and Jessica Tandy is also available on audio cassette from Caedmon (A-301). Additionally, Paul Newman's 1987 version of The Glass Menagerie, starring Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich, with Karen Allen and James Naughton, is available on video cassette from Teacher's Video Company at (800) 262-8837.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Tennessee Williams on Drama HOW TO STAGE THE GLASS MENAGERIE, page 1759
1. How do both Albee (see Albee's "Writer's Perspective" on the Theater of the Absurd on page 1480) and Williams feel about theatrical "realism"? 2. How does Williams argue for his use of the slide projector? If you were producing The Glass Menagerie, would you follow the playwright's instructions and use the projector, or leave it out? 3. What other antirealistic devices would Williams employ? Would you expect them to be effective?
38 New Voices in American Drama
This chapter presents a small cross-section of recent American plays to supplement the main selections in the book. The section can be taught as a unit to present new developments in American theater, or instructors can use individual plays to illustrate themes discussed elsewhere in the "Drama" section. David Hwang's one-act play, The Sound of a Voice, provides an additional selection for "The Modern Theater," especially in demonstrating contemporary alternatives to realistic theater. Terrence McNally's Andre's Mother could serve as an ideal vehicle for an additional discussion on the elements of a play in Chapter 32, "Reading a Play." Less than three pages long, this powerful vignette is guaranteed to provoke a lively classroom discussion, and its brevity permits it to be read aloud in class without taking up more than a few minutes. Milcha Sanchez-Scott's brilliant short play The Cuban Swimmer can be used for discussions of experimental and symbolist theater, and it also opens up other possibilities such as how minority playwrights bring their own experience into theater, especially when part of the social reality they want to represent is bilingual. August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone also makes an excellent text for a discussion of "Modern Theater," since it combines both realistic and symbolist elements. Critical statements by Hwang, McNally, Sanchez-Scott, and Wilson appear in the "Writer's Perspective" feature that follows each play. Finally, these new plays provide students with potential subjects for research papers. Possible paper topics are mentioned in the notes on individual plays.
David Henry Hwang THE SOUND OF A VOICE, page 1762
David Hwang's short play, The Sound of a Voice, is simple, direct, and deeply mysterious. The play unfolds like an eerie folktale. A nameless man visits an enigmatic female hermit, who is reputed to be a witch. Although they both recognize that they are potential foes, they fall into a doomed love affair. Eventually, one of them is destroyed. Hwang's treatment combines elements from both the Eastern and Western traditions. The Sound of a _ Voice borrows many features from No drama, the courtly theater of Japan. Despite their _ elaborate and allusive language, No plays have simple narrative structures, and they mostly focus on the interaction of two principle_ characters (one of whom is usually a ghost haunting some mysterious locale). Like No drama, The Sound of a Voice prominently deploys music to build a brooding atmosphere rife with emotive impact and symbolic significance. The Sound of a Voice also resembles the short symbolist plays of William Butler Yeats, J. M._Synge, and August Strindberg. Yeats's plays, which masterfully combine elements of No drama with English verse tragedy to create a poetic form for folk material, seem particularly influential on The Sound of a Voice. The main reason to outline the rich literary background of The Sound of a Voice is not because the play needs such explication. Hwang's play wears its learning lightly; the influences have all been assimilated into a remarkably straightforward and accessibly contemporary style. The importance of Hwang's diverse sources is to demonstrate the complex heritage of an Asian-American playwright. There is sometimes a temptation to reduce the work of minority writers to mere autobiography, but in this short play, Hwang consciously draws from a Japanese genre that has nothing directly to do with either the
(text pages) 17621776 Chinese heritage of his family or the historical traditions of the author's native language, English. Hwang himself has complained about how narrowly he has been stereotyped as a writer: I first became aware of the simplistic nature of this stereotyping when I did the two Japanese plays The Sound of a Voice and The House of Sleeping Beauties. I thought this work was a departure because these were the first plays I'd written that didn't deal with being Chinese-American, with race and assimilation; I felt that they were tragic love stories. Yet they were not perceived as being a departure, because they had Asian actors. (Contemporary Authors, vol. 132. Susan M. Trosky, ed. Detroit: Gale Research) While The Sound of a Voice draws from Hwang's consciousness as an Asian writer, it is also a work that grows out of the traditions of American experimental theater.
