THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 18, Number 1 Winter 2006
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editor: David Savran
Managing Editor: Ken Nielsen
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Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF N EW YORK
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Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
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Jorge Huerta
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Shannon Jackson
Jonathan Kalb
Jill Lane
Thomas Postlewait
Robert Vorlicky
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 18, Number 1 Winter 2006
CONTENTS
DEBORAH BAILIN
OUR KIND: ALBEE'S ANIMALS IN SEASCAPE AND
THE GoAT OR, WHo Is SYLVIA?
ROBERT HAYNES
THE KIDDERS AND THE DISAPPOINTMENT CLUB: A CRITICAL
THEME IN HoRTON's FooTE's THE YoUNG MAN FROM ATIANTA.
ANITA DUNEER
ON THE VERGE OF A BREAKTHROUGH: PROJECTIONS OF ESCAPE
FROM THE ATTIC AND THE THWARTED TOWER INCHARLOTTE PERKINS
GILMAN'S "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER" AND SUSAN GLASPELL'S
THE VERGE
BUELL WISNER
'WAITING IN THE ANGEL'S WINGS': MARxiST FANTASIA IN
NAOMI WALLACE'S SLAUGHTER CITY
CONTRIBUTORS
5
24
34
54
72
jOURNAL OF AME!UCJ\N DRAMA AND THEATRE 18, N0.1 (WINTER 2006)
OUR KIND:
ALBEE's ANIMALs IN SEASCAPE AND THE GoAT OR, WHo Is
SYLV'IA.?
DEBORAH BAILIN
I went to the zoo to find out more about the way people
exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each
other, and with people too. It probably wasn't a fair test,
what with everyone separated by bars from everyone else,
the animals for the most part from each other, and always
the people from the animals. But, if it's a zoo, that's the
way it is.
- The Zoo Story
I
Since The Zoo Story (1959), Edward Albee has explored human
nature by dramatizing the relationship between humanity and animality-
the boundaries, intersections, and continuities that both connect us to
and divide us from our ancestors and cousins of other species. In a 1981
interview, responding to a question about taking risks by putting animals
onstage in Seascape (1975), Albee draws attention to the dangerous ambi-
guities of this relationship, remarking, " the people wandering around in
most of my plays are animals. We are animals, are we not? ... I'm inter-
ested in the fact that so much of what I think is wrong with the world
has to do with the fact that man's nature is so close to the bestial."! While
The Zoo Story, Seascape, and The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes toward a
Definition of Tragec!J) (2003) all involve nonhuman animals, only in the later
two plays do these animals actually appear onstage. Through conflicts
evolving from this inescapable physical presence, Albee risks destabiliz-
ing common humanist assumptions about what it means to belong-in a
phrase that resonates throughout these two plays-to "our own kind" by
challenging his human characters to confront both the animal other and
the animal self. At stake in both plays is the definition of what it means
to be human.
1
Mark Anderson and Earl Ingersoll, "Living on the Precipice: A
Conversation with Edward Albee" (1981), in Conversations with Edu;ard Albee, ed. Phillip
C. Kolin Oackson: UP of .Mississippi, 1988), 170.
6
BAlUN
Seascape and The Goat differ structurally from The Zoo Story in that
unlike the dog in The Zoo Story, the lizards and the goat in these plays
function not just as narrative elements but as actual characters, thus alter-
ing the scope and representational possibilities of the relationship
between the human animal and other creatures.z In The Zoo Story, Jerry's
relationship with the dog, the "black monster of a beast," happens off-
stage; the only relationship Peter and the audience have with the dog is
through Jerry's narrative) Consequently, neither Peter nor the audience
experiences the direct contact between the human animal and other ani-
mals so central to the other two plays. In contrast, Sarah and Leslie, the
lizards in Seascape, after emerging from the sea, spend the entire second
act onstage, speaking English and interacting with Nancy and Charlie,
linking their own destiny by the end of the play with that of the two
humans. And while Sylvia, Martin's beloved goat in The Goat, makes her
only appearance onstage dead at the end, Martin's relationship with her
drives the play's action, devastatingly transforming his relationships with
his wife, son, and best friend. By putting other animals onstage in Seascape
and The Goat, Albee dramatizes in the flesh how the best in our nature is
so often disturbingly inseparable from the beast-how the capacity to
learn, grow, think, communicate, evolve, and perhaps most important, to
love is inseparable from the "monster," the "goat-fucker," and the scaly,
green, reptilian ancestor who once crawled up from the slime.
Yet to express the relationship between humanity and animality
in these terms, which implicitly impose a hierarchy in which the best qual-
ities are always superior, "human" ones and the worst are always inferior,
"bestial," and hence, "animal" ones, is to indulge in what Joan Dunayer
has termed "speciesism," and thereby to evade the potential challenges of
Albee's more characteristic tendency to prod and unsettle the compla-
cencies of his audience. Speciesism, in Dunayer's words, refers to "the
assumption that other animals are inferior to humans and do not warrant
2 Frequently, criticism reduces Sarah and Leslie to symbols. See Christopher
Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Tiventieth-Century American Drama, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1982), 317-318; and Liam Purdon, 'The Limits of Reason: Seascape as
Psychic Metaphor," Modern Critical Views: Edward A/bee, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 119. My discussion departs by taking them at face
value, as real animals, as Albee himself insists they are (Christopher Bigsby, Modern
American Drama: 1945-2000 [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000], 144).
3 Edward Albee, The Zoo Story: A Play in One Scene (New York: Signet, 1959),
30. Hereafter, page references to The Zoo Story are cited parenthetically in text.
OUR KIND: ALBEE'S ANIMALS 7
equal consideration and respect."4 Anthropocentric and culturally perva-
sive, speciesism has roots in the hierarchical mind/body dichotomy
defined by Descartes and which, according to Kay Anderson, forms a
boundary that, over the last few centuries, has only become "increasing-
ly chauvinistically drawn within the larger Cartesian framework of
Western dualistic thought."S Speciesism places humans in a special cate-
gory, separate from and superior to all other living creatures, not because
other animals are "different," to use Leslie's terminology (when describ-
ing his contempt for the fish), but because, supposedly possessing body
without mind and soul, they are "stupid."6 Leslie's speciesist and mar-
velously human assertion, however, illustrates a primary flaw in speciesist
thinking, namely, the conflation of difference with stupidity and inferior-
ity-a line of reasoning that humans have used throughout history not
only to devalue other animals but also to support socially, culturally, and
politically oppressive hegemonies by identifying the "other" with the ani-
mal. In confronting the question of human/ animal boundaries in these
plays, Albee brings the problem of speciesist reasoning uncomfortably
close to the surface, destabilizing the very language commonly used to
justify, explain, and exploit difference.
Indeed, even Albee's own discourse precariously negotiates the
complex instabilities of speciesist reasoning. In his words quoted earlier,
he says, employing speciesist language, that "what I think is wrong with
the world has to do with the fact that man's nature is so close to the bes-
tial," but his plays dislocate the idea of the bestial from a term for the
merely animal to one for the barbarous creature that only a human being
can become. In Seascape, and especially in The Goat, it is the humans, in
spite of their minds, who exhibit stupid behavior and some of the worst
qualities- betrayal, duplicity, dishonesty, anger, aggression, idleness.
Other animals teach them about what it means to think, learn, commu-
nicate, understand, grow, evolve, and love. Not surprisingly, even lao-
4 Joan Dunayer, "Sexist Words, Speciesisr Roots," Animals and Women: Feminist
Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham: Duke UP,
1995), 11.
5 Kay Anders, "Animals, Science, and Spectacle in the City," Animal
Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, eds. Jennifer Wolch
and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998), 30.
6 Edward Albee, Seascape: A Play in T1vo Acts (New York: Dramatists Play
Service, 1975), 42. Hereafter, page references to Seascape are cited parenthetically in text.
8 BAlUN
guage, perhaps the most "human" of human qualities, often fails, as the
idea of the beast comes to suggest not a human lacking human qualities,
but a human lacking animal qualities.
In stating that the characters in Seascape "exist on the boundaries
of land and sea, past and future, pre-history and history, event and emo-
tion,"7 Christopher Bigsby neglects an additional, more significant set of
boundaries-that between the human and the animal. Confronting this
boundary in these plays means confronting the limitations of the merely
human by peering, momentarily, across the dizzying, multidimensional,
interspecies spectrum of continuities and discontinuities that both unites
and divides. Without discounting all that unquestionably does separate
the human from other species, Jacques Derrida argues that discussion of
this boundary really only
becomes interesting once, instead of asking whether or
not there is a discontinuous limit, one attempts to think
what a limit becomes once it is abyssal, once the frontier
no longer forms a single indivisible line but more than
one internally divided line, once, as a result, it can no
longer be traced, objectified, or counted as single and
indivisible. s
In these plays, Albee embarks on journeys to this disconcertingly abyssal
frontier, where language itself, perhaps the most obviously distinguish-
able human difference, breaks down and the characters, human and non-
human alike, must confront each other on equally animal terms; Nancy
and Charlie, Martin and Stevie find out more about what it means to be
human by learning more about what it means to be animal from two
evolving lizards and a tragically beloved goat.
II
Such a suggestion, however, that a human, like Martin, might learn some-
thing profound about the nature of his being from a goat, has provoked
disapproving reviews accusing Albee of crossing the limits of audience
7 Bigsby, A Critical Introduction, 318.
8 Jacques Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (M:ore to Follow),"
trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 399.
OUR KIND: ALBEE'S ANIMALS 9
tolerance with The Goat.9 While Albee himself has admitted deliberately
attempting to test such limits, the kind of tolerance he aims for seems less
the tolerance of what makes Martin an "animal" for having sex with a
goat than the tolerance of what makes it so difficult for Martin to differ-
entiate in his love between Sylvia, the goat, and Stevie, his wife. In other
words, the tolerance being tested involves less the problem of Martin's
bestiality than the more universally problematic ambiguities Albee reveals
about human animality and the consequent undermining of speciesist
assumptions about what it means to be a human being. By the end of the
play, Albee wants his audience to ask not only the question in the title,
"Who is Sylvia?," but also, by extension, "Who are we?" Similarly, by the
end of Seascape, Nancy's repeated question upon first seeing the lizards,
'What are they?" (22-24), also implicitly resonates with a reflexive quali-
ty, as the boundaries dividing human beings, respectively, from goat and
lizards become less and less clear.
Answering these questions in both plays becomes a problem of
language, or as Leslie would say, defining one's terms, for the problems
of human language as an inexact and even dangerously flawed means of
communication figure centrally in how both plays approach human/ ani-
mal intersections. In Seascape, language repeatedly fails to express for
Sarah and Leslie essential meanings that Nancy and Charlie previously
have taken for granted; in The Goat, language breaks down entirely as the
argument Martin and Stevie have about Martin's "affair" disintegrates
into an existential dispute over pronoun reference, about she-ness and it-
ness, who-ness and what-ness. Before and beyond language, however,
characters first enter the interspecies abyss without words, through look-
ing, feeling, and acting on a primal, nonverbal level. Here, on a liminal
plane that Stevie, "with quiet loathing," mockingly and bitterly scoffs at
as ''goat level,"
1
0 humanity and animality converge and the speciesist hier-
archy collapses, as human characters meet nonhuman characters not as
mere animals but as mere!y other animals.
In his book, About Looking, John Berger writes, "the animal has
secrets ... specifically addressed to man," that "man becomes aware of
himself" through the apprehension of these secrets by "returning the
9 See reviews by Ben Brantley, David Finkle, Elysa Gardner, Linda Winer,
and others at <http:/ /www.billpullman.org/Biography/bio02.htmml>.
10 Edward Albee, The Goat or; Who Is Sylvia? (Notes to1vard a Definition of
Tragu!J) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2003), 39. Hereafter, page references to
The Goat are cited parenthetically in text.
10 BAILIN
look [of the animal]." These "secrets," Berger explains, have to do with
"animals as an intercession between man and his origin," and wordless
exchanges of looking in both plays, through which the other animals pass
on their "secrets" to the human characters, are silendy but psychological-
ly transformative.
11
Settings dramatize the liminality of these exchanges
as the experiences of human and other animal characters intersect in
locations that evoke the frontier, border, and abyss. At the edge of the
sea where Nancy and Charlie meet Sarah and Leslie in Seascape, from the
crest of a hill where Martin first sets eyes upon Sylvia in The Goat, con-
tact becomes a perceptual process in which the human characters cross a
dangerous threshold of understanding, a point of no return from the dis-
covery of the "secrets" of the animal.
The locations of these encounters recall the entrance hall in The
Zoo Story, a place as Jerry says, "where better to make a beginning ... to
understand and just possibly be understood" (35). In The Zoo Story,
though, that understanding never really happens; while initially dangerous
for both Jerry and the dog, the entrance hall becomes a place where both
human and dog flnally pass freely, through "feign[ed] indifference,"
because though they "had made many attempts at contact, " they ulti-
mately "had failed" (35). The danger, Albee implies, lies in the exchange
of that silent understanding and both Jerry and the dog feign indifference
to avoid it. The doorway, too, represents a less risky, less absolute thresh-
old, because it suggests a potential for motion in both directions absent
from the edge of the sea and the crest of a hill. These encounters fail
because Jerry always avoids the dog rather than meeting him on an even
plane, at "dog level." The dog is always just a dog, a mere animal, a "black
monster of a beast," rather than another animal. As Jerry passes by the
dog, he distracts him in order to avoid the dangers of really connecting.
In contrast, the two later plays develop the possibilities of what happens
when contact, like that which failed for Jerry and the dog, becomes an
uncertainly optimistic experiment in Seascape and a catastrophically suc-
cessful consummation in The Goat. Unlike Jerry, who recognizes the dan-
gers of real understanding, the characters in Seascape and The Goat unwit-
tingly, fatefully, fall into the abyss of secrets and flnd themselves at new
and inexpressibly liminal levels of self-awareness.
In Seascape, initially encountering the lizards stuns Nancy and
Charlie into inarticulate awe as well as silent submission to the "animal."
When the lizards, Sarah and Leslie, appear from behind the dune,
II John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 3-4. Italics are
Berger's.
OUR KIND: ALBEE'S ANIMALS 11
Charlie's first reaction is instinctively physical and aggressively defensive.
He commands Nancy to "get [him] a stick," because "they're going to
come at us" (22). Nancy reluctantly complies though the small stick she
finds, especially in comparison to the much larger one Leslie brandishes,
illustrates the irony of this kind of response, in addition to its ridicu-
lousness. Both Charlie and Leslie behave, in speciesist terms, like "ani-
mals." Unable or unwilling to accept something so far beyond his frame-
work of comprehension, after the unsatisfactory stick-waving, Charlie
next responds by insisting that he and Nancy have been poisoned by
spoiled liver paste, are dead, and have encountered some sort of post-
mortem hallucination. Yet while Charlie tries to block and rationalize the
presence of the lizards, Nancy responds only with a sense of over-
whelming wonder, exclaiming as she hands Charlie the stick, "they're
magnificent! ... I think they're absolutely beautiful! What are they?" (23).
Nancy's reaction suggests a recognition of something that does not
entirely transfer to words, certainly not in a way she can translate for
Charlie. Both "beautiful" and "terrifying" to the human characters (28),
the appearance of the lizards suggests an experience almost of the sub-
lime. Finally, Charlie has no choice but to submit to it and to surrender
to both the animal other and the animal self- literally, to the inspection
and mercy of Leslie and Sarah but also to the recognition of his and
Nancy's own animality. Nancy observes, "We may be dead already,
Charlie, but I think we're going to die again. Here they come!" (25), and
Act I ends with Nancy and Charlie in a "submission pose" (26), vulnera-
ble to the whims of the lizards and transformed by their attempt to com-
municate with the lizards through their bodies.
In The Goat, when Martin first encounters Sylvia, his feelings of
wonder and awe, like Nancy's, are overwhelming and transformative but
untranslatable. He tells Ross, his friend, that "it wasn't like anything I'd
felt before; it was ... so ... amazing, so ... extraordinary!" (21). In repeating
his description of the encounter to Stevie, Martin expresses an even more
exaggerated sense of awe and wonder, explaining that he felt as if "an
alien came out of whatever it was, and it. .. took me with it, and it
was ... an ecstasy and a purity, and a .. .love of a ... (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-
able kind" (39). Ultimately, it was "an understanding so natural, so
intense, that [Martin] will never forget it," and in fact, he can only describe
the ecstasy of first looking into Sylvia's eyes in orgasmic terms, "as
intense as the night [Stevie] and I came at the same time" (40) . Looking
into Sylvia's eyes, Martin experiences an epiphany. Some fundamental
truth beyond anything he has ever thought overcomes him, but his expe-
rience can only be felt, never fully articulated or explained. Just as Nancy
12 BAlUN
and Charlie at the end of Act I have no choice but to get into a submis-
sion pose and abandon themselves to the scrutiny of Sarah and Leslie, so
Martin finds himself incapable of anything but surrender to Sylvia's gaze,
to "those ryes of hers" (21), and to all the inexpressible, secret, sublime,
transformative, "animal" truth her eyes convey.