1. How does Hwang's names for his two characters ("Man" and "Woman") affect our reading of the play? Although the author lets the woman's name (Hanako) slip into the stage directions, he otherwise refers to them only by their generic titles of Man and Woman. The two characters never give one another their true names but only self-evident fictions (Yokiko, Man Who Fears Silence, and Man Who Fears Women). By refusing to name them, Hwang encourages us to see them as archetypal or symbolic characters. The visitor is all men, and Hanako is, implicitly, womankind. Their story, by extension, bears some symbolic significance to all male-female relations. When the Woman suggests "Man Who Fears Women" as a name for her visitor, she underscores the symbolic nature of their relationship. The action generally seems not to be realistic in detail but symbolic in import. Hwang is not trying to recreate the texture of daily reality as a naturalistic dramatist might; instead, he attempts to portray a mythic drama--a folk legend come to life. Although the action of Hwang's play takes place in Japan, one could easily imagine a staged production of it set in rural New England or on the Louisiana bayou. All you would have to change is to substitute a Cajun violin or Vermont fiddle for the shakuhachi. 2. Why does the man visit the woman in her remote house? We never know exactly why he visits, but we gradually learn that he came on a quest or dare to kill her. The woman tells of other men who arrived because "great glory was to be had by killing the witch in the woods." He initially believes (as do the nearby villagers) that she is a witch who enchants and destroys the men who visit her home. He even imagines (scene 7) that her flowers contain the trapped spirits of her previous lovers. As the man falls in love with her, his desire to kill her disappears, but he is nonetheless plagued by guilt at his failure to keep to his quest. 3. The woman is unsure of the length of time since her last visitor. What effect does that uncertainty have on our sense of the dramatic situation? This detail contributes to the mythic quality of the action. It seems possible that she is a supernatural being unaffected by human mortality; or, perhaps more to the point, that this particular plot is played again and again between her and generations of young men. Moreover, at the very least, it adds to the sense of mystery that pervades the play. 4. Does this play have a central conflict? Like Japanese etiquette, the action of Hwang's play is understated; the real drama is implied mostly in the details. Both the man and the woman understand from the opening scene that they are locked in a potentially mortal combat, but neither of them directly admits their knowledge. Everything concerning the central conflict emerges slowly--and often indirectly--at least insofar as the audience is
(text pages) 17621778 concerned. But Hwang's deliberately low-key style, however, eventually intensifies the dramatic tension since it creates a heavy sense of mystery we become anxious to resolve. The central dramatic conflict is the symbolic battle that the man and woman play out. The woman seems to win by removing the man's fears and arousing love in him. Ironically, however, the man, who could not defeat her by force, manages to destroy her by love. His decision to abandon her after their professions of devotion drives her to suicide. 5. When we read a play, we focus mostly on the text. When we see a play in the theater, however, we experience it visually as well as verbally. What nonverbal elements play important roles in Hwang's play? The Sound of a Voice illustrates the importance of nonverbal elements in achieving theatrical effects. Two complete scenes (scenes 4 and 6), as well as the conclusion, are played without words. Another episode (scene 8) depends on a visual trick (the man balancing his chin on the point of a sword) to create dramatic tension. Likewise, one of the central contests between the two characters is a physical fight with wooden sticks. The play's finale is a visual tableau. Music also plays an important role in establishing and maintaining the mood of the play. Students will be able to find other nonverbal elements of the play. Hwang reminds us of the importance of spectacle, even in a modest, two-character play. A play works by total representation of a drama, not by the words alone. There are a great many possible topics for papers based on Hwang's play. Students could trace a single image from the play (flowers would be an obvious candidate) and discuss its significance. Another interesting notion would be to discuss the use of music in the play: what does it contribute to the atmosphere and tone that words could not? Another good subject would be to examine the two scenes in the play (scenes 4 and 6) that are played without words: what effect do they have on the structure and feeling of the drama? Students could also discuss the end of The Sound of a Voice: is the woman's death tragic? The theme of suicide would also be an illuminating topic since both characters contemplate the idea, and the woman hangs herself at the end of the play. Students could compare the use of archetypal names (Man, Woman) in The Sound of a Voice to a similar technique in Edward Albee's The Sandbox (page 1474); do both playwrights achieve the same effect or are there significant differences? Finally, students could compare and contrast The Sound of _ _ a Voice with one of its models--either a No drama or one of Yeats's short plays. No plays _ are generally very brief (around ten pages). Arthur Waley's classic, The No Plays of Japan (New York: Grove, 1957) provides an excellent starting point. Any play by Seami, such as Tsunemasa or Kumasaka (both in the Waley book), the most celebrated master of the form, would work well. Several of Yeats's short plays provide excellent contrasts to Hwang's piece, most notably, Deidre, The Only Jealousy of Emer, and Purgatory.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE David Henry Hwang on Drama MULTICULTURAL THEATER, page 1777