III
Once the characters establish this "beginning" or "understanding," (35)
as Jerry calls it, on a nonverbal level, grappling with the experience, trans-
lating it, and making sense of its implications for defining the relation-
ship between human being and animal being become problems of lan-
guage. Albee has said, "the fact that our tails have fallen off and that we
have developed metaphor strikes me as part of the evolutionary
process."t2 While Leslie is stili "extremely proud of his tail" (52), Seascape
is in many ways a dramatization of this process-a play about the func-
tion of language as a step in evolutionary development. Both lizards and
humans, by the end of the play, realize that language, the ability to talk,
"you know, English" (31), offers them extraordinary possibilities in the
shaping of their own destinies by providing the words (or at least the
potential to find the words) to shape thought and define experience.
However, Albee's idea of evolution does not necessarily support
progressive development towards something better, for he has also ques-
tioned the notion that "we're on top of the pile" just because "we're the
most recent animal."
1
3 The possibilities for language, even in Seascape, are
precarious and hardly inevitable, and while Seascape concludes with a ten-
tati\e hopefulness, the failures of language in The Goat reverse this
process, as characters lose the power to affirm their humanity by losing
the power words have always offered to define self and experience.
Discovery of the inexpressible "secrets" of the animal exposes in both
plays the limitations of language as a means of defining the human and
thus of clearly mapping a boundary between humanity and animality.
Even though language itself so often clearly characterizes human differ-
ence, Albee here explores language in ways that fractalize that line of dif-
ference and evoke what Derrida, in the passage quoted above, calls an
12 Mark Anderson and Earl Ingersoll, "Living on the Precipice: A
Conversation with Edward Albee" (1981), in Kolin, 159.
13 Jeanne Wolf, "Jeanne Wolf in Conversation with Edward Albee" (1975), in
Kolin, 117.
OUR KlND: ALBEE'S N I ~ ~ \ L S 13
abyss of not "a single indivisible line but more than one internally divid-
ed line." In these plays, instead of resolving questions of human differ-
ence, language, in its frustrating imprecision, merely serves to complicate
them.
Early in the second act, before the human and nonhuman char-
acters in 5 eascape connect through language, the power of words to shape
reality offers the protection, safety, and reassurance of denial. After
Nancy and Charlie fall into their submission poses, Leslie and Sarah first
establish physical, "animal" contact with some preliminary poking and
sniffing. Then, when Leslie speaks to the humans, Nancy responds, but
Charlie refuses, explaining that if he spoke to "it" (meaning Leslie), he
would "have to accept it" (29). Answering Leslie-admitting him into
language-would be an acknowledgement that the giant talking lizard is
real; Charlie fears that an exchange of mere words will give substance to
what he feels cannot be real.
Soon, however, languages appears to bridge the abyss. After
some prompting and prodding by the lizards, a tentative conversation
begins, as Charlie tries to illustrate his and Nancy's relative friendliness by
telling the lizards, "we don't eat our own kind" (31), which seems an odd
statement, certainly dubious to Leslie, given that Charlie and Nancy are
humans and Leslie and Sarah lizards. By "our own kind," though, Charlie
refers not to species but to language: "we don't eat anything that ... well,
anything that talks; you know, English" (31). Leslie remains doubtful,
answering Charlie with the obvious, ''You see ... you're not our kind, so
you can understand the apprehension" (31), but the continuation of the
conversation subdues him as language becomes a tool for establishing
common ground. It mitigates suspicion by making communication pos-
sible in spite of real difference. At least temporarily, language suspends
speciesist conceit on the part of both humans and lizards long enough
for all of them to get acquainted.
For a while, the ability to "talk English" works well enough to
maintain common ground. As long as words correspond to objects, the
humans can communicate relatively well with the lizards, though
nonetheless, they find themselves in the unusual position of having to
explain relationships between words and referents they have never before
questioned. The lizards, for example, call all of their limbs "legs," vexing
Nancy and Charlie with the question of why, as Leslie asks, they "differ-
entiate" in their terminology between arms and legs. Charlie's "quietly
hysterical" though comically logical answer, that arms are "the ones with
the hands on them" (32), satisfies the lizards sufficiently for the discus-
sion to move on to "clothes," which receive a similarly straightforward
14 BAILIN
explanation. When the conversation moves on to "breasts," the lizards
require visual aid and analogy, but even though they do not know what
breasts are, after Nancy shows hers to Sarah, they catch on by way of
likening what Sarah sees to whale anatomy, something they have
observed before. As long as talk revolves around the empirical territory
of "animal" comparisons-bodies, mating habits, breeding, other ani-
mals-language, though disconcertingly challenged, grounds their rela-
tionship, ironically, not by articulating any sort of relative "humanity" but
by reinforcing their common animality.
Even more ironically, language fails Nancy and Charlie almost
entirely when they try to define "human" qualities like love and the emo-
tions that they suppose Sarah and Leslie possess. As soon as all four
humans and sea creatures accept each other on the basis of shared lan-
guage and common animality, the reliability of language begins to erode.
While discussing the raising of children, Nancy tells Sarah that the rea-
son humans keep their children at home for eighteen or twenty years, in
addition to the necessity of preparing them for the world, is that "we love
them" (38). In the ensuing conversation, confounding difficulties arise
when words are disconnected from experience and lack the obvious ref-
erents that "arms," "clothes" and "breasts" have:
LESLIE.
CHARLIE.
LESLIE.
CHARLIE.
LESLIE.
CHARLIE.
NANCY
SARAH.
NANCY
LESLIE.
(Turns to Charlie and sits on his haunches.)
Explain.
What?
What you said.
We said we love them.
Yes; explain.
(Incredulous.) What love means!?
(To Sarah.) Love? Love is one of the
emotions. (Thry look at her, waiting.) One
of the emotions, Sarah.
(After a tif!Y pause.) But, what are they?!
(Becoming impatient.) Well you must have
them. You must have emotions.
(Sits. Quite impatient.) We may, or we
may not, but we'll never know until you
define your terms. (38)
The problem for Nancy and Charlie, of course, is how to translate
humanity-how to define terms that rely for their meaning only on
"human" experience.
OLIR KIND: ALBEE'S ANIMALS 15
Ways of speaking, Nancy tells Charlie in the first act, are really
ways of thinking and feeling, and Charlie finally communicates "love"
and "emotion" to Sarah not by defining them but by making her experi-
ence them, asking her what she would do "if Leslie went away ... for a
long time" and "was never coming back" (54). Sarah becomes distraught,
as if Leslie really has gone away, though she can hardly find words for
what she feels, stammering, "I'd ... cry, I'd ... cry! I'd .. . I'd cry my eyes out!
Oh ... Leslie!" (54). What happens to her recalls the experiences of inex-
pressible feeling that overwhelm human characters in both plays, as well
as Charlie's argument with Leslie a few pages earlier about Descartes, in
which Leslie ponders his own version of, "I think therefore I am."
Beneath the surface of language, adrift somewhere in the interspecies
abyss, thinking and feeling, more so than speaking, are what define "our
kind."
Yet perhaps most ironic of all, Charlie's use of language creates
an illusion that provokes real feeling. Thus, while words, as Nancy says,
"are lies" (20), in fact they hardly fail Charlie in defming "emotion" and
"love" for Sarah because his words produce her genuine experience and
hence her understanding. Significantly, language mediates experience in
more than one way. Characters use it to describe features of their com-
mon animality-arms, legs, breasts-but more importantly, it defines
"our kind" in terms of both evolution and culture. Language not only
describes the world but also adds new dimensions. It not only communi-
cates but creates.
Like Descartes, Albee does make a distinction in Seascape
between "our kind" and the "brute beast" (54). However, Albee's dis-
tinction obscures a clear human/ animal boundary defined in terms of
species because being of "our kind" does not depend, as it does for
speciesists, upon devaluing the "animal" body-the part that, in Nancy's
words, simply "eat[s] carrots" (53). Nancy explains further that she is
"not one of these people says I'm better than a ... rabbit; just that I'm
more interesting: I use tools, I make art ... (Turning introspective) ... and I'm
aware of my own mortality" (53). In Act I, when Charlie insists that he is
"happy ... doing ... nothing" (7) and speaks of having "had" a good life in
the past tense as if his life is already over (18-19), he embodies his own
subsequent description of the "brute beast," behaving as a creature "not
even aware it's alive much less it's going to die!" (54). Charlie is a "brute
beast" in Act I not for being an animal, but for forfeiting, in terms of
both thought and language, what makes him different from a rabbit-the
same thing that makes Leslie and Sarah different from the fish. Through
their exasperating questions, the lizards prompt him to (re)discover that
16 BAILIN
difference by compelling him to find words to communicate across the
abyss the "beautiful" and "terrifying" experience of what it means to live
as "our kind." Not merely the ability to think, or to talk "you know,
English," but the interrelationship of experience, thought, and language
is what determines "our kind." Through their efforts to pack words with
meaning, characters in Seascape redefine evolution as much by the process
of growing in understanding as by that of losing tails and growing arms.
The implications for human destiny are extraordinary. By con-
fronting the animal other, embracing the animal self, and relocating the
evolutionary process from body to mind, Albee proposes that this
process may yet be ongoing. Such an idea shifts the destiny of "our kind"
from humanist reckonings of an unchanging creature "at the top of the
pile" to the dynamic, infinite possibilities for metamorphosis available to
an "organism that has evolved to live by its wits."1
4
While we may know
something about what we are, Albee suggests, we do not yet know what
we may become. Appropriately, the play ends with the word "Begin" (56).
IV
This process, however, as Leslie remarks towards the end of the second
act, is "rather dangerous" (55), for the same capacity that enables the dis-
covery of meaning also makes possible the destruction of it. While
Seascape dramatizes the possibilities of packing words such as "love" and
"emotion" with meaning, The Goat develops the frightening conse-
quences of unpacking words-the process of destroying lives by destroy-
ing language. The so-called "conceptual matters" (43) characters discuss
in Seascape become volatile personal matters in The Goat. Nancy and
Charlie compare their animality to that of Sarah and Leslie at the safe dis-
tance of conversation, but :Martin's behavior causes similar comparisons
to intrude crudely upon the intimacy of his marriage. Exploring the enig-
ma of what it means to belong to "our kind" mutates from the earnest
attempts to answer the lizards' question in Seascape about the meaning of
love into a speciesist nightmare born at the nexus of love and sex, where
the most "human" experience is inseparable from the most "animal."
Under these circumstances, the only language available to make sense of
human difference gets twisted and lost in the abyss.
14
Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal. On the Biogenetic Foundations o/
Literary Representation (Evanston: N orrhwestern UP, 1996), 101.
OUR KIND: ALBEE'S A N I ~ W S 17
As Martin endeavors to explain to Stevie and Ross what has hap-
pened to him, the speciesist boundary he has crossed by falling in love
with Sylvia approaches a liminality nearly impossible to articulate. From
his perspective, the boundary disappears entirely and as it does, relation-
ships between words and familiar meanings begin to disintegrate. As the
distinctions between she-ness and it-ness, who-ness and what-ness-
between "fucking [an animal]" and "being an animal" (42)-become dis-
tressingly unclear, human relationships begin to fall apart as well. The
boundary Martin crosses goes far beyond bestiality; his words are as
transgressive, if not more transgressive, than his behavior, for the way he
understands and communicates the nature of his relationship destroys his
world, more so than what he actually does with Sylvia in the barn.
Martin's series of attempts to find the language to express what
"can't have happened" but "did" structures the play (39-40). Like Nancy
and Charlie, who must "define their terms" in order to communicate
something outside the experience of the lizards, Martin must find the
right language to convey the essence of an experience that "relates to
nothing" else (39). He confesses his relationship with Sylvia three times
during the course of the play, his tone shifting progressively from irony
to confidentiality to inexorable, heartbreaking honesty. Ross narrates the
story a fourth time in a letter to Stevie, which she reads aloud back to
Martin. In each telling and retelling, the question, "Who is Sylvia?," aris-
es. By the end of their argument in Scene Two, when Stevie finally under-
stands and accepts how Martin answers that question, the "truth" of his
feelings, instead of illuminating their lives, empties the years of meaning
from their marriage. Ultimately, Stevie kills Sylvia because "She loved
you ... you say. As much as I do" (54). Martin's words, what he says alone,
make real for Stevie something that "can't have happened," as Charlie's
words in Seascape make the lizards real for him and "love" real for the
lizards. The difference in this play, from a speciesist perspective, is the
disturbing nature of what becomes "real." If language normally civilizes
and humanizes, here it uncivilizes, dehumanizes, and animalizes. What
leads to the tableau of silence at the end of the play is not Martin's expe-
rience itself but the "honest" language with which he insists on making it
real for other people (10). Attempt after attempt, he demands the preci-
sion of a grammarian but lacks the skill of a rhetorician.
Early in Scene One, Martin reveals his "affair" with Sylvia for the
first time amidst some half-serious banter about whether he is seeing
another woman, but the context is so farcical that Stevie laughs and dis-
misses his confession as a joke. After she notices an odd smell on Martin
and a mysterious woman's business card in his pocket, a dialogue ensues,
18 BAILIN
as the stage directions indicate, "in a greatly exaggerated Noel Coward
play manner," with "English accents" and "flamboyant gestures," that
discloses everything and nothing (9). Martin tells Stevie that, though he
"fought hard" against it, he has "fallen in love" and that "Her name is
Sylvia" (9). In response to Stevie's inevitable question, "Sylvia? Who is
Sylvia?" Martin goes even further:
MARTIN.
STEVIE
She's a goat; Sylvia is a goat! (Acting
manner dropped; normal tone nmJJ; serious,
flat.) She's a goat.
(Long pause, she stares, finai!J smiles.
Giggles, chortles, moves toward the hall, nor-
mal tone.) You're too much! (9-10)
Instead of recognizing the truth, Stevie interprets Martin's confession as
a kind of mocking, linguistic substitution-simply his way of ridiculing
her own suspicion. For her, Martin's replacement of a supposed other
woman with a goat renders absurd the very idea that he would be having
a'!Y sort of affair, much less one actually with a goat.
In contrast to this quick reductio ad absurdum, when Martin next
discloses his "affair," this time to his longtime friend, Ross, it takes six
pages from the time they first broach the subject of an affair for Martin
to communicate Sylvia's identity, because before he can describe who she
is, Ross's own schemas about what an affair must be repeatedly interfere.
Martin tells Ross how he "was getting back in the car, about to get back
in the car, all my loot - vegetables and stuff," when he sees Sylvia
"Just ... just looking at me" (21), but instead of SylYia, Ross sees "Daisy
Mae! Blond hair to her shoulders, big tits in the calico blouse, bare
midriff, blond down at the navel, piece a straw in her teeth" (21). Ross,
of course, could not be further from the truth. Thinking Martin is hav-
ing an affair with "Daisy Mae," he tries to help him tell the story, but
words attach incongruously to meanings:
MARTIN.
ROSS.
MARTIN.
ROSS.
MARTIN.
I can't talk about it.
All right; let me help you. You're seeing
her.
(Sad laugh.) Yes; oh, yes; I'm seeing her.
You're having an affair with her.
(Confused.) A what? Having a what? (21)
O UR KIND: ALBEE's ANIMALS 19
As Ross continues to prompt, Martin continues to respond with a mix-
ture of affirmation and confusion, until the inevitable question, "Who is
Sylvia?" When Martin responds by bashfully, almost innocently showing
him a picture, immediately, Ross's schemas shift. Martin is no longer "see-
ing" someone, no longer "in lo\'e" with someone, but simply "fucking a
goat" and "in very serious trouble" (22-23). Martin cannot explain what
happened to him, but neither can Ross. That Martin resorts to a picture
underscores the failure of language for both of them. The relationship
normally connecting experience, language, and meanings short-circuits
because what has happened "relates to nothing" and the only language
Martin can use is the wrong language.
When Ross informs Stevie of Martin's secret, his letter express-
es only how he himself conceives the situation, as merely a "crisis" of
perverse behavior potentially dangerous to "Martin's public image" (24).
But Martin's situation is so far beyond what Ross's letter conveys that
Stevie must work through several more rnisreadillgs before she and
Martin can even begin to address the real issues. Initially, when she reads
the beginning of the letter, "Martin is having an affair with a certain
Sylvia," she responds as Ross does, and thinks there is another woman,
"glad at least it's someone [she doesn't] know" (27). When she reads all
the way through the letter, her next reaction is to laugh, thinking the story
a rather "grim joke" (28). Finally, reflecting that "It's not funny when you
come right down to it, Ross" (28), she confronts the rudimentary facts.
Grasping that Martin has been consorting with a goat, that he fancies
himself in love, and that he imagines "it" loves him back, Stevie feels as
if she has "fallen off a building" (28). The analogy is apt, because Martin,
too, experiences a kind of free fall that he compels Stevie to share. He
can neither deny nor refute the "wrong" language other people use to talk
about his situation, but neither can he find the "right" language to repre-
sent it.
In her anger over these "facts" of Martin's behavior, Stevie over-
turns furniture and smashes crockery, but her passion soon finds an
equally aggressive outlet in reason, distilling language to logical, minimal-
ist extremes. As Martin recalls his ventures to the country to look for a
new house and how in the course of these ventures, as if it were the most
ordinary, natural thing, he comes to find Sylvia, Stevie compresses the
issue of boundaries Martin has been avoiding into a vicious tug-of-war
over pronouns and their relationship to personhood:
STEVIE.
MARTIN.
Now get on to the goal!
I'm getting there. I'm getting to her.
20
STEVIE.
MARTIN.
Stop calling it hen
(Defending.) That is what she is! It is a
she! She is a she! (32)
BAILIN
Such haggling over "it-ness" and "she-ness" punctuates the entire argu-
ment. A bit later, Martin once more tries to describe his moment of
epiphany at the "crest" of the hill, but Stevie pushes him further:
l\tiARTIN.
STEVIE.
MARTIN.
STEVIE.
And it was then that I saw her.
(Grotesque incomprehension.) Who!?
(Deeply sad.) Oh, Stevie ...
(Heal!)' irorry.) Who!? Who could you
have seen!? (39)
What seems to bother her about his use of "she" and "who" is the undif-
ferentiated linkage between human body and goat body. She asks Martin,
"How the hell did you know it was a she-was a female? Bag of nipples
dragging in the dung?" (31), and she contrasts this image to herself: "I
have only two breasts; I walk upright; I give milk only on special occa-
sions" (25). If these bodies are equivalent, Stevie asks, where does one
draw the line between the animal other and the human self? How does
one know the difference between a woman and a goat?
When they get directly to the subject of love and sex, the ques-
tion of personhood reaches a crisis. The only way to define what has hap-
pened to Martin is to do so in already available terms, and defining it in
those terms, for Stevie, "SHATTERS THE GLASS!" (44). Crossing the
human/ animal boundary by "fucking a goat" is one thing; dissolving the
boundary by insisting desperately and passionately that the goat has a
soul, that the relationship "isn't about fucking," and that Martin "love[s]"
Stevie "and an animal-both of us!--equally" (43), as Stevie as well dis-
solves the self. The way Martin "defines his terms" is incompatible with
the way Stevie understands her humanity, and Martin's failure to under-
stand this conflict destroys Stevie, Sylvia, and himself.
v
If language offers one means to mediate the uncertainties between "our
kind" and the rest of animalkind, civilization offers another. Civilization
interrupts the fantasy of Seascape only intermittently, as an occasional jet
plane roars overhead and momentarily drowns out conversation.
Characters explore human/ animal intersections with little fear but a fleet-
ing apprehensiveness of one another. Unlike Stevie, Nancy can relate her
OuR KIND: ALBEE'S ANIMALS 21
body to the body of another animal, a whale, without sacrificing any of
her humanity. Yet the isolation of the setting of Seascape-the very dis-
connection from civilization that makes possible the freedom of the fan-
tasy-renders irrelevant the kinds of anxieties Stevie has about the dif-
ference between goats and humans. Even in Seascape, however, the sound
of civilization is ominous, and in The Goat, its metaphoric roar threatens
to drown out what both the animal other and the animal self have to say
about what it means to be human.
In this context, Stevie's contested self inflects problems of the
human/animal dichotomy through constructions of gender. Her obses-
sion with pronouns stems in part from a prevailing speciesist and sexist
"notion that woman is. . .closer to animals than man, and that this
woman-animal continuity forms a major barrier for social equality
between the sexes."
1
5 Martin can gaze blissfully into Sylvia's eyes and
assert bluntly that "we [are] all animals" ( 42), but Stevie, in confronting
Martin's assertion that Sylvia is "someone just like you," that she is "[a]s
bright; as resourceful; as intrepid; . .. merely ... new" (42), must contend
with the reality that "discrimination has occurred" and continues to occur
"on the basis of a woman's body, her sexuality, her sex hormones, her
reproductive function," even "on account of her (allegedly) greater emo-
tionality, indeed, on account of anything which can also be detected in
animals."16 Martin fails to recognize that, within the conftnes of "civi-
lization," Sylvia cannot be "just like" Stevie, To insist that she is both, that
there is no difference between a woman and a goat, given the constructs
that bound their world, rather than humanizing Sylvia, dehumanizes
Stevie.
Martin, however, also has something at stake as important as
Stevie's humanity. Though she has little choice, Ste\'ie is mistaken in the
absoluteness with which she rejects her own animality. Joan Dunayer
writes that "women who avoid acknowledging that they are animals
closely resemble men who prefer to ignore that women are human."17
Both rely on false dichotomies. Stevie hardly deserves blame for avoid-
ing acknowledging her animality while her husband not only carries on
with a goat but ignores what makes her different from Sylvia for the sake
of what makes her, in his eyes, "just like." However, instead of relying on
15 Barbara Noske, Bv,ond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (New York: Black
Rose, 1997), 106.
16 Noske, 107.
17
Dunayer, 19.
22 BAILIN
false dichotomies, Martin forgets about them altogether and, in the
process, recognizes something that Stevie can only accept at the expense
of everything else that speciesist civilization has taught her to understand
about herself as a human being. In the loss of boundaries that Martin
experiences gazing into Sylvia's eyes, he has an epiphany (albeit one he
can never quite express): the "animal encompasses [the] human."ts
Implicitly, defining the human in these terms reveals a profound connec-
tion between humanity and all the rest of living creation which translates
for Martin as a love inappropriate and absurdly tragic only because, in
ignoring dichotomies, he ignores important differences, too. At stake for
Martin is the reconciliation of human identity with his newly discovered
animal self.
In spite of Martin's epiphany, however, it is no secret that rabbits
do not mate with goats, nor lizards with fish. Characters in Seascape base
their understanding of "our kind" in matters of mind and emotion,
rejecting speciesism but at the same time accepting species difference as
a given By insisting that "we are all animals," Martin challenges the same
speciesist arguments that characters in Seascape do, but in The Goat, species
difference figures as a central point of contention in defining "our kind."
Animal rights activist Lorri Bauston writes of how her sheep, Hilda, sim-
ilar to what Martin ascribes to Sylvia, develops a strong attachment to her
husband. Following him around their farm, trotting up beside him, lean-
ing against him, Hilda apparently adores Gene Bauston the way Sylvia
seems to Martin to adore him-until something occurs to them that
Martin has missed. One day, Lorri and Gene "officially turned from 'city
slickers' into 'farmers.' Hilda wasn't in love. She was in heat."t9 Sylvia, like
Hilda, belongs to a different species; being in love is not the same as
being in heat. While Leslie at least thinks about difference, albeit some-
what hypocritically given his feelings towards the fish, reflecting that
"[b]eing different is .. . interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or
superior to it" (42-43), Martin's inability to see any difference at all under-
mines the value of what he understands about the animal self. Stevie's
assertion that "we stay with our own kind" baffles him (42).
Martin himself realizes that he has a serious problem with
boundaries, admitting that he is "deeply troubled" and "greatly divided"
(42), but the play suggests that he may have found a way to resolve his
issues had Ross not interfered. On the verge of tears, he himself insists
18 Dunayer, 23.
l9 Lorri Bauston, "Vegan Kinship," Kinsbip 1vith the Animals eds. Michael
Tobias and Kate Solisti-Mattelon (Hillsboro: Beyond Words Publishing, 1998), 193.
O UR KlND: A LBEE'S ANIMALS 23
to Ross that he "could have worked it out" (52) . Martin's relationship
with his son Billy and the undercurrents of tension surrounding Billy's
homosexuality draw attention to an underlying imperative of civilization
to establish boundaries, even among members of "our own kind."
Martin's relationship with his son towards the end of the play indicates
that he does have some sense of such boundaries in restraining the
expression of an almost overpowering capacity to love. When Martin
embraces Billy to comfort him in the midst of the crisis, Ross enters and
senses sexual overtones that he perceives as "sick" (51). Martin challenges
Ross's conception of boundaries, recklessly wondering, "[what] if
it .. . clicks over and becomes- what?-sexual for ... just a moment ... so
what?" (50). Significantly, in this slippage from the emotional to the phys-
ical-in speciesist terms, from the human to the animal-the transgres-
sion is momentary. In the story Martin later recounts about becoming
aroused by the baby in his lap, he describes being overcome by shame,
thinking, "he would die; his pulse was going a mile a minute; his ears were
ringing" (51). Martin knows that love and sex dangerously converge in
the abyss, and he knows that he needs to "work out" who Sylvia is and
what his relationship to her should be. He also knows a love that is con-
fused and "deeply troubled" but more profound and valuable than any-
thing that Ross, in his shallowness, duplicity, and concern for appear-
ances, will ever experience. If Martin's transgressions make him an "ani-
mal," Ross's lack of understanding makes him a beast.
Ultimately, in the progression that begins with The Zoo Story,
evolves through Seascape, and culminates in The Goat, Albee reveals more
ambiguities about the human animal than he resolves. The qualities that
make us, in Nancy's words, "interesting" and different from the rest of
animalkind are the same qualities that, in their absence or inverse, trans-
form us from the human animal into the human beast. Our "beautiful"
and "terrifying" difference manifests itself most robustly in the "civi-
lized" and undeniably human mind that has created the jet planes that
disturb the serenity in Seascape and the skyscrapers that will likely fill
Martin's World City- a combination that, as we know since September
11th, is appallingly more than "rather dangerous." Perhaps the next evo-
lutionary step for humanity will move us past, in Albee's words, "being
one of the two or three animals that kills its own kind."
2
0 Our destiny as
a species, he suggests in these plays, depends upon yet untapped
resources of language, understanding, and love.
20 Jeanne Wolf, "Jeanne Wolf in Conversation with Edward Albee" (1975), in
Kolin, 117.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 18, N0.1 (WI NTER 2006)
THE KIDDERS AND THE DISAPPOINTMENT CLUB:
A CRITICAL THEME IN HORTON FOOTE'S THE YOUNG MAN
FROM AILANTAl
ROBERT HAYNES
When Horton Foote's play The Young Man from Atlanta won a Pulitzer
Prize in 1995, a retrospective reverence for the national past had already
settled in among many of those mature enough to appreciate the twenti-
eth century. At the time, Tom Brokaw was still assembling the material
for the book he would title The Greatest Generation, and, with the arrival of
the half-century anniversary of the end of World War II, a kind of nos-
talgia crept upon the scene, a nostalgia to which Foote's play provides a
quiet but powerful antidote.
2
Set in Houston in 1950, this drama reveals
the thoughtlessness and insensitivity that have governed the lives of a
successful couple who have recently lost their homosexual son, a World
War II combat veteran, to suicide. Yet this couple ultimately responds
with a certain vigor to their crushing loss and from the near desperation
of their narrow world they at last glimpse at least a hope of solace.
In his review of the play, Vincent Canby remarked: "The Young
Man from Atlanta doesn't soothe or lift any hearts. It's tough, one of Mr.
Foote's most serious and scathing works."
3
Certainly the play describes
the emotional agony of an aging couple whose son has killed himself and
early in the play, the father of the dead son suddenly loses his long-held
job and finds himself bereft of the financial prosperity he has devoted
his life to achieving. He and his wife, each privately tormented by the loss
of their son, undergo humiliation and intense anxiety and, as things get
worse financially, the husband Will Kidder has a heart attack. These are
l This essay was presented as a conference paper at the October 2005 Horton
Foote American Playwrights Festival at Baylor University. I wish to thank Baylor's
Department of Theatre Arts for hosting this event and those who participated in the dis-
cussion for some excellent insights into Horton Foote's artistry. My thanks also to l\1r.
Horton Foote for his kind response to this and to a previous essay on his work.
2 Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998).
3 Vincent Canby, "Nameless Menace in Latest by Foote," the New York Times,
30 January 1995, C13. This passage is quoted on the back cover of the 1995 Dramatists
Play Service edition of the play.
THE KIDDERS
25
definitely "serious and scathing" events. In this essay, however, I wish to
suggest that an apparently minor theme in the play carries more signifi-
cance than is at first evident. This theme appears in the recurrent discus-
sion of the "Disappointment Club," an actual urban legend of the 1940s
which claimed that Eleanor Roosevelt had schemed with prospective
domestic workers (such as maids) to establish false hopes in the minds of
possible employers. As Lily Dale (Mrs. Will Kidder, who believes the
rumor) explains:
It was just awful. A maid would say they were going to
work for you. You would arrange the hours and the
salary and she would be so nice and polite, then the day
she was supposed to start work, she wouldn't show up,
and that meant she was a member of the
Disappointment Club whose purpose was to disappoint
white people.4
Lily Dale is bothered because her husband does not believe this
story, so she reverts to it several times during the play, trying to ascertain
whether Mrs. Roosevelt had actually been so Machiavellian. The legend
itself is of course ludicrous and its persistence tells much more about the
credulity and the emotional investments of Lily Dale than about Mrs.
Roosevelt or the maids of Houston. Yet this is a play about disappoint-
ment and this teasingly comical reflection upon an absurd form of con-
jectural disappointment recurs so often as to make it a part of the greater
picture of disappointment centered upon Will I<:idder's failure as father
and as man of business. 5
Disappointment and betrayal appear early and often in this play.
The vigorous Will Kidder who at the opening of the play is reviewing the
plans for the expensive house he has just built is soon shown to be vul-
nerable and, despite his claim to be a realist, a rather trusting soul. His
heart is acting up, he has spent all his cash on the house, he has lost his
4 Horton Foote, The Young Man .from Atlanta (New York: Dramatists Play
Service, Inc. 199 5), 1 5.
5 In an insightful article, Gerald C. Wood discusses some of the themes treat-
ed here. Though my interpretation proposes a different perspective, his analysis illumi-
nates an essential dimension of the play. See Gerald C. Wood, "The Nature of Mystery
in The Young Man from Atlanta," in Horton Foote: A Casebook, ed. Gerald C. Wood (New
York: Garland, 1998), 179-188.
26
HAYNES
son, and he cannot confide in his wife, who has taken to religion, but
despite everything he takes comfort from his status and from his com-
petitive instinct. As he tells his junior colleague Tom Jackson, "I'm a com-
petitor, son. A born competitor. Nothing fires me up like competition."
6
Yet even Tom Jackson wonders why Will and his wife need such a big
house and Will's admission of his heart problem is soon supplemented
by his confession that he is bewildered by the death of his son and iso-
lated by his wife's fitful preoccupation with religion. Even upon receiving
the sudden news of his termination from the job he has held for nearly
forty years, however, he responds with an aggressive assertion of the
competitive spirit for he tells his boss that he intends to start up a rival
company. As soon as his boss has left the room, Will calls to cancel an
order he had previously placed for a new car for his wife, an action which
seems to show that his business sense is unimpaired by the unexpected
loss of his job. Yet the scene has shown not only his preoccupation with
his son's death and with his own effort to cope with that loss by invest-
ing all of his resources in a grand new house, but it has also suggested
the reason for his professional decline.? As Mr. Cleveland Jr. has told him,
it was Will who caused the loss of the Carnation 1v1ilk contract and Will
has also begun making Tom Jackson something of a substitute for his lost
son, an expression of a psychological need that takes a cruel twist when
Tom turns out to be Will's replacement.
Will, however, still recognizes that business is business and he
quickly turns his attention to the matter of assembling the resources
needed to launch his own company. His way of dealing with personal dis-
appointment is made clear when he tells Tom Jackson: "I won't lie to you.
It's quite a blow to my pride. But never mind. I've had worse blows than
this and on I'll go."
8
A competitor, an optimist, a devoted practitioner of
the mid-twentieth-century Republican business ethic, Will Kidder must
follow in the path that has brought him success in his profession, but he
6 Foote, 6.
7
As he tells Tom, Will has just been told by his doctor that he has a heart con-
clition. The fact that Will has gone for a medical check-up in order to get more life insur-
ance suggests that he has in mind the inadequacy of his son's life policy and that he wish-
es to provide as well as possible for Lily Dale. This precaution also is an indication of
Will's awareness of his mortality and should be kept in mind at the end of the play when
he ignores his doctor's orders and prepares to return to work.