1. What events contributed to Hwang's heightened conscious of his Asian roots? 2. What importance does Hwang feel mythology has in drama? 3. On what does Hwang think the notion of "ethnic theater" depends?
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Terrence McNally ANDRE'S MOTHER, page 1778
One of the major genres of American theater during the last ten years has been the AIDS play--dramas that explore the painful social, moral, and personal issues that came into public prominence in the epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Terrence McNally has examined these issues with his characteristic mixture of humor and humanity in Andre's Mother, a dramatic vignette of extraordinary compression. At the center of this compelling scene is the title character, a role without words. Students find this play provocative. Not only does it address a highly visible public issue, but the play's literary structure focuses the reader's attention on puzzling out what goes on inside Andre's Mother's mind.
1. What relation does Andre's Mother have to the other characters in the play? Her only connection is through her dead son, but they come from a part of his life she never knew--or at least never acknowledged. She has never met the other three people, although they played important roles in her son's life. She seems to be isolated in her grief and her unspoken disapproval of her son's homosexuality. Arthur, Penny, and Cal are articulate, sophisticated, witty people. Andre's Mother is neither urbane nor worldly (Andre is described by Cal as a "country boy"). There is a social distance between her and them. McNally portrays her intense isolation, confusion, and initial resentment through her silence. 2. Andre's Mother, the title character of this piece, never says a word in the course of the play. What thoughts and emotions do you think she experiences in the final scene? Give reasons for your opinions. The dramatic point of this vignette is to make the audience project their feelings onto the silent, suffering mother. McNally does not portray her in an entirely positive light. She refuses to speak, even as Cal desperately begs her for some response. She has also apparently never acknowledged that her son was gay. Her presumed disapproval made it impossible for Andre to speak to her either about his homosexuality or illness, and yet we feel the intensity and isolation of her grief. All we know about her feelings, however, are her external actions, which in the final scene appear understandably ambiguous. She wants to hold on to the balloon. She starts to let it go, then pulls it back to kiss it before finally letting it sail away. Her fixed stare on the balloon, however, suggests she cannot let go of her son or break his "last earthly ties" with her. However harshly we may have judged her earlier in the play, we are probably touched by her evident love and pain in this final moment. 3. Is the balloon a symbol in Andre's Mother? If so, what does it represent? This becomes the dominant symbol of McNally's vignette. Cal explains what he considers the balloons' significance. "They represent the soul," he explains. "When you let go, it means you're letting his soul ascend to Heaven. That you're willing to let go. Breaking the last earthly ties." It seems uncertain, however, whether Andre's Mother would share Cal's interpretation. When she finally lets go of her balloon, her slow, agonized gestures seem to confirm the permanence of her earthly ties. A more focused interpretation of the balloon is probably in order. The balloons may be intended to represent all the things that Cal claims, but they also come to symbolize the relationship each character has with the deceased. Arthur and Penny let go first; they knew him least well. Each expresses his or her personal perspective on him. Cal's farewell is more deeply complicated, especially since he speaks it to Andre's silent Mother. One might even suggest that the Mother's painful silence suggests all that went unspoken between her and her son. The balloons also be-
(text pages) 17781795 come surrogates for Andre, whose presence haunts the play he never enters. Can your students suggest other symbolic associations of the balloons? A good writing exercise would be to have students create a final speech for Andre's Mother. Ask them to write 500 words for her character to speak alone on the stage about her reactions to Andre's death. An alternate version of the assignment would be to have her speak to Andre's spirit, as if he could hear her. A more analytical topic would be to compare and contrast the silence of Andre's Mother with the attitudes of the speakers in Miller Williams's poem, "Thinking about Bill, Dead of AIDS" (page 1153).