8 Foote, 14.
THE KlDDERS 27
is out of place in his profession now because the bonds between indi-
viduals have lost importance and his characteristic hearty goodwill
toward his colleagues seems oddly inappropriate. And though he has told
Tom, "I hope this new house will help us get away from a lot of memo-
ries," his own physical weakness and financial insecurity suggest that his
hope is without foundation and the presence at the Houston YMCA of
the young man from Atlanta bodes ill for his prospects.9
Will soldiers on. He does not yet question himself or his com-
petitive mission, but he wonders what has gone wrong. For him, at least
at this point in the play, disappointment is a challenge to be overcome, a
temporary obstacle which calls for greater effort and a concentration of
competitive energy and even in his traumatized state he refuses to
acknowledge the threat of personal defeat.
It is only when he finds that his wife Lily Dale has given much
of her own savings to the former roommate of their late son that Will
yields to the emotions of bitterness and anger. Will had hoped to borrow
her money for his new business but he discovers not only that the
resources available are not what he hoped they would be but also that his
wife has betrayed him through her naive generosity to Randy Carter. It is
Will's rage over Lily Dale's imprudence that brings on his heart attack. As
a culminating betrayal following his firing by Mr. Cleveland and his
replacement by his own protege, Tom Jackson, this final discovery is too
much to bear and the gentle tolerance of Will's attitude toward Lily Dale
collapses into recrimination.
Will's struggle to reconcile himself to his situation is frustrated
at every turn by the persistent presence of Randy Carter, the young man
from Atlanta. Carter constantly leaves telephone messages and also
attempts to ,isit in person and though Will refuses to see him, Lily Dale's
irresolution makes her a perfect target for his solicitations, even after her
husband's furious response to her long-concealed generosity toward the
young man has brought about a near-catastrophe. But Lily Dale's des-
perate hope that it is still possible to find credit in Randy Carter's com-
forting version of her son's last days is stronger than her fear of her hus-
band's wrath and it is only as the play closes that she gives up this tanta-
lizing hope.
9 Ibid., 10.
28 HAYNES
In finally rejecting Randy Carter's improbable version of her
son's life and death, Lily Dale not only divests herself of illusions which
have endangered her and her husband's financial prosperity, but she also
resolves to return to the music she abandoned after her son's death. Since
that time, she has been a musician without music much as her husband
has recently become a businessman without a business. Crystal Brian has
pointed out that in Foote's plays, "a particular character's reaction to
music reveals something fundamental about that person's response to life
itself."
10
Lily Dale's rejection of her natural talent for music is like what
Marian Burkhart has called "Aristotelian violence, ... the twisting of the
natural," and it results, of course, from her son's unnatural death.'' In
fact, the absence of music from the play is mentioned so often as to be
itself resonant like a musical theme and Lily Dale's desire to replace the
music in her life with religion has not been notably successful. After Will's
heart attack, for example, she begins complaining to Clara, the maid, who
calmly replies, "Where's your Christian faith?"l2 Clara goes on to remind
Lily Dale repeatedly of the comforts of faith, but when she tells her,
"God is going to take care of you," Lily Dale's reply is, "You think so?"l3
Lily Dale's decision to return to her one realm of competence,
music, is a step toward sanity and, since she will be earning some money
by teaching music, she will also be making a tangible contribution to solv-
ing the financial problem which has so dismayed her husband. In fact, she
will be joining Will in the world of work, since he has already decided
upon an immediate return to his old company. Thus at the end of the
play each has regained a measure of personal identity and their embrace
as the lights fade suggests that their period of isolation as individuals has
ended. As Laurin Porter has remarked with respect to the final redemp-
lO Crystal Brian, "To Be Quiet and Listen: The Orphans' Home Cycle and the
Music of Charles Ives." In Horton Foote: A Casebook, ed., Wood, 101. The Kidders' son, as
Lily Dale reports (16), was fond of his mother's music and her rejection of it seems to be
inextricable from her rejection of the pain of remembering him.
11
Marian Burkhart, "Horton Foote's Many Roads Home: An American
Playwright and His Characters." Commonweal 115.4 (26 February 1988): 110-115.
Contemporary literary Cn"ticism. Gale. 30 May 2004 <http:/ /www.galegroup.com/>.
12
Foote, 27.
13 Ibid., 28.
THE KIDDERS 29
cion of Mac Sledge, the protagonist of Foote's Tender Mercies, "The con-
version is interior, as it always is with Foote, and it takes place within the
context of committed relationships and the creation of a farnily."14 Here,
of course, the family is not so much created as it is healed.
As moving and powerful as this play's central action and the
theme of an aging couple confronting the suicide of their only son is, the
reiterated theme of Lily Dale's preoccupation with the tale of the
"Disappointment Club" invites careful consideration. This myth actually
circulated in the 1940s and perhaps earlier, as former government official
Philleo Nash told Jerry N. Hess in a 1967 interview. Nash explained:
In the prewar period, or maybe the very early part of the
war, there had been tension that broke out into street
fighting around the Sojourner Truth housing project in
Detroit. There were also rumors that had a lot of circu-
lation-hostile Anti-Negro rumors; there was the story
of the "Disappointment Club." As domestic help
became scarce and war jobs became frequent in many of
the border cities, it was rumored that-this was when
the girl you hired from the employment agency didn't
show-that it wasn't because she had something better
to do or a better job, but that she had teamed up with
others to "disappoint" the white housekeeper-the mis-
tress. So this is a rather primitive era as we look back on
it 25 years after, but that kind of thing was going on. 15
14 Laurin Porter, Orphans' Home: The Votce and Vision of Horton Foote (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State, 2003), 195. Perhaps it should be noted that the Kidders' financial
situation is far from desperate, considering that in this year of 1950 they own a $200,000
home (''There is no finer house in Houston," says Will). which is paid for. Since Will has
apparently decided against starting a new company and since both he and his wife have
decided to work, their income should be more than adequate for financial comfort. They
also have some savings. Thus the budgetary threats which assume ominous proportions
at times remain less of a genuine threat to their family than the emotional trauma, guilt,
and disappointment resulting from Bill's death.
15 Jerry N. Hess, "Oral History Interview with Philleo Nash" (21 February
1967. Online at Harry S. Truman Library), 600. 23 Oct. 2005 <http:/ /www.ttumanli-
brary.org/oralhist/nash12.htm>. Another source for the Disappointment Club myth is
identified in Charles S. Watson, Horton Foote: A Literary Biograpqy (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2003), 234, n.6.
30 HAYNES
Nash's account does not include the attribution of this plan to
Eleanor Roosevelt, but FDR's wife was a likely candidate for criticism,
given her vigorous opposition to racial prejudice and the institution of
segregation. In a letter written in December, 2005, Horton Foote
acknowledged that the story of the Disappointment Club was familiar to
him from a family source: "I can witness to the truth of Mrs. Roosevelt's
story," he wrote, "as I had an aunt who firmly believed it and spread it far
and wide."t6 In Foote's play, Lily Dale's belief in this rumor is almost as
strong as her wishful belief that Randy Carter be a fine and truthful
young man whose presence will eliminate some of the nightmarish
dimensions of Bill's life and death. Her concern that others accept the
story of the Disappointment Club not only indicates her separation from
reality but also demonstrates how poor a substitute credulity is for judg-
ment-and surely the issue of judgment is essential here. While Gerald
C. Wood has argued effectively that this play finally shows the Kidders
"embracing mystery," perhaps it should also be said that it shows the two
of them learning how lovingly to suspend judgment, for both of them
learn the consequences of living in accord with unexamined fantasy.'?
Will has long ago committed himself to a life of relentless competition
and his wife has, when traumatized by the loss of her son, made of
Randy Carter a virtual deus ex machina whose appearance seems redemp-
tive and tranquilizing. Neither fantasy proves sufficient to obliterate the
truth and it is only the truth that can finally free the Kidders from their
debilitating fantasies. And one consolation they find in facing the truth of
their loss is that they can still give their lost son the dignity of a respect-
ful silence regarding his personal life.
With respect to the Disappointment Club, Lily Dale's position is
absurd: she invokes a bigoted fabrication about black working people
while her own domestic arrangements only function at all because of the
energy and competence of her maid Clara, who cooks for everyone and
even preaches a bit. Lily Dale cannot even imagine that Clara and her
friends might be offended by such a story, a story which Will himself
refuses to believe.
The theme of the Disappointment Club leads to the introduc-
tion of Etta Doris Meneffree, who had been the Kidders' cook when
16 Personal letter from Horton Foote to Robert Haynes, dated December 18,
2005.
17 Wood, "The Nature of Mystery," 185.
THE KIDDERS 31
their son Bill was a child. Etta Doris, now too old to work, has nonethe-
less come to visit her old employers, expressing clear and affectionate
memories of them and their son. Though Will does not remember Etta
Doris, she jolts him by recounting a conversation with his lost son: ~ n d
I said to him, you remember me little boy. Yes, Ma'm, he said. I remem-
ber you well .... That's what he said. I remember you well."
1
8 These
words suggest the distance between Will and his son in a variety of ways.
Her sincerity and warm sympathy also contrast strikingly with the coldly
businesslike attitude of Will's boss, Ted Cleveland Jr., who gave Will his
notice knowing full well that Will had just built an expensive new house.
In fact, Cleveland admits he has made a trip to see Will's new house, just
as Etta Doris explains she recently went to see his old house, finding it
torn down. Within the contrast between Ted and Etta Doris lies a deep
incongruity, for Will does not even remember Etta Doris, one of the few
persons on earth who genuinely sympathizes with his loss. Thus both
Will and Lily Dale, their lives now fragmented by the loss of their son,
may be seen as blind to the essential humanity of others, even those who
like and respect them. Their blindness is reflected in that of such other
characters as Ted Cleveland, the calculating business executive, and in the
financial opportunism of Randy Carter, who has apparently gone
through some fifty thousand dollars of Lily Dale's money in the year or
so that has elapsed since Bill Kidder's death, not to mention the hundred
thousand dollars previously paid to him in checks by Bill. Though
Randy's actual character remains ill-defined, suggesting perhaps that final
judgment on him should be suspended, he demonstrates a keen sense of
the financial vulnerability of others and an accompanying disregard for
the pain generated for others by his parasitic way of life.I9 Though all of
the evidence against Carter is brought onstage by circumstantial reports,
Lily Dale's fi nal report to her husband of Randy's words includes what
may be the most substantial sign of his dishonesty. Will has seen his son's
collection of canceled checks made out to Randy, and Randy has told Lily
Dale that "Bill insisted on giving him the money, for buying nice things,"
18 Foote, 46.
19
Here I disagree with Charles S. Watson, who does not seem to take into
account the suggestion that there is at last a kind of wisdom in the Kidders' tacit recog-
nition that by not condemning Randy Carter they can still together protect their late son.
See Watson, Horton Foote, 235-237.
32 HAYNES
a statement which would seem to undermine the hard-luck stories told to
Lily Dale after Bill's death.20
Yet there is a kind of suspension of judgment regarding Randy
Carter and it derives from the Kidders' suspension of judgment regard-
ing their son and his relationship with Randy. Though both Will and Lily
Dale finally accept that their son killed himself, they pause on the brink
of accepting that their son's connection to Randy was a socially unac-
ceptable relationship in their world. When Will finally admits to his wife
that he knows that his son gave all his money to Carter, his wife responds,
"Will, maybe there was a reason." Will replies:
Maybe so. But I don't know want to know what it is.
Ever. So tell him that for me. That I know my son gave
him a hundred thousand dollars and maybe it was for his
sick mother, too, or his sister, but I don't believe it. And
I don't believe-anyway, whatever the reasons I don't
want to know. There was a Bill I knew and a Bill you
knew and that's the only Bill I care to know about.21
Whether Carter was blackmailing Bill or whether Bill feared that once his
money was gone Randy would turn to his parents for money, whatever
the explanation may have been for Bill's death, Will respects his son's
memory and refuses to intrude upon his privacy. Yet he must take meas-
ures to end the financial drain caused by Randy's supposed needs and he
must protect Lily Dale as well. Though stunned by his professional
reverses and shocked by the recognition of his own miscalculation both
as father and as businessman, Will recovers the spirit he earlier told his
wife he had lost and the two comfort one another.
In a sense, then, the ending of the play resembles the gamos, or
marriage, which ends the classical comedy. Hope has been recovered, if
not the boundless hope of youth, at least the middle-aging hope of
diminished pain and, from this perspective, as Lily Dale contemplates,
perhaps, the music lessons she is soon to give, the gentle mockery of the
leitmotiv of the Disappointment Club echoes in the silence. Though Will
Kidder never belieYed the story, he does make a grim joke about it when
he returns from visiting several banks in search of a business loan. "I
think the banks in Houston are all running Disappointment Clubs," he
20 Foote, 53.
21 Ibid., 52.
THE KIDDERS
33
says.
22
The details of his own disappointment are numerous and they are
magnified in view of his early uncompromising statements about what he
demands from life. As he tells Tom Jackson:
I want the best. The biggest and the best. I always have.
Since I was a boy. We were dirt poor after my father died
and I said to myself then I'm not going to live like this
the rest of my life. Will Kidder, I said, you are going
from now on to always have the best. And I have. I live
in the best country in the world. I live in the best city. I
have the finest wife a man could have, work for the best
wholesale produce company in the .... 23
He is cut off by Tom, who indicates that their company is no longer what
it used to be, but Will is confident that the company will bounce back.
Soon, however, in addition to renewed grief over Bill's death, he has lost
his job with the company, his new house begins to seem a foolish invest-
ment, his wife's gullibility with respect to Randy Carter is revealed, and
his own formerly vigorous body yields to a heart attack. But the eerie
comicality of the Disappointment Club theme suggests that disappoint-
ment itself is something of a joke, a suggestion borne out by Lily Dale's
rather inept citation of the Book of Ecclesiastes, in which disappoint-
ment itself is a vanity.
24
And just as the black domestic workers in this
play are the least disappointing human beings who appear, so the music
Lily Dale has rejected as a worldly vanity finally offers her a means to
escape the vanity of disappointment and the false hope that has separat-
ed her from her husband.
Thus in what may be the most subtle and profound of the plays
of a long career, Horton Foote throws a retrospective searchlight on the
past of twentieth-century American life, both illuminating the blindness
and prejudice that have caused so much pain and reminding his audience
that a fundamental reality of life both has been and remains the urgency
of finding strength.
22
Ibid., 31.
2
3 Ibid., 6.
24
Ibid., 16.
jOURNAL or M E R J C ~ DRAMA AND THEATRE 18, N0.1 (WINTER 2006)
ON THE VERGE OF A BREAKTHROUGH:
PROJECTIONS OF ESCAPE FROM THE ATTIC AND THE
THWARTED TOWER IN
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"
AND SusAN GLASPELL's THE VERGE
ANITA D UNEER
I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. I
The Verge (1921) has been recognized as the most modern of Susan
Glaspell's plays. According to her biographer, Barbara Ozeiblo, it is
"Glaspell's most ambitious play and best exemplifies the degree to which
the Provincetown Players had assimilated and made their own the inno-
vative trends of European theater."
2
The Provincetown Players was
founded in 1915 by Susan Glaspell, her husband George Cram "Jig"
Cook, and others from the politically conscious Greenwich Village set,
who, reacting to the War in Europe, "hoped for a spiritual revolution in
America that would result in equality and harmony among the country's
divided classes, sexes, and races."3 The Provincetown Players was the
quintessentially American theater company, producing only plays by
American playwrights, including an unprecedented percentage of plays
by women, and involving an impressive number of women behind the
scenes as set and costume designers, directors, and executive committee
members.4 The momentum for the progressive role of women in the
Provincetown Players came from the group's overall conviction that art
and politics are inseparable. In this context, it is not surprising that,
although the theatrical concept of expressionism came out of the
1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," The Norton Antbology of
American Literature, ed. Nina Baym et al. 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1994), 2: 652.
2 Barbara Ozeiblo, Swan Clasp& A Critical Biograpi?J (Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina P, 2000), 187.
3 Cheryl Black, The Women of Provinceto111n, 1915-1922 (Tuscaloosa: U of
Alabama P, 2002), 1.
4 For a comprehensive study on women's involvement in the Provincetown
Players, see Black.
ON THE V ERGE 35
German art movement, Glaspell's adaptation of expressionist stage tech-
niques in The Verge reflected the rebellious impetus of the feminist move-
ment so integral to the Greenwich Village consciousness of the times.
Cheryl Black explains that "it was in Greenwich Village that the
restlessness of women cultivated a new idea- part social theory, part
philosophical perspective, part political action, part religion-that came
to be known as 'feminism."'5 She adds that "Provincetown's female
founders epitomized these restless and radical women."6 There were
many new organizations rallying for the interests of women, but
Heterodoxy, "the discussion club for women with unorthodox views,"
was the group most associated with the women of the Provincetown
Players.7 Black further notes that "In the Village, 'Heterodite' was a syn-
onym for 'feminist'; the club 'epitomized the Feminism of the time."'S
Glaspell, along with many other Provincetown women, was an active
member of Heterodoxy.9 According to Ozieblo, The Verge is the play that
Glaspell's peers in this group "seized upon" as symbolizing the radical
feminism of the day.
1
0 Liza Maeve Nelligan also sees the women of
Heterodoxy as an appreciative audience, but even more important, as a
source of artistic inspiration: "Glaspell's participation in Heterodoxy and
the wide-ranging friendships she must have found there probably
s Ibid., 8.
6
Ibid., 9-10.
7
Ibid., 9.
8 Ibid., 9. For "Heterodite" as "feminist," Black cites Steve Watson, Strange
Bedfellows: The First Anmican Atant-Garde (New York: Abbeville P, 1991), 143. For the quo-
tation ending "Feminism of the time," Black credits Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding if
Modem Feminism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987), 38.
9 Theatre women made up one of the largest constituencies in this club, but
the membership included one hundred and ten women, from diverse ethnic and racial
backgrounds, representing a range of professions, classes, and sexual orientations. Some
women came to Greenwich Village from the Lower East Side and Harlem, according to
J. Ellen Gainor, 97 (citing Judith Sch"arz as her source). For more on Heterodoxy, see].
Ellen Gainor, S11san Glaspe/1 in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics 191548 (Ann
Arbor: U of t-.lichigan P, 2001);Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists if Heterodoxy, revised ed.
(Norv.ich, CT: New Victoria P, 1986); and Christine Stansell, Ammcan Modems: Bohemian
Neu; )-Qrk and the Creation if a New Cmtury (New York: Metropolitan, 2000).
10 Ozieblo, 185.
36 D UNEER
inspired her to write the play and also provided her with the audience she
most wanted to reach." ! I
The member of Heterodoxy whose inspiration in particular I
want to address is Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Since, according to Black,
the Greenwich Village feminists "read everything" and "appropriated
what they found useful," it was no doubt their support for Gilman as a
peer that led them to adopt her creed from Women and Economics (1898)
that "woman's place was everywhere."l
2
Glaspell was without a question
familiar with her story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), which was
reprinted in Great Modern Amen"can Stories (1920) the year before the
November 14, 1921 Provincetown Playhouse opening production of The
Verge. t3 In this essay, I will consider the ways in which Glaspell adapts
thematic and stylistic elements of Gilman's story in her radical dramati-
zation of the modern woman's attempt to escape from patriarchal and
artistic conventions. In reading the psychological drama of The Verge
through "The Yellow Wallpaper," I hope to elucidate how Gilman's
proto-modernist style sets the stage for Glaspell's adaptation of expres-
sionist techniques. Situated in the historical heyday of American mod-
ernism and feminism, Glaspell's play suggests that female artists of the
1920s had not yet completely escaped from their metaphorical attics but
were on the verge of a breakthrough.
Despite obvious parallels in theme and style between the The
Verge and "The Yellow Wallpaper," only one critic has made a direct com-
parison. J. Ellen Gainor offers the following overview of the similar
themes of these works:
[Gilman's] narrative and Glaspell's share many elements,
including their central characters' movement from sani-
ty to madness. In each the protagonist approaches a
madness integrally connected to feelings of entrapment
within patriarchal structures, especially the traditional
maternal function; each desires to escape to a realm of
11 Liza Maeve Nelligan. "The Haunting Beauty from the Life We've Left"': A
Contexrual Reading of Trifles and The Verge," in Susan Claspe/1. Essqys on Her Theater and
Fiction, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 91.
1
2 Black, 9.
13 For the source of this reprint, J. EUen Gainor cites Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, eds.,The Norton Anthology qf Literature fry Women: The Tradition in English (New
York: Norton, 1985), 1147.
ON THE VERGE
alternate self-definition. Both works feature woman's
critique of conventional gender roles and the knowl-
edge that they must be subverted through female cre-
ativity. . . . The works also share with other texts that
have become central to feminist criticism the structural
nexus of a "madwoman in an attic."I4
37
Gainor's analogies provide a useful starting point for situating these
works as thematic companion pieces within the broader context of sto-
ries featuring the "madwoman in an attic." I am particularly interested in
how Glaspell might have adapted the symbolic psychological deteriora-
tion of Gilman's narrator in her experimental performance piece. In both
the story and the play, the protagonists' reveal their subjective realities
through (proto)expressionistic modes of communication. Their use of
language and the works' respective settings reflect the characters' states
of mind: Gilman's narrator's "sprawling" written text reflects her mount-
ing hysteria in response to the wallpaper; IS Claire's increasingly fragment-
ed speech reveals the inadequacy of language to describe her own cre-
ative vision.
Prior to The Verge, the American performances noted for expres-
sionist features were Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones (1913) and Eugene
O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920), as well as the German film, The Cabinet
if Dr. Caligari, released in the spring of 1921. Following the opening of
The Verge later in that same year, several European expressionist plays
were staged, as well as a range of new American plays exhibiting expres-
sionist techniques. The archetypal American expressionist play, Elmer
Rice's The Adding Machine, would not appear until 1923, nor would Sophie
Treadwell's Machinal until 1928, which added a feminist twist by casting a
woman in place of the characteristic "little man" protagonist against a
dehumanized world.
16
The Verge's Claire, and even the narrator of "The
Yellow Wallpaper," can be seen as fighting similar battles for individual-
ism in a world dying from boredom.
!4 Gainor, 153.
15 Gilman, 647.
16 For a more complete list of plays in the 1920s noted as expressionistic, see
Jerry Dickey, "The Expressionist Moment: Sophie Treadwell," in The Cambndge Companion
to American Women PlqyMights, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999),
70.
38 D UNEER
In ''The Expressionist Moment: Sophie Treadwell," Jerry Dickey
provides a useful characterization of the elements of expressionism
shared by many of these works:
they attempted to reject representation of surface reali-
ty in favor of a depiction of inner, subjective states of
emotion and experience. Visual and emotional qualities
often featured an element of distortion, exaggeration,
or suggestive symbolism, frequently achieving a dream-
like or nightmarish quality to the action. The effects of
mechanization and urbanization resounded in the com-
pressed syntax and telescopic dialogue of the characters .
. . . These plays also tended to reject a linear, sustained
exposition of story in favor of a rapidly changing
sequence of short scenes which sometimes dissolved
one into the other in cinematic fashion.
17
Although Dickey is concerned with theatrical expressionism, his empha-
sis on the psychological experience of the protagonist offers a way to
think about these features transcending artistic genres. The relationship
between "surface reality" and "inner, subjective states of emotion and
experience" can be seen as vividly in the narrator's written representation
of her consciousness in "The Yellow Wallpaper" as in Claire's perform-
ance in The Verge.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" depicts both a real and symbolic night-
mare for the narrator. In prescribing the "rest cure" for what would now
be diagnosed as postpartum depression, John, the narrator's husband and
doctor, forbids her the stimulation of family contact and the creative out-
let of her writing. Locked in an upstairs nursery of an "ancestral" man-
sion, the narrator descends into madness as she contemplates the walls
that confine her.
1
8 John's attitude toward his wife is more paternal than
spousal: he calls her his "little girl"
1
9 and "hardly lets [her] stir without
special direction."20 She writes, "John says the very worst thing I can do
1
7 Ibid., 70.
18 Gilman, 645.
!9 Ibid., 651.
20 Ibid., 647.
ON THE VERGE
39
is to think about my condition."21 Powerless to openly defy her husband's
orders, she nevertheless does just that: she "thinks" round the clock and
secretly records her thoughts on paper. Confined to the nursery with the
"horrid" wallpaper,
22
she is strangely and compulsively drawn to its mon-
strous pattern, which she describes as "[o]ne of those sprawling flam-
boyant patterns committing every artistic sin."23 She finds inspiration for
her own rebellion in the "sinfully" unruly images in its design.
The projection of the narrator's "subjective states of emotion
and experience" on to her increasingly distorted visions of the wallpaper
exemplifies a primary feature of expressionism. Gilman's use of visual art
as a mirror of the narrator's mind and her proto-modernist approach in
dismantling formal expectations of visual and literary art are techniques
that may be compared with those Glaspelllater uses in her play.
The visual effects in the story exemplify the characteristics
Dickey attributes to expressionism: "element[s] of distortion, exaggera-
tion, or suggestive symbolism, frequently achieving a dream-like or night-
marish quality." The narrator's hallucinational descriptions of the room
in which she is confined become progressively more nightmarish as the
"pattern" of the wallpaper becomes increasingly distorted:
when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little
distance they suddenly commit suicide-plunge off at
outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of
contradictions .... I determine for the thousandth time
that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of
conclusion .... You think you have mastered it, but just
as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-
somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face,
knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a
bad dream.2
4
21 Ibid., 646.
22 Ibid., 648.
2
3
Ibid., 647.
24 Ibid., 647, 650, 652.
40 0 UNEER
The pattern is an adversary to be "mastered," an authoritative form arbi-
trarily in control despite the illusory evidence of its disorder. I ts implica-
tions are unstable, just like the mind of its observer. For example, "by
moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman
behind it as plain as can be."25 The woman in the wallpaper had appeared
at first as a "strange, provoking, formless sort of figure,"26 who, as
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest, was "concealed behind what
corresponds ... to the f ~ d e of the patriarchal text," which defines the
role of women as a male construct. But now the woman's image
"becomes clearer and clearer."27 When the pattern leads to no definite
"conclusion," the narrator struggles against it and with the help of the
almost-liberated woman she so clearly imagines, rips her way out of the
paper. The clarity of the narrator's vision as she descends further into
madness might be seen in the same light as what Karen Malpede calls
Claire's "lucidity of madness."28
The narrator finds creative empowerment in redefining the pat-
tern in her own terms and, through her writing, rupturing the metaphor-
ical boundaries that would limit her creativity. The text of her writing not
only literally defies her husband's authority, but it also signifies a break-
through in narrative form. Symbolism, circularity, and "rapidly changing
sequences" of imagistic thoughts corresponds to the features that Dickey
discerns in expressionism. The text's fragmentation is resistant to struc-
tural conventions: the paragraphs, often only a sentence or two long,
move quickly from thought to hallucination. Although the theme leads
from the narrator's mild depression to an advanced state of madness, the
style is nonlinear: a not-quite-circular stream of consciousness that seems
to follow the wallpaper's undulating lead. Or is it the other way around-
the handwritten text in the lead? Like the "interminable grotesque" of
the wallpaper pattern, the narrative itself "seems to form around a com-
mon center and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction."29 The
25 Ibid., 652.
26 Ibid., 649.
27
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad111oman in the Attic: The Woman
Wnler and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 90.
28 Karen Malpede, "Reflections on The Verge," in Susan Glaspe/L Essqys on Her
Theater and Fiction, ed. Ben-Zvi, 123.
29
Gilman, 650.
ON THE VERGE
41
text interweaves through descriptions of the wallpaper, returning to re-
analyze images already visited, which are re-imagined as somehow trans-
formed:
Looked at in one way, each breadth stands alone; the
bloated curves and flourishes-a kind of "debased
Romanesque" with delirium tremens-go waddling up
and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the
sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of
optic horror, like a lot of wallowing sea-weeds in full
chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems
so, and I exhaust myself trying to distinguish the order
of its going in that direction.JO
The "bloated curves and flourishes," for example, might be the narrator's
new perspective on the "recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a bro-
ken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down,"3I which later
she will see as "so many heads" that try impossibly to "climb through that
pattern," which "strangles them off and turns them upside down, and
make their eyes white!"32
In the narrator's imagination, these women's heads get stuck in
the midst of their futile efforts to escape the male construct of the patri-
archal text. She implies that domestic confinement "strangles" the life out
of them, stifling their imaginations and limiting their creative potentials.
Furthermore, these images are suggestive of pregnant women: "bloated,"
"waddling," and "wallowing," like "bulbous" seedpods on a vine or a
rope of "sea-weed." Implied in the images of those "waddling up and
down in isolated columns of fatuity" is the monotonous complacency of
women with no further aspirations than their biological functions.
The frustrated state of mind of Gilman's narrator is somewhat
comparable with the angst of the worker up against the dehumanizing
mechanism of a system unsympathetic to the need for human individu-
ality. Reduced to the domain of childhood, Gilman's unnamed narrator's
30 Ibid., 650.
31 Ibid., 648.
32 Ibid., 654.
42 DUNEER
confinement in the nursery might be compared with the anonymous Mr.
Zero's monotonous job of adding meaningless figures in The Adding
Machine or with the robotic secretary's performance of redundant tasks in
Machina! With a nurse to take care of her baby and a husband to do her
thinking for her, Gilman's narrator's role as mother (if her husband had
his way) would be reduced to little more than a machine for reproduction.
Whatever ironic clarity of vision we ascribe to Gilman's narrator in the
climax of her madness comes from her sheer determination to overcome
the mind-numbing prescription for "rest." If we consider that the narra-
tor escapes from the wallpaper by successfully ripping it off the wall, we
might say that she frees herself through her imagination. However, even
though she sees other women "creeping" outside her window in the
arbors and the garden, she does not project herself beyond the borders
of her room. She realizes the universality of women's oppression, but she
remains in her room, unable to transfer her resistance to a larger ideal.
She cannot yet envision herself in unfamiliar territory: "For outside you
have to creep on the ground . ... But here I can creep smoothly on the
floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I
cannot lose my way."33 Although she dreams of freedom, and initiates a
rebellion against her restraints, her imagination is incomplete. She does
not have the vision to see what she could be if she were to break through
the male construction of her identity. Perhaps for Gilman's narrator, just
as Christine Dymkowski suggests for Claire, "madness is liberating,"34
since only in her madness, and in her "mad" style of writing, can thenar-
rator "creep over" her husband "every time!"35
Almost thirty years after Gilman's publication of her story,
Glaspell's protagonist in The Verge executes her own revolt against male
constructions of femininity that would limit her powers of creativity.
Although the feminist movement was opening more doors for women to
actively pursue their creative endeavors outside the home, patriarchal def-
initions of womanhood were slow to change. More than a rebellion
against the physical restraints of domesticity, Claire's struggle against the
conventional men in her life-Tom, Dick, and Harry-challenges the
33 Ibid., 656.
34 Christine Dymkowski, "On the Edge: The Plays of Susan GlaspeU," Modem
Drama 31, no. 1 (1988): 101.
35 Gilman, 657.
ON THE V ERGE
43
complacency of their lives as well as their inability to appreciate her artis-
tic and social values. Claire had divorced her previous husband, a "stick-
in-the-mud artist," before marrying a "man of flight" who, instead of
"going higher" in the freedom of the "rarer air," "returned to earth the
man who left it."3
6
Her disappointment in her husbands as sources of
inspiration extends to the other men in her life: Dick, her lover, a more
modern artist than her first husband, but conventionally grounded in the
new forms of modernism; and Tom, the man she seems to truly love
because he understands her desire for "outness," but who, despite world
travels that would suggest a transcendence from conventional modes of
thinking, unwittingly reverts back to the patriarchal idea that women need
to be protected by men.
37
The female characters, Claire's daughter,
Elizabeth, and sister, Adelaide, are conventional women more interested
in manners than ideas. Elizabeth, the ''product of a superior school," has been
taught to try to "liv[e] up to the men" who came before her, and "[h]elp
add to the wealth of the world."
3
8 None of the characters in the play-
with the possible exception of Anthony, Claire's faithful assistant-imag-
ines that a woman can create something new without measuring its value
up to what has previously been created by men. Like Gilman's narrator,
Claire wants to break through the boundaries of gendered conceptions
of what a woman can be, but even more than demonstrating her right to
pursue her art, her goal is to be taken seriously as an artist. Whereas
Gilman's narrator implies that creative engagement is necessary for her
sanity, Claire sees herself as the creator of something extraordinary that
will challenge the creative potential of humankind.
Claire's medium is horticulture. In what Ozieblo calls her
"Nietzschean desire to overcome established patterns," Claire's work with
plants implicitly extends to the broader modernist ideology of represent-
ing the rupture of conventional values through unconventional concepts
of art.39 The literal and metaphorical rootedness of Claire's creations,
however, signifies their limitations, in that they are always somehow con-
nected to what has "been." The two masterpieces (I use this word ironi-
36 Susan Glaspell, The Verge, in Plqys I!J Susan Glaspe/1. ed. C. WE. Bigsby (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1991), 69.