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Terrence McNally on Drama HOW TO WRITE A PLAY, page 1781
McNally offers invaluable advice to all aspiring authors: the best way to become a writer is to write. He expresses himself with a light touch, but he puts forward some important ideas. Writing is a process, McNally asserts, that does not fully begin until one writes. Many students labor under the misconception that inspiration happens entirely away from one's desk or keyboard. McNally's sensible comments not only illuminates his own creative process but provide students with a helpful perspective on their own writing.
Milcha Sanchez-Scott THE CUBAN SWIMMER, page 1782
Very little criticism has been written about Milcha Sanchez-Scott, but she is a genuine dramatic talent. The Cuban Swimmer is one of the most interesting experimental plays in recent American theater. Sanchez-Scott is also one of the most profusely talented Hispanic playwrights now active. She is not a prolific writer, but her best work is richly conceived and brilliantly executed. Her plays like Latina (1980), The Cuban Swimmer (1984), and Roosters (1987) are important additions to contemporary American drama. The Cuban Swimmer is an experimental play in both form and style, but, unlike most experimental drama, it succeeds. This play requires no critical intervention to clarify its aims. Audiences intuitively follow Sanchez-Scott's innovative devices, and the play's cumulative impact is considerable. The Cuban Swimmer creates three distinct but inter-dependent worlds--the swimmer in the water, her family in the boat behind her, and the radio newscasters in the helicopter. Obviously, none of these worlds can be presented realistically on-stage. They must be stylized in some way by the director and the designer. This factor highlights the symbolic--almost allegorical--atmosphere of the play, a quality the author both indulges and satirizes. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Cuban Swimmer is the bilingual texture of the dialogue. Sanchez-Scott creates two separate linguistic worlds--the mixture of Spanish and English spoken by the Suárez family and the cliché-ridden media English of the newscasters. These two "dialects" also differ in another crucial sense--one is the private language of love, duty, and tradition; the other is the public language of hyperbole and manipulation. Although The Cuban Swimmer brilliantly employs the visual potential of theatrical spectacle, the play centers on language. Significantly, one does not need to know Spanish to enjoy the play (although a sizable portion of the text is en Español).