37 Ibid., 64.
38 Ibid., 7 5.
39 Ozieblo, 186.
44
DUNEER
cally) that Claire creates are the "Edge Vine" and "Breath of Life." The
Edge Vine successfully develops into something new: "The leaves of this
vine are not the form that leaves have been."
4
0 But its novelty is transitory. Claire
sees with disappointment that "It's turning back ... it's had its chance. It
doesn't want to be -what hasn't been."4I The Edge Vine, of course, is
true to its name. It never quite crosses over the edge of becoming a truly
novel creation. Claire then hopes that her other experiment, Breath of
Life, can stay "alive in its otherness."42 To be successful, Claire cross-pol-
linates the plant with another flower, to give it a slight fragrance, a
"Reminiscence" ("no limiting enclosing thing") of "what it has left,"
because "Breath of Life may be lonely out in what hasn't been."43
Through her botanical inventions, Claire questions whether it is possible
to transcend the boundaries of social and artistic conventions ingrained
in the patterns of our lives. And if so, whether we can survive the lone-
liness of an existence completely outside conventional ways of thinking
and living.
Gainor contextualizes Claire's artistic revolt within "the revolu-
tionary force of modernism itself, with its upheaval in theatrical, literary,
artistic, and other cultural forms that rejected the stasis and torpor in
dominant modes of expression."
44
As Veronica Makowsky points out,
however, all modernisms are not equal. She posits that through Claire,
"Glaspell explores the causes and the tragic consequences of the high
modernist's alienation from the life around her."45 In a particularly "high
modernist" style, Claire cuts herself off completely from her family and
friends through her disillusionment with the shallowness of social con-
ventions. Her own alienation is played out in her fears for Breath of Life's
potential loneliness: "What has gone out should bring fragrance from
40 Glaspell, 58.
41
Ibid., 61.
42 Ibid., 62.
43 Ibid., 63-64.
44 Gainor, 155.
45 Veronica Makowsky, "Susan Glaspell and Modernism," in The Cambridge
Companion to American Women Playwnghts, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1999), 62.
ON THE VERGE 45
what it has left."46 Breath of Life, however modern in its "outness," must
retain some thread of relevance to the world from which it came. The
new forms she creates are particularly relevant to her role as a female
artist in their reflection of her desire to reinvent herself as the embodi-
ment of new possibilities for women in the arts. Gainor situates Claire's
predicament within the concurrent forces of feminism and modernism:
"The Verge both participates in the call for a female/ feminist modernism
and recognizes, precisely through the struggle and extremity of Claire,
how great a challenge it is."47
In The Verge this predicament of the female modernist is staged
as a projection of Claire's psychological dilemma of trying to break
through boundaries of artistic and social conventions. Claire's conscious-
ness is played out on the set in much the same way as Gilman's narrator's
experience is visualized in the wallpaper. There are two stage settings: a
greenhouse for Act I and III and what Claire calls her "thwarted tower"
for Act II.48 The architectural framework of each mirrors her revolu-
tionary frame of mind and artistic sense.
Act I reveals the expressionistic qualities of "distortion" and
"suggestive symbolism" through the greenhouse, whose jarring architec-
ture and contents are emphasized through eerie lighting and sound
effects. The first brief scene opens on an example of what we later
understand as one of Claire's "strange" art projects:
The Curtain lifts on a place that is dark, save for a shaft of light
from below which comes up through an open trap-door in the floor.
This slants up and strikes the long leaves and the huge brilliant
blossom of a strange plant whose twisted stem prqjects from right
front. Nothing is seen except this plant and its shadow. A violent
wind is heard. 49
The "shaft of light" shining through the darkness evokes the trope of
creative enlightenment in the midst of dullness, the "brilliant blossom,"
the flourishing product of whatever creative force brought it to life. Its
4
6 Glaspell, 63.
47 Gainor, 158.
48 Glaspell, 79.
4
9 Ibid., 58.
46
D UNEER
"twisted stem," however, distinguishes it from flowers thought as con-
ventionally beautiful. Its oddness, emphasized by the light that "slants up
and strikes" it, could characterize this plant as similar to the Edge Vine:
"arresting rather than beautiful."50 The striking form of the plant is
emphasized by the "violent wind" which permeates the scene with the
sense of creation as a force of violence. That the plant is the only thing
"seen" in this opening moment suggests it is somehow removed from
other life forms. Thus, this first image of Claire's creation sets it apart: as
a high modernist work of art and as a symbol of the alienation of the
female/ modernist artist herself.
The idea of the "shaft of light" is repeated in the angular lines
of the outside of the greenhouse, where, in the morning light, "the glass
roof slopes sharply up."
51
The setting of Act II also exhibits a twisting,
jarring, asymmetrical structure. This is how Glaspell sets the scene:
CLAIRE is alone in the tower - a tower which is thought to be
round but does not complete the circle. The back is u r v e ~ then
jagged lines break from that, and the front is a queer bulging win-
dow- in a curve that leans. The whole structure is as if given a
twist by some temjic force- like something wrong. It is lighted by
an old fashioned watchman s lantern hangingfrom the ceiling; the
innumerable pricks and slits in the metal throw a marvellous pat-
tern on the curved wall - like some masonry that hasn't been.
There are no windows at back, and there is no door save an open-
ing in the floor. The delicate!J distorted rail of a spiral staircase
winds up from below. CLAIRE is seen through the huge ominous
window as if shut into the tower. She is !Jing on a seat at the back
looking at a book of drmvings. To do this she has left the door of
her lantern a little open - and her face is clear!J seen. 52
The effect of this tableau is similar to that of the opening scene. The
tower structure itself is like a giant unconventional plant, "twisted," "like
something wrong." At the same time, there is something clearly "marvel-
lous" about the overall composition, with the figure of the artist framed
within its walls.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
sz Ibid., 78.
ON THE VERGE 47
This tower setting is perhaps the most complex symbol of the
play. It initially conjures images of chivalry: princesses locked away in
towers waiting for their Prince Charmings to whisk them away into the
sunset; the fairytale endings that blend countervailing longings for escape
with hopes for the safety of conventional happily-forever-afters. Locked
in a tower is like being locked in an attic, despite the difference in wall
coverings. Claire's tower retains the "reminiscence" of those romantic
and gothic stories before her, but hers is a tower with a "twist."
According to Harry, Claire "bought the house because of it" and would
have liked "to have known the architect."53 It would not be out of char-
acter for Claire to be interested in the architect (even if the report might
be unreliable coming from Harry); it is after all emblematic of the central
conflict in the play: her internal struggle for liberation from the condition
of measuring herself up to male ideals. She is adamant in telling Adelaide,
"It isn't Harry's tower."5
4
In taking ownership of her "thwarted tower,"
Claire has literally appropriated the male construct of woman's impris-
onment, thwarting its classic function. The tower seems to represent
Claire as if it were her own creation.
In appropriating this space for herself, Claire transforms a
potential prison into a refuge. But as the action of the play reveals, nei-
ther her room in the tower, nor her workspace in the greenhouse is quite
the "room of one's own" that Virginia Woolf envisions. Despite her
attempts at locking the other characters out, they continually invade her
space, whether it be for Harry to "cook eggs under the Edge Vine" or for
Harry and Adelaide to parade uninvited up the spiral staircase of her
tower. 55 Instead of trying to work in the home as did nineteenth-century
women writers, Claire has claimed for herself the greenhouse as her own
work area, which the men in the play try to reconvert into a domestic
space. In this sense, the tower and the Edge Vine both represent the
problem of reverting back to original forms. Harry cannot see that
Claire's art is more important than his breakfast. Because he feels threat-
ened by his inability to understand her revolutionary desires, he grasps at
the only means he can imagine to keep her: by bringing in Dr.
Emmons-a stand-in for Gilman's nemesis, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell-to
commit her as prisoner in her own tower under orders of the "rest cure."
53 Ibid., 79.
5
4
Ibid.
55 Ibid., 60.
48 DuNEER
The rest cure is an obvious allusion to "The Yellow Wallpaper,"
the story that Gilman says she wrote to "save people from being driven
crazy."56 Claire knows all about the purported cure and its results. She
tells Emmons, "It must be very interesting - helping people to go
insane."57 Ironically, Claire's sarcasm reveals the possibility that madness
can be an escape from the sort of "smothering" platitudes that the char-
acters in the play use to try to pacify her.
5
8 Claire probes Emmons fur-
ther, "But tell me, how do they do it? It's not so easy to - get out."S9 As
Claire verbalizes the possibility of going insane, she becomes taken in by
the idea and begins to hallucinate, not unlike Gilman's narrator searching
for a way out of the wallpaper: "Can't you see the dead stuff in the path?
(PointiniJ ... I can't stay with them - piling it up! Always - piling it up! I
can't get through to - he won't let me through to -what I don't know is
there!"60 Life for Claire is the discovery of new ideas that have not yet
been imagined. The "dead stuff" in the path is all the trivial clutter that
Harry, Adelaide, and Elizabeth take for life, and which they try to "pile
up" in front of Claire to obscure her vision and surround her with their
closed mindedness. Their mindless blathering reveals their unquestioning
acceptance of conventionality: Harry thinks, "That's an awfully nice thing
for a woman to do- raise flowers";
61
Adelaide believes, "A round tower
should go on being round";62 and Elizabeth does "the things one does"
and thinks just like "all the girls."63
Elizabeth in particular is a disturbing reminder for Claire of the
difference between reproduction and creation. As Gainor points out,
Claire and Gilman's narrator share similar "feelings of entrapment with-
in patriarchal structures, especially the traditional maternal function." But
56 Gilman, "'Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper,"' in The Norton Anthology of
American Literature, ed. Nina Baym et al. 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1994), 2:658.
57 Glaspell, 91.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 91-2.
61 Ibid., 65.
62 Ibid., 79.
63 Ibid., 74, 75.
ON THE VERGE 49
whereas pregnancy for Gilman's narrator signifies the reduction of her
identity to a biological machine, Claire sees Elizabeth as a failed creation
because she has become one more cog in the wheel of an unthinking
social machine. Right before she rips up the Edge Vine, Claire explains
why: "I should destroy the Edge Vine. It isn't- over the edge. It's run-
ning back to - 'all the girls."'64
Claire has no hope for Elizabeth; however Elizabeth is not
Claire's only child. Claire reminisces to Tom about the death of her son,
David, whom she analogizes with the morning star that he pointed to in
wonder when he could not sleep. Claire describes David's vision-like
her own-as "[b]righter - stranger - reminiscent - and a promise."65
Gainor situates this tender moment in the context of Claire's ultimate
disillusionment: "Glaspell brilliandy captures here Claire's rationalization
of the loss of her son, her preference that he die rather than lose the
potential and wonder of a childhood that had to give way to adulthood
in a debased culture."66
The religious implications in Claire's memory of an ethereal son
too good for this world suggests that now, in the context of her failed
creations, the vibrant potential of the star of David has degenerated into
a false promise like the Edge Vine. When the Edge Vine flrst appears on
stage, "You might see the form of a cross in it, if you happened to think it that
wqy."67 Its loss of life, as Claire would define it, even before she destroys
it, anticipates her disdain for the empty words of Adelaide's "spiritual val-
ues."68 Claire accuses Adelaide of being a "liar and thief and whore with
words,"69 because coming from her, and people like her, words are stolen
and stripped of all meaning: "you pull them up - to decorate your stag-
nant litde minds."70
6
4
Ibid., 77.
65 Ibid., 87.
66 Gainor, 157.
67 Glaspell, 58.
68 Ibid., 81.
69
Ibid., 82.
7
0 Ibid., 83.
so
DUNEER
In this sense, ripping up the Edge Vine is not so different from
clearing a space to breathe in the sea-weed choked pattern of the wallpa-
per. Both Claire and Gilman's narrator are haunted by "patterns" of con-
formity. Each tries to break through social constraints by imagining possi-
bilities of escape from conventional forms by seeing herself reflected in
either "a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure"? I that appears in the
wallpaper or a plant that takes on "a form that hasn't been."72 Whereas
the pattern in the wallpaper can bar the way or suggest an escape route,
the patterns on the set of The Verge similarly connote entrapment within
solidified forms or possibilities of new forms. As the pattern of the wall-
paper is inextricably implicated in Gilman's narrator's writing, the ambi-
guity suggested by the patterns projected on the stage are mirrored in the
unstable patterns of Claire's speech.
There are two prominent descriptions of patterns in the stage
directions: in the snow crystals on the greenhouse and in the lantern's
reflection on the walls of the tower. In Act I, when the greenhouse
appears on a "snony morning,"
~ h e frost has made patterns on the glass as if- as Plato would
have it- the patterns inherent in abstract nature and behind all
lift had to come out, not on!J in the creative heat within, but in the
creative cold on the other side of the glass. And the wind makes
patterns of sound around the glass houseJ3
These patterns cannot be attributed to human creativity; they are forms
created by nature. But in a Platonic sense, even the patterns on the glass
and their counterpoints in the wind are only representations of ideal pat-
terns. In analogizing the "heat within" to the "cold on the other side of
the glass," Glaspell implies that Claire's creative work inside the green-
house must be subject to the same principles as "inherent in abstract
nature." Yet in trying to bring to life "what hasn't been," Claire assumes
a divine role of creator in imagining a revolutionary ideal. The ultimate
problem Claire encounters is how to prevent her modern creations from
reverting to already-established patterns. Claire illustrates her struggle
against this tendency through the pressures within her own language:
71
Gilman, 649.
72
Glaspell, 96.
73 Ibid., 58.
ON THE VERGE
Do not want to make a rose or make a poem -
Want to lie upon the earth and know. (closes her ryes)
Stop doing that! - words going into patterns;
They do it sometimes when I let come what's there.
Thoughts take pattern - then the pattern is the thing.74
51
Roses and poems, for Claire, both represent conventional forms to be
overcome.
This modernist dilemma of continually "making it new" before
patterns solidify, as represented in the accumulating patterns on the
greenhouse windows, is thus mirrored in Claire's speech. Just as she tries
to escape the restrictions of other fixed forms, Claire resists the formal
structure of language. Her unorthodox use of language may be thought
of in terms of Dickey's description of the "compressed syntax and tele-
scopic dialogue" of expressionism. As Gainor suggests, Claire's "lan-
guage is yet another structure she must deconstruct to make her own."75
The nihilistic revolt of her language nevertheless reflects her sense of
failure in keeping her creations outside conventional forms. In her mind,
her creative limitations are analogous to humanity's inability to break out
of the established conventions that has stifled its potential:
And it was - a stunning chance! Mankind massed to kill.
We have failed. We are through. We will destroy. Break
this up - it can't go farther. . . . And then - and then -
But we didn't say - "And then -" The spirit didn't take
the tip.76
Claire's fragmented language may be an ineffective form of communica-
tion, but it is not falsely "decorated" to give the appearance of undisput-
ed meaning. The gaps in her speech paradoxically manage to convey a
resistance to established structures that would be impossible with con-
ventional syntax.
74 Ibid., 88.
75 Gainor, 159.
76 Glaspell, 70.
52 DUNEER
Marcia Noe interprets Claire's linguistic revolt as an example of
Helene Cixous's concept of /'icriture feminine.1
1
Cixous's call for women to
make language their own can be read in terms of Claire's struggle to
escape from the "prison house of language."78
If woman has always functioned "within" man's dis-
course, a signifier referring always to the opposing sig-
nifier that annihilates its particular energy, puts down or
stifles its very different sounds, now it is time for her to
displace this "within," explode it, overturn it, grab it,
make it hers, take it in, take it into her women's teeth,
make up her own tongue to get inside of it.79
What makes Noe's example particularly relevant is her analysis of the
"vicious circle" implicit in both Claire's and Cixous's dilemmas:
[S]he cannot escape structures except through annihila-
tion. If she tries to explain her enterprise, she must do
it with language, within the very structures she is trying
to break out of. If she doesn't explain or define it, she
has no way of validating its existence. so
The paradox of /'icriture feminine speaks to the problems shared by mod-
ernism and feminism, both at the heart of Claire's creative bind.
Although Claire says, "We need not be held in forms moulded
for us," she understands the need for "reminiscence," which signifies
some connection to what has already been.81 Glaspell illustrates this par-
77 Marcia Noe, "The Verge: L'imlure Feminine at the Provincetown" in Susan
Glaspe!L Essqys on Her Theater and Fiction, eel. Ben-Z vi., 129-42.
7
8 Noe and Gainor both aptly allude to Fredric Jameson's concept of the
"prison house of language."
79
Noe, 139. Here, Noe cites from Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement,The
New!J Born Woma11, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of :Minnesota Press, 1986),
95-6.
80 Ibid., 140.
81 Glaspell, 64.
ON THE VERGE 53
adox through the projection of the lantern onto the walls of Claire's
tower: "the innumerable pricks and slits in the metal throw a marvellous pattern on
the curved wall- like some masonry that hasn't been." The lantern is "oldjash-
ioned," yet its particular position in the tower allows it to project itself in
a new way. The pattern, "like some masonry that hasn't been," only appears
that way. It is "marvellous' in the way d1at modern art makes the old new.
For Claire, this pattern suggests the possibilities of reshaping what has
been. The lantern that projects this pattern can be seen as a symbol
enclosing Claire herself. While sitting in this tower, she describes herself
as enclosed within a circle with "pricks" like those on the cover of the
lantern, litde holes left from the darts made by her "gaiety" escaping from
the circle.8
2
If the light projected by the lantern is analogous to the clari-
ty of Claire Archer's vision, the darts represent her attempts to rupture
the circle and free herself. However, those ''pricks and slit!' are what make
the pattern, implying that if she were to leave the circle completely
behind, she would annihilate the pattern along with her connection with
the past.
This is what Claire does in the end after all. She annihilates the
love that would hold her in. She cannot find a way to reconcile the coun-
tervailing desires for escape and connectedness, nor are the men in her
life ready to relinquish their constructions of her identity. Only through
madness do both Claire and Gilman's narrator find their ways out of the
structural patterns that hold them. Gilman sets the stage for Glaspell by
allowing her narrator to "creep over" her husband. Glaspell furthers the
revolt by having Claire strangle Tom before he can enclose her like the
women in the wallpaper. The psychological expressionism of Glaspell's
play extends the proto-modernist style and feminist theme of Gilman's
story to dramatize the challenges for the Heterodox artist. Claire's tragedy
may be no more liberating than that of Gilman's narrator, but Glaspell's
vision for the female artist echoes Gilman's belief that woman's place is
everywhere. Her play announces that the modern woman is on the verge
of claiming her territory.
82
Ibid., 82.
jOURNAL OP Al\lE!UCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 18, N0.1 (\X'INTER 2006)
'WAITING IN THE ANGEL'S WINGS': MARxiST FANTASIA
IN NAOMI WALLACE'S SLAUGHTER CITY
BUELL WISNER
British and American activist playwrights of the 1980s and 1990s faced a
crisis of relevance, often despairing of the wisdom or effectiveness, in
the face of the collapse of Marxist politics and the commodification of
nearly all aspects of life, including art, and of the possibilities for contin-
uing the socialist tradition of Brecht and Odets. If radical drama itself
became suspect of complicity with late capitalism and a concomitant loss
of revolutionary value, then dramatists felt the burden of answering the
challenge posed by Fredric Jameson, who argues .in "Postmodern.ism, or
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism":
the new political art-if it is indeed possible at all-will
have to hold to the truth of postmodern.ism, that is, to
say, to its fundamental object- the world space of
multinational capital-at the same time at which it
achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable
new mode of representing this last, in which we may
again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and
collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and strug-
gle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well
as our social confusion.t
Faced with what conservative theorist Francis Fukuyama exultingly pro-
claimed as "the end of history," activist artists and critics found them-
selves at a juncture where the Marxist horizon, including "history, hope,
meaning and causality" teetered on the brink of meaninglessness.z
Referring back to Jameson's idea of "cognitive mapping," Margaret
Beetham voices a need for a new kind of aesthetic for social change,
1 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
in The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 232.
2 Michael Evenden, "No Future without Marx: Dramaturgies of the 'End of
History' in Churchill, Brenton, Barker," Theater 29.3 (1999) : 100.
.11-1.!\RXIST Fru'JTASIA 55
lamenting, "in the 1990s we lack maps for our journey or dreams of a
possible future."3 Her answer lies in a recuperation of the discourse of
utopianism, and she offers blueprints for feminists and socialists in the
work of Angela Carter, Tony Kushner, Donna Harraway, and in the alle-
gories of historical change in Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the
Philosophy of History."
The plays of American-British playwright Naomi Wallace, which
include the award-winning In the Hearl of America, One Flea Spare, and
Slaughter City, represent a body of theatrical work representative of this
new utopian aesthetic. Though various in subject matter, as well as in
style and tone, all of Wallace's major plays are alike in their spirit of rad-
ical activism. At a time \vhen identity politics rule the stage and page, she
maintains a sense of the Marxist narrative of class struggle which
inspired earlier generations of literary leftists. Wallace's 1996 fantastical
factory dramaS laughter City seems, of all her plays, the most central to her
art and ideas. Slaughter City advances an essentially socialist view of the
past and the future which its author acknowledges is "irresponsibly hope-
ful in a lot of ways."4
Embodied by the play is a new kind of socialist aesthetic, one
that embraces concerns other than economics and its role in human des-
tiny. Wallace's neo-Brechtian drama of oppressed factory workers
belongs to the traditional socialist discourse centered upon the factory.
With its echoes of Sinclair's The Jungle and Brecht's St. Joan of the
Stockgards, Wallace's play seems almost a product of the 1930s. But
Slaughter Ciry eschews social realism for something more suited to con-
temporary aesthetics. Incorporating a sense of postmodern space, reviv-
ing allegory, and aestheticizing history, Wallace posits a new kind of the-
atre dedicated to a fantastic dramaturgy and a radical politics. In its admit-
tedly bold attempt to refashion traditional Marxist drama, Slaughter City
offers a somewhat uncomfortable reconciliation of materialist and ideal-
ist ideologies, a project lying at the heart of much contemporary political
theatre.
In crafting this new aesthetic, Wallace draws upon two contem-
porary dramatic movements, both of them facing similar crises and
3 Margaret Beetham, "Feminism and the End of Eras: Apocalypse and
Utopia," Essq)'S and Studm 48 (1995): 89-114, 106.
4 Robert Vorlicky, Kushner in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998), 258.
56 WISNER
advancing similar responses. The first of these comes from Wallace's
adopted country, England, and comprises playwrights of a slightly older
generation, including Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond, and Howard Barker.
According to Michael Evenden, the 1980s plays of these authors suc-
ceeded-in the face of the Thatcherite "war on socialism"-in creating
an "arena for a teeming, many-sided struggle to master the engulfing and
paralyzing present."S The dramaturgy of the "end of history," in
Evenden's view, revels in creating new, postmodern settings that reveal
the present as apocalypse, a co-opted dead-end of horrific proportions,
haunted by the past yet using these ghosts to suggest the ever-present
chance of reaching utopia. According to Evenden's version of radical
English theatre, "All of this disrupting of time, conjuring of ghosts, ago-
nizing, violating of sanctities, exposing of wounds, and hurling of bod-
ies against the barriers in these plays suggests both a kind of whistling-
in-the-dark terror and an all-out effort to resist the present static apoca-
lypse."6 Wallace writes with a similar eye to apocalypse and the spirit of
utopia; this vision pervades all of her thoughts on history, revolution, and
change.
Tony Kushner provides the second major influence on Wallace's
art and ideas. Angels In America's immense success and Kushner's person-
al crusade has brought politics back onto the American stage, inaugurat-
ing a new political theatre which adopts a neo-Brechtian dramaturgy and
boasts such playwrights as Suzan-Lori Parks and Wallace. Kushner's play
calls itself a "fantasia" and accordingly mixes several layers of reality and
dream, features "hauntings" by the ghosts of the past, and offers (or pre-
tends to offer) a metaphysics for change, embodied in the awe-inspiring
visitation of an androgynous, "very Steven Spielberg" version of
Benjamin's Angel of History.? Fostering a close professional relationship
with Wallace, Kushner has offered guidance as a personal mentor, artis-
tic predecessor, and political compatriot; almost single-handedly, he has
established a genre of political drama toward which the author of
Slaughter City aspires.
5 Michael Evenden, 100-13, 101.
6
Ibid., 101.
7 Tony Kushner, Angels in America Part Om: Millennium Approaches, Angels in
Amenca (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 124.
MARXIST
57
In Slaughter City, Naomi Wallace revisits the site of traditional
Marxist analysis, the factory. Whether in drama, fiction, or poetry, the
arena of industry provides for representation of the fundamental ele-
ments of Marxist theory. Portraying working conditions and workers' cul-
ture within the factory, such literature foregrounds the ingredients most
crucial to an evaluation and overthrow of capitalism-the images of
union agitation, the debilitating effects of labor, the petty and not-so-
petty tyrannies of the propertied class and its minions. All of these
images comprise the stuff of traditional socialist discourse. To a large
extent, however, this discourse no longer seems a vital part of revolu-
tionary writing. The contemporary playwright, therefore, who chooses to
author a factory drama writes within a somewhat hackneyed tradition,
one which seems at this historical moment unsuitable for a realistic poli-
tics. On one level, Slaughter City might seem tired. In a laudatory review,
Benedict Nightingale nevertheless notes the conventional themes and
rhetoric which inform Wallace's play: root [Slaughter City] is a tradi-
tional Marxist protest-play .... All this could have been written by Odets
for New York's Group Theatre in the 1930s."8 Approaching a sort of
play which has gone unwritten for decades, however, Wallace realizes the
need to update the literary activism of an earlier epoch. She articulates
this revisionist goal in Rage and Reason:
When I wrote Slaughter City I thought, "There's very lit-
tle that's been put on stage about labour struggles, more
maybe in the 1930s, but how do you do that again now
in a vital and dramatic way? When you're dealing with
labour issues there's a certain rhetoric that you can't get
away from, so my challenge was, 'How do I take this
rhetoric and make it come alive again so people hear it,
hear these issues again?"'9
The primary challenge to this comes, naturally, from the fact that
the factory no longer seems the site at which most First World workers
encounter capitalism. Between Sinclair's turn-of-the-century journalistic
novel The jungle and the 1930s, which Wallace recognizes as the decade
8 Benedict Nightingale, "Sausage and Mishmash;' ReYiew of Slaughter City, by
Naomi Wallace, Times [London], 29 January 1996.
9 Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women PlayJJJrights
on Pltry1111ighting (London: Methuen, 1997), 164-65.
58 WISNER
when the factory occupied the central position in socialist discourse,
modernity wore the face of industrialism. Millions of Americans spent
their work weeks at the local plant, engaged in assembly line production,
regimented by whistles and timed breaks. As Jameson argues, however,
the First World has entered the period of "late capitalism," for which the
consumer drones of Huxley's Brave New World seem more prophetic than
the industrial under worlds of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Most Americans
now labor in service industries, their readily-spent wages fueling various
multinational corporations. And, as Jameson notes, the aesthetic of real-
ism which matched the earlier period of industrialization is no longer
desirable or even applicable. Noting the loss of the "real" in postmodern
literature generally and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime specifically, Jameson
argues, "If there is any realism left here, therefore, it is a 'realism' which
is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement, and of
slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which
we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and
simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach."IO
When Wallace writes a play about a factory, then, social realism does not
provide the appropriate medium nor represent the realities of labor and
class today. To proffer a valid discourse of the factory, Wallace must
eschew realism in favor of a new kind of drama.
Surprisingly enough, Wallace began writing Slaughter Ciry with a
strong inclination toward the traditional understanding of the factory. In
the foreword to the Faber and Faber edition of the play, she discusses her
play's genesis. Conducting research for her characters, the playwright
interviewed numerous workers at the Fischer Packing Company in
Louisville, Kentucky (her stateside hometown). She describes Wanda
Maloney, Gus Lazrouitch, and other members of Local 227, recalling the
interviews in which plant employees revealed the scars, literal and figura-
tive, resulting from the dangerous jobs in the meat-packing industry. She
admits to feeling somewhat "uneasy" in her role as "cultural anthropolo-
gist," but ultimately the short record of Slaughter Ciry's gestation attests to
the play's basis in reality.
11
The document becomes such a key grounding
because Slaughter Ciry, while modeled on actual factory life, rejects all pre-
tense of realism to become a "fantasia" (like Angels in America), ultimate-
ly comprising a revision of traditional Marxist theatre.
10 Jameson, 208.
II Naomi Wallace, "Foreword," in Slaughter City (London: Faber and Faber,
1996), 1lli-xi.
M 'IRXIST FANTASIA 59
For Slaughter City, U.S.A. does not represent a real factory.
Rather, it gives us a postmodern simulation of a factory, a self-conscious
image chosen as the site for socialist allegory. Its lack of fidelity to the
material "real" possibly compromises Wallace's politics, but the space of
the play reflects the time in which she writes. As such, the setting of
Slaughter City aims at the confusing cooption of the real by the ideal,
working in much the same way as Jameson's Bonaventura Hotel or
Baudrillard's Disneyland. Denied the resource of an effective aesthetic
built upon a realistic factory setting, Wallace opts for a fantastical one. In
Baudrillard's terms, "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor redupli-
cation, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of
the real for the real itself."12 The play restricts itself completely to the
meat-packing plant and its time is "now and then."
1
3 Like many other
postmodernist authors, Wallace chooses a specific generic discourse- the
factory drama-for the purposes of fabulation, for holding up an artifi-
cial, un-real world to comment upon this one.
In doing so, Wallace draws at least partly on Brechtian epic the-
atre, which, however, she revises in keeping with her goal of revision.
Early on, Brecht articulated a purely rational, sociological basis for his
plays, arguing "the essential part of the epic theatre is perhaps that it
appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of shar-
ing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things."t4
Claudia Barnett's claim that "Wallace employs Brechtian themes and tech-
niques in her plays to become the consummate Brechtian feminist"
15
seems something of an overstatement because Wallace aims perhaps
more at feeling than at reason, but certainly Slaughter City derives in large
part from the tradition of Brechtian theatre. In place of Brecht's scien-
tific, sociological aims, Wallace, in keeping with the contemporary disdain
for scientific dialectics, strikes in Slaughter City toward an aesthetic of
affect, the sensationalism of bleeding flesh-of both meat and worker.
12 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 4.
13 Slaughter City, 3.
1
4 Bcrtolt Brecht, "The Epic Theatre and its Difficulties," in Brecht on Theatre:
the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John \X'illett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1964),
203.
!5 Claudia Barnett, "Dialectic and the Drama of Naomi Wallace," Soutbern
Women Play1vrights: New Essays in Uterary History and Criticism, eds. Robert L. McDonald and
Linda Rohrer Paige (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2001), 156.
60
WISNER
Re-envisioning the industrial plant, the playwright makes this
rhetoric "come alive again"16 by creating a new aesthetic of the factory,
one disturbing, sensual, and poetic. Taking place in a kind of cosmic
meat-packing house, Slaughter City refurbishes factory protest, expanding
traditional Marxist theories into the realm of fantasy, alienating industry,
and de-naturalizing factory work as Brecht might have.
In Slaughter City the factory is not realistic, but a magical space,
an analogy for the theatre, where Wallace's ideas can engage the audience.
To a large extent, the characters and events of the play can be read alle-
gorically. In two essays on contemporary visual art, Craig Owens identi-
fies a rise in allegory as one marker of an aesthetics of postmodernism,
ranging from the stories of Borges to the performance art of Laurie
Anderson, and from the Benjamin revival to the critical work of Harold
Bloom. Essentially, Owens defines allegory as an attitude common to
contemporary art, occurring "whenever one text is doubled by another ..
. . Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not
invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally signif-
icant, poses as its interpreter."17 In Slaughter City Wallace works in this
mode, laying claim to a classic text and interpreting it for a new historical
situation. The palimpsest upon which Wallace inscribes her allegory in
Slaughter City is the classical Marxist paradigm of dialectical materialism,
corning from its earliest source, The Communist Manifesto. The play must be
read in light of this-the setting, characters and events of her play rein-
terpret the dialectic. In addition to her revision of Marxist factory dis-
course, she expands the traditional focus on economics to include sexu-
ality, in short "sexing" the dialectic. A reading of this allegory seems
appropriate both to its aesthetics and to Wallace's political agenda.
The idea of the body's nobility in the realms of both labor and
eros-and the denial of that nobility through the capitalist means of pro-
duction-serves as the guiding thematic principle of Slaughter City. While
the Manifesto points out the loss of worker fulfillment and increasing
alienation from labor, Wallace's play expands labor to include all aspects
of the body, in particular its capacity for sexuality. As she tells Tony
Kushner, "What fascinates me is how much the body and politics are
16 Rage and Reason, 165.
t7 Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of
Posrmodernism," Bryond Recognih'on: Representation, Pmver, and Culture, eds. Scott Bryson,
Barbata Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: UC Press, 1992), 53-54.