(text pages) 17821795 Sanchez-Scott carefully positions the Spanish so that a monolingual English-speaker can guess most of it from context while still experiencing the cultural richness of the characters' bilingual existence. There is so much family drama going on in The Cuban Swimmer that an attentive reader might meaningfully examine almost every relationship--across generations, across genders, across cultures. At the center of the family drama is Eduardo Suárez, whose driving ambition is for his daughter Margarita to achieve athletic fame and success. As both her coach and father, he projects his own complex set of needs and desires (as father, immigrant, and exile) on Margarita. The play signals some of his desires overtly and others indirectly. His boat, for instance, is named La Havana, an ironic moniker for a political exile who runs a salvage yard. His wife is--Sanchez-Scott revels in such symbolic possibilities--the former Miss Cuba. His nineteen-year-old daughter is the "Cinderella entry" in the "Wrigley Invitational Women's Swim to Catalina," and probably the only amateur among the professional swimmers. The ending of The Cuban Swimmer deserves some commentary. The play has flirted with symbolism from the opening (in a dozen details from the generically named Abuela to the religious prayers and oaths said by the family), but now it unfolds into a sort of Magic Realism reminiscent of García Márquez. Pushed by her father past endurance, Margarita seems to drown. She certainly disappears. Then she miraculously reappears on the breakers off Santa Catalina to win the race. The radio announcers call her upset victory in language that bespeaks not only media hype but also the Latin Catholic imagery that is woven through the play. Here are the play's final words: This is indeed a miracle! It's a resurrection! Margarita Suárez, with a flotilla of boats to meet her, is now walking on the waters, through the breakers . . . onto the beach, with crowds of people cheering her on. What a jubilation! This is a miracle! Shakespeare's The Tempest and Milton's "Lycidas" also seem to be hovering around the play's climax--or, at the very least, the traditional myths of death, sea-change, and resurrection. Sanchez-Scott has so carefully prepared us for the magical final tableau that it seems simultaneously both surprising and inevitable for this daughter of Miss Cuba and the head usher of the Holy Name Society to be reborn miraculously out of the sea to Santa Catalina--like Jesus walking on the waves. The Cuban Swimmer's comic tone allows us to view this final scene ironically, but the play's tight symbolic structure also suggests we should take it seriously. That so complex and ambitious an ending could work testifies to Sanchez-Scott's imaginative power. Sandra Santa Cruz directed a production of The Cuban Swimmer in 1997 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. (The photo for The Cuban Swimmer found in the book was taken from this production.) She wrote an interesting account of her experiences selecting, producing, and directing the play, from which we offer a few excerpts: In selecting a play, I began to search for a work that would look at the Hispanic experience, a community we are not normally accustomed to seeing in American theater. I was disappointed to encounter a number of one-act plays written by Hispanic playwrights whose stories seemed to focus negatively on Hispanic life. While I am not particularly interested in a one-sided, idealized portrait of the Hispanic experience, I don't agree with those works which portray Hispanics, or any other community, from a demoralizing, degrading perspective. In my opinion, this negative imagery only serves to reinforce and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Rather, I am interested in works that present a range of choices. I found Milcha Sanchez-Scott's The Cuban Swimmer to represent a realistic portrait of a family who oscillates between adversity and triumph; frustration and hope.
(text pages) 17821797 From the outset, The Cuban Swimmer seemed to capture the imagination, interest and excitement of people throughout the Theater department. It presented a unique set of challenges, the most obvious of which is the setting--the ocean! How would that environment be created? Secondly, it portrays the experience of a Cuban family. How would a cast who was largely unfamiliar with this particular culture and language relate to the language and characterization? Although only a seemingly short one-act play, the events of Cuban Swimmer range from stasis to crisis, from calm to fury. The external world imposes itself through the television media and the natural world through calamity. . . . In my opinion, The Cuban Swimmer explores the fundamental question of identify; one's own image of "self," how that "self" is defined and how that self-identity is tested. It's about the loss of dignity and confidence in oneself and how that affects self-image. The play is driven by the emotional, physical, and spiritual survival of a family whose hopes and dreams have been undermined by a callous external world. Despite the dangers and hardships of the open sea, the real battle lies within the family itself; especially when their image of "self" is shattered. . . . Ultimately, Margarita finds the inner strength to emerge triumphant; transcending limitations imposed by an external world and in full possession of her self--"self-possessed," so to speak.
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE Milcha Sanchez-Scott on Drama WRITING THE CUBAN SWIMMER, page 1796
Milcha Sanchez-Scott provides an extremely interesting account of her life and literary development in M. Elizabeth Osborn's valuable anthology, On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1987). This book also reprints Sanchez-Scott's Roosters. The excerpt reprinted in Literature describes the author's discovery of herself as a writer as well as the initial inspiration for The Cuban Swimmer.