MJ\RXJST FANTASIA 61
connected. The body that labors is also the body that loves. And if you
live in a society where what you do for a living destroys the body, then
that affects how you love sexually."JS For Wallace, the history of class
conflict is also the history of sexual conflict; proletariat and bourgeoisie
struggle not only over capital, but within the realm of sexuality.
The characters fall generally into two camps and can be read as
embodiments of Ivfarx's "two great, contending classes." On one side is
the factory's manager, Baquin, who laments that he has but one Mercedes
while rival plant managers have two. Helping him in his program of
exploitation is the foreman Tuck, an African American man who, despite
his complicity in Baquin's stratagems, has misgivings about worker
exploitation. On the other side are the union workers, whose names
reveal more about their status than their personalities. Roach leads the
workers' union-she's a powerful, rebellious black female. Maggot, her
best friend, is a white worker.
The chief allegorical characters of the play, however, are two
ghostly figures who haunt the slaughterhouse. With this haunting,
Wallace represents the presence of ideology and history in much the
same way that Kushner employs the spirit of Ethel Rosenberg and Prior
Walter's ancestors in Angels. Commenting upon similar spectral adver-
saries in In the Heart of America, Beth Cleary uses a Freudian formulation
to characterize Wallace's use of ghosts as an attempt to represent a return
of the repressed from the depths of the "social unconscious."t9 In
Slaughter City, however, the spirits, personifying the adversarial classes, are
the most obvious re-appropriation of dialectical materialism within the
play. Aligned with Baquin, Tuck, and the bourgeoisie is an eccentric char-
acter known only as the Sausage Man, a demiurgic specter who wields a
totemic sausage-grinder and laments the passage of the "old days" when
men with vision refused to let unions stand in the way of sausage pro-
duction. The Sausage Man's counterpart, Cod, arrives on the scene as a
picket-line-crossing scab, revealing only gradually that he has a long his-
tory of union agitation and that he's actually a woman masquerading as a
man.
His hand-held sausage grinder symbolizing his power over the
bodies of other creatures, the Sausage Man understands that his power
cannot be characterized merely as the acquisition of wealth, but that it
18 Kushner itl Conversation, 258.
19 Beth Cleary, "Haunting the Social Unconscious: Naomi Wallace's In the Heart
of America," ]oumal of American Drama and Theatre 14.2 (2002): 3.
62 WISNER
builds its foundation on exploiting the "refuse" of progress, or the bod-
ies of the proletariat. The Sausage Man narrates his empire-building
process, revealing how capitalism uses its workers: "I made sausages. All
the little bits of bone and gut and cartilage that the rest of the world
threw away, I made into something useful. Something edible .... With my
two hands I created an empire out of a single sausage."20 These bits and
pieces of flesh advance Wallace's notion of the human body in all of its
multiple, pluralistic sexuality. When the Sausage Man grinds up these bits
and pieces, he treats non-normative pleasure as refuse, to be recycled into
a more holistic, homogeneous form. The phallic outcome of this process,
the sausage, represents the desired erotic alignment of the industrial sys-
tem.
Meanwhile, his metaphysical adversary, Cod, must learn how
dialectical materialism, in all of its aspects, affects the body. In an early
scene, Cod reveals to Maggot and Roach her long history of union agi-
tation and violence, utilizing the traditional rhetoric of socialist agitation
to describe the strikes and defeats of a past time.zr Believing that Cod is
a man, Maggot and Roach taunt her with disbelief and condescension;
they proceed to show the scab what life in Slaughter City, U.S.A. really
means. Roach assists Maggot in putting on a veil of bacon, in which she
will mockingly "marry" the unamused Cod.22 Employing meat scraps and
blood, the two women smear "rosy cheeks" upon the recalcitrant scab
until Maggot bestows a marriage kiss.23 The episode, which relies heavily
upon Brechtian gestic action and implied meaning, displays the extent to
which capitalism reduces the workers to meat.
The metaphor of the slaughterhouse guides the work and
Wallace locates the slashing, slicing, cutting, and hacking of the industry
upon the bodies- rather than just upon the pocketbooks-of the work-
ers. In production, Wallace's settings and dialogue indicate how factory
life makes commodities out of the bodies of the characters. Perceiving
Wallace's method of presenting her characters alongside the carcasses of
animals to show how their humanity stands in constant danger of being
reduced to commodified meat, Benedict Nightingale notes how a
London production underscores her message:
20 Skmghter Cit;; 19.
21 Ibid., 16.
22Jbid., 17.
23 Ibid., 18.
MAR.'UST FANTASIA
Gouts of fresh blood splatter both the bare stage and
the slats of plastic dangling at the back. Gobs of drying
blood are scraped by bloodstained workers from inside
the pigs' heads that shunt past, dangling from bloody
hooks .... The pigs' -heads, the offal, the slabs of meat
in sinister white muslin are largely emblematic: it is the
workers who are being sliced, scraped, minced and
turned into sausage-meat.24
63
The Communist Manifesto describes how capitalism reduces the worth of
the worker and his work, forcing him into a menial, mechanical servitude,
toiling within and for an economic system from which he is alienated:
"These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity,
like every other article of commerce."2s Life in Slaughter City forces
Wallace's characters literally to "sell themselves piecemeal." Their bodies,
in addition to their labor, become commodities. Initially believing in the
myth of promotion, the white, semi-educated Brandon, for instance,
gladly exchanges parts of himself for higher pay.26
In Wallace's revision of The Communist Manifesto, when classes
contend, the issues of sensuality, erotic fulfillment, and gender factor as
importantly as any strictly economic concern. Urging the workers to
understand that their oppression is a physical one, Cod aligns the prole-
tariat with a quasi-mystical interpretation of sex. Un-alienated sexuality
provides, like Marx's validation of un-alienated labor, a criterion by which
systems of living can be judged. In Slaughter City, the working class holds
the politically revolutionary power of sexuality: "It's catching! Fuck you
to the bowing and scraping we live by just to eat, fuck you to the pover-
ty, to the dismemberment of our souls, day after day, hour after hour."
2
7
The managing class of the factory, represented by the plant manager,
Baquin, promotes-in opposition to this erotic pluralism-phallic, mas-
culine unity. Ironically compelling the workers to do health-improving
calisthenics before they proceed to the kill floor, Baquin parodies the
24 Nightingale, 1.
25 Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin
Ltd., 1993), 87.
26 Slaughter Cil), 9.
27 Ibid., 24.
64 W ISNER
notion of spirituality in Cod's speeches by exhorting them to "jump!
Leap! Exercise your gifts. Raise your bodies to the cause, make yourselves
stars of motivation, co-ordination, innovation."ZS
Cod foresees sexual love as an end to the history of class strug-
gle. If she could achieve physical fulfillment, then the constant history of
struggle might come to an end. But the deterministic forces of the dialec-
tic stop her desires at every turn. Curbed in her yearning, Cod typifies the
rest of the workers. History, as conceived by the Sausage Man, wraps her
in the wardrobe of a man; ostensibly, her role as labor instigator is com-
mensurate with her assumed identity as a man. In Wallace's allegory, Cod
has been denied erotic fulfillment by her place within the Sausage Man's
system.
The poetics of the play lead, ultimately, towards a utopian vision
of the end of history, a millennium of redeemed labor and sexuality. To
achieve this, Wallace aestheticizes history by formulating a teleological
allegory. An investigation of her historical sense, therefore, is indispensa-
ble in considering what change means in the context of the play and also
useful in reading Wallace's other major works, most of which are histor-
ical dramas, from the 1665 plague play One Flea Spare to the Depression-
era The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, from In the Heart of America, set during
the first Gulf War, to The Inland Sea, which concerns landscape artists in
the eighteenth century. In focusing on history, Wallace follows Brecht,
Churchill, Kushner, and the current obsession with historical themes in
postmodern fiction and poetry.
Wallace rejects the scientific historicism of earlier decades in
favor of the historical sublime. Whereas the modernist Brecht insisted on
a historical theater based on rationality and the attempt to show the
effects of commodification on characters' lives at different points in his-
tory, Wallace denies Brecht's scientific perspective as well as the ideas of
progress and the linear narrative common to the historical narratives of
modernity. In this, Slaughter Ci!J seems paradigmatic of those contempo-
rary plays, including Angels in America, which attempt a similar recupera-
tion of history's promise of redemption.
Claudia Barnett describes Wallace's sense of the historical by
comparing it to Julia Kristeva's distinction between linear time and cur-
sive time. For Barnett, One Flea Spare and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek
illustrate the latter, also known as "women's time" or "monumental time,"
in which the idea of historical specificity has been replaced by the shape-
28 I bid., 55.
M\RXIST FANTASIA 65
lessness of the eternal oppression of women and minorities by a white
patriarchy. As Barnett articulates it, "By displacing and splitting the time
periods of One Flea Spare and her other prison plays, Wallace clarifies that
such imprisonment is monumental rather than linear .... History repeats
itself, eternally and helplessly, and thus time itself, 'without cleavage or
escape."'
2
9
But Kristeva appears less applicable to Wallace's view of history
than does a writer whose dedication to historical materialism seems more
pertinent, and whose "Theses on the Philosophy of History" provide the
chief generative fiction of Angels in America and a major touchstone for
the new political theater-Walter Benjamin. Roger Bechtel, among oth-
ers, discusses the influence of Benjamin on Wallace's contemporary
Kushner, asserting, "What Kushner flnds in Benjamin is a theory of his-
tory that can be used aesthetically, a means of reinvigorating our experi-
ence of history in an aesthetic mode."30 We must read Slaughter City in a
similar way, for Wallace uses the philosopher's ideas as the maio basis for
her own aesthetics of history.31
Benjamin wrote his "Theses" during the ascendeocy of Nazism;
he saw in Hitler all the chaos and horror that history can bring.
Destroying any hope that Benjamin may have had about the constant,
irreversible progress of humanity, Nazism forced him into exile and
eventually to suicide. Shortly before that fate, however, he composed a
series of gnomic, allegorical "theses," wherein he attempts a revision of
Marxist rationalism in order to reestablish a sense of the immanence of
revolution. The "Theses on the Philosophy of History" begin with a
description of history as a chess game, won unfailingly by a puppet
known as "materialism." Unlike Marx, however, Benjamin sees under the
chess table, hidden from view, a midget called "theology" who, obscured
29 Claudia Barnett, "Physical Prisons: Naomi Wallace's Drama of Captivity," in
Captive Audience: Prison and Captivi!J in Contemporary Theater, eds. Thomas Fahy and Kimball
King (New York, New York: Routledge, 2003), 151. For more discussion of Kristeva's
continuum between linear and cursive time in relation to Wallace's plays, sec Barnett,
"Dialectic and the Drama of Naomi Wallace."
30 Roger Bechtel, '"A Kind of Painful Progress': The Benjaminian Dialectics of
Angels in America," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Cniicism 16 (2001): 99-121, 101.
31 For more on how Benjamin has influenced the current use to which femi-
nists and gay authors have put Benjamin's concepts of apocalyptic revolution, see
Margaret Beetham, "Feminism and the End of Eras: Apocalypse and Utopia."
66 WISNER
from view, actually conducts the game.32 Enlisting Jewish ideas of mes-
sianic time, the philosopher understands history not as a chain of events,
but as a continuum of catastrophe, a piling of "wreckage upon wreck-
age." Any given catastrophe, however, might usher in revolution and
utopia: the age of the messiah. By replacing the empirical epistemology
and progressive teleology that lie at the heart of Marx's studies and of
Brecht's theatre with a theological faith in redemptive revolution,
Benjamin reshapes the whole outlook of the historical materialist (his
ideal historian) to include a conception of history organized around the
sudden, cataclysmic, and always possible rupture of social order.
In Slaughter City, Wallace articulates more clearly than in her other
plays a sense of history culled from Benjamin's allegories. Using
metaphors from the meat-packing industry, the Sausage Man conceives
progress as a great animal: "Can there be history without the poor? Small
people die small deaths and their place in history is the flick of a pig's tale,
part of the machinery of the living beast, but the tail end all the same ..
. . There will always be refuse in this world so there will always be a place
for me."33 With this nihilistic piling of wreckage upon wreckage, the con-
tinuum of time is, from the first scene, destabilized. The play opens with
Cod desperately trying to rouse a textile worker from her work bench as
flames envelope the factory. Throughout the play, it becomes increasing-
ly clear that Cod, the eternal animating spirit of labor discontent, may
now be leading the fight in Slaughter City, U.S.A., but has led it elsewhere
and "elsewhen" as well. Delivering a trance-like litany of her personal his-
tory, Cod recalls:
I used to be union. A miner. Long time ago ... Haden
County ... Kentucky ... No ... It was the Colorado coal
strike. Dug our own graves underground. Ate coal,
pissed coal, shat coal. Then one day, doesn't matter
which day, you just couldn't dig anymore and you lay
down in the grave you dug and died. After years of it,
we went on strike. Just said "No". We figured that would
change something. Well, it did. Rockefeller called out the
National Guard. They came down on the Ludlow
3
2
Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 253-64.
33 5 laughter City, 44.
MARJ(JST F.\NTASIA
colony, burned our tents and opened fire. Sixty-six of us
dead ... I was a telephone linesman. I went through the
wreck the next day and lifted an iron cot that was cov-
ering a pit. There were bodies inside. Burned the way
meat gets burned and goes black and small.34
67
Cod remembers more labor tragedies in this same dreamlike manner dur-
ing the play; like another Tom Joad, she has been there, fought oppres-
sion in a thousand guises, observed coundess catastrophes, witnessed, in
Benjamin's terms, the wreckage hurled at the feet of history. Cod embod-
ies also the spiritual gifts that come with this history of oppression,
bringing to the workers of Slaughter City those things that, according to
Benjamin "manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cun-
ning, and fortitude."3S
The ultimate goal of Benjamin is for revolutionaries, like the
messiah, to "blast open the continuum of history." Slaughter City ends
with a fantastical occurrence of just such a revolt against the sinister
power of the Sausage Man. Originating with the death of the worker
Brandon, the revolution occurs through catastrophe, but is marked at
every turn by the sexual fulfillment of the characters and by Cod's abili-
ty to find both physical and emotional love. As the play closes, all of the
workers attempt to overcome the process by which capitalism keeps their
desires constrained. Harking to Cod's early prophecy, in which the scab
declares that "coming is the body's way of saying fuck you" to capitalism,
the movement toward a workers' takeover of Slaughter City is at once
political and sexual.
Wallace designates the climactic touch of Cod and Maggot as an
analogy for the revolution. As Brandon dies from the ammonia-line
break, Cod removes her shirt to use it for first aid. This act is a dual catas-
trophe, sparking a worker revolt and a gender cataclysm; Baquin, dis-
gusted over the scab's gender-bending charade, wants to fire Cod, con-
sidering her "unnatural."36 The former scab also alienates Maggot, who
had begun to share Cod's love. The resolution to both catastrophes lies
woven together: in the climactic scene of the play, the workers take con-
trol of the factory while Cod and Maggot, putting aside the artificial
34 Ibid., 16.
35 Benjamin, 255.
36 Slaughter CifY, 79.
68 WISNER
boundary of gender, take control of their bodies. The two events occur
simultaneously. As Roach lays out the chains to lock the workers into the
factory, Cod and Maggot reconcile. Asking the "eternal spark" where her
feelings lie, Maggot challenges Cod to remove her shirt. Unwinding the
bandage which restrains Cod's breasts, Maggot instigates a dual count-
down which parallels the suspense of the factory lock-down. As the
bandage drops to the floor, two revolutions occur at once: "Maggot and
Cod kiss. At the moment of the kiss we hear the very loud sound of heat:y doors being
pulled shut and locking, echoes of many doors locking and locking. Then silence. "37
As has happened throughout the play, political and physical actions
reflect one another. Cod's kiss completes, but for a formality, her victory
over the Sausage Man. Withholding from her the pleasures of physical
interaction with others, the ur-capitalist has hitherto refused to let Cod
find a time or a place in which to stay. Always before, the revolts have
failed, ending in bleaker conditions than before. This time, however, the
workers thwart the Sausage Man's plan; Cod and the rest triumph due to
touch- the kiss frees Cod from the strings with which her master has
made her dance.
In the last scene of the play, when the fate of the workers' rebel-
lion hangs in the balance, as does the eternal struggle between Cod and
the Sausage Man, Wallace returns to the possibility of utopia. Roach pro-
claims the new order of affairs in Slaughter City: "My friends. Welcome
to Slaughter City. This is a place where things go and go and go. Now this
is a place where things stop. Machinery stops. Cows stop. Pigs stop. We
stop. And most importantly, profits stop. And whenever profit stops,
things heat up fast. From now on, anything can happen."38 As the work-
ers' takeover of the plant