August Wilson JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, page 1797
1. What does Bynum's "shining man" represent? What is the significance of his telling Bynum to rub blood on himself? What action of Loomis's in Act III does this ritual foreshadow? 2. What is implied when, in Act II, Scene 2, Bynum asks Loomis whether he has ever been in Johnstown? 3. Who is Joe Turner? What does he represent? 4. At what moment does the crisis occur in Joe Turner's Come and Gone? 5. After reading Wilson's play, what would you say is the Secret of Life that Bynum learns from the shining man?
(text pages) 17971846 6. What, if anything, does Wilson's play have to say about religion? 7. For discussion: Do you think the play would have been more effective had Herald Loomis and his wife decided to stay together once they had been reunited? 8. Comment on the spelling of Loomis's name. Is he a herald? If so, what message does he impart? 9. What is the theme of Joe Turner's Come and Gone? Is it stated in the play, or only implied? David Savran remarks about Wilson's play: Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which takes place in 1911, performs a ritual of purification, setting African religious tradition against American Christianity. It documents the liberation of the spiritually bound Herald Loomis, who years before had been pressed into illegal servitude by the bounty hunter named in the play's title. In the course of the play the details of everyday life in a Pittsburgh boarding house give way to the patterns of African religion and ritual. With the help of Bynum, an African healer, a "Binder of What Clings," Loomis effects his own liberation. He recognizes that his enslavement has been self-imposed; this man "who done forgot his song" finds it again. Bynum explains to him: "You bound on to your song. All you got to do is stand up and sing it, Herald Loomis. It's right there kicking at your throat. All you got to do is sing it. Then you be free" (In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights [New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989] 289). The lines Savran quotes, appearing in the play's final scene, are perhaps as good a statement of the play's theme as there is. The troubled Loomis is a herald, it seems--Bynum's "One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way" (see Bynum's long speech in Act I, Scene 1). What Loomis learns, and shows the others, is that African-Americans, if they search, can find within themselves and their African traditions the power to be free. This is apparently the Secret of Life that Bynum has learned from his "shining man." Everyone has to find his own song. Only then can he make his mark on life. Bynum, the conjure man, is a pivotal character. At the start of the play, he is the only one who has found his song (though Bertha and Jeremy seem closer to having found theirs than do some of the other characters). Loomis, when he first appears, is still under the influence of Joe Turner, the cruel bounty hunter who personifies all the evils of slavery. Thus Loomis frightens the others, seems to them crazy and unpredictable. Though Seth knows where Martha Pentecost is, he refuses to tell Loomis. In fact, Loomis is a man searching for his song. Bynum also realizes that, after their long period of slavery and separation, black people have to seek and find one another. That's why his magic is aimed at bringing people together. That's also why he likes the People Finder, and why he encourages Jeremy to go "down to Seefus" to play his guitar, even though Bertha warns him the place might get raided. "That's where the music at," Bynum says. "That's where the people at. The people down there making music and enjoying themselves. Some things is worth taking the chance going to jail about." Several of the characters in Wilson's play are in search of the right person to connect with. What makes this play so life-affirming is that some of them, by reaching out, find what they're looking for. The turning point in the play seems to come at the end of Act I, when Loomis has his vision, making such a commotion that Seth tells him he'll have to leave the boarding house. Only Bynum realizes how crucial that vision is to Loomis's spiritual health. By this
(text pages) 17971846 time he clearly believes that Loomis is a shining man. That's why he asks, on the following day, whether Loomis has ever been in Johnstown. It was in Johnstown that Bynum had the experience with the shining man that he tells Selig about in Act I, Scene 1. By singing the Joe Turner song in Act II, Scene 2, Bynum gets Loomis to unburden himself, to reconnect with his own African roots. As if by instinct, Loomis seems to know he can do so by rubbing himself with his own blood, thus acting out the ritual Bynum has described to Selig in Act I, Scene 1. Wilson is clearly aware that blood functions as a Christian symbol of purification. Martha urges Loomis to be washed in the blood of the Lamb. But Loomis rejects the Christianity that sustains his wife. Purification comes for Loomis and Bynum not through Christianity but through the powerful African rituals of their forefathers. "I don't need nobody to bleed for me!" Herald says. "I can bleed for myself." Loomis's song is "the song of self-sufficiency." When he learns to sing it, he becomes a shining man. Students need to pay attention to Wilson's prologue ("The Play," preceding Act I, Scene 1). The world of Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a now-vanished corner of American society--a world of poor drifters, of migrants from the cotton fields to the booming Pittsburgh steel mills of 1911. But although times have changed, the situation of the characters ("foreigners in a strange land" seeking "a new identity") may recall that of any new settlers in a big city, whether Africans, Hispanics, or Asians. For class discussion: How does the play remind us of the lives (and problems) of minority people today, who find themselves transplanted to an American city from a very different culture? For another topic for discussion, have students read Wilson's comments to his interviewer, Bill Moyers, in "Black Experience in America" in the "Writer's Perspective" following the play. How does the play reflect Wilson's views? Particularly interesting may be Wilson's opinion that African-Americans were ill advised to leave the South. Here are three suggested writing topics: 1. The importance of magic in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. 2. Is Wilson a symbolist? (That he imparts a message and that he portrays real and recognizable people does not prevent his play from being richly suggestive. Joe Turner, Bynum's "shining man," and the blood rituals that are part of the quest for an individual song all hint at larger meanings. Students may find others as well.) 3. For a long paper, one entailing some research in a library: In what ways has life for most African-Americans changed since the 1911 of which Wilson writes? In what ways have problems and conditions of life stayed the same? Wilson's play was first performed in a staged reading in 1984 at a playwright's conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. Later, in 1986 and 1987, it had two productions by the Yale Repertory Theater. Shortly thereafter, in 1988, a successful Broadway production received great acclaim: "haunting, profound, indescribably moving" (Frank Rich in The New York Times); "Wilson's best play" (William A. Henry III in Time). Students might be asked to comment on this summing up by Henry in Time for April 11, 1988, and if necessary argue with it: At the end, when Loomis seems pathetically shorn of his consuming purpose . . . the most spiritual boarder perceives in him instead the "shiny man" of a folkloric religious vision. In that moment, spectators too find themselves transported from pity to admiration: Loomis has transformed his pointless suffering into an ennobling search for life's meaning. Shortly after Wilson received a second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson in April
(text pages) 17971847 1990, he made a few revealing comments to an interviewer. Nothing in his work is autobiographical, he declared; nothing he has written has been taken from his own experience. He has successfully avoided studying other playwrights. He claims to have read nothing by Shakespeare except The Merchant of Venice (in high school), nothing by Ibsen, Miller, or Tennessee Williams. The only other playwrights whose work he admits to knowing are Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Athol Fugard. He doesn't go to the theater himself, hasn't been to a movie in ten years. "Part of this creative isolation is self-protective fear," explains the interviewer, Kevin Kelly. "Wilson is afraid of tampering with those chaotically rich and whimsically independent forces in his head, terrified of confusing their voices and stories with the voices and stories of other writers" ("August Wilson's True Stories," Boston Globe, April 29, 1990).
WRITER'S PERSPECTIVE August Wilson on Drama BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA, page 1846
1. What does Wilson see as a part of his purpose in writing plays? "To see some of the choices that we as blacks in America have made." 2. How does Joe Turner's Come and Gone illuminate any such choices? Wilson has respect and affection for black folk culture, with its elements of myth and magic. Perhaps, he hints, it risks disappearance when transplanted to the urban North. 3. What light do Wilson's remarks throw on the line in the play, "Everyone has to find his own song"? These characters, as the playwright sees them, are looking for their African identities. That they are embarked on any such quest won't be obvious to most readers. Students will need to do some thinking and discussing in order to make sense of Wilson's claim. What is an African identity? How does Herald Loomis end up with one at the end? Carefully reread the playwright's explanatory stage directions in the last moments of the play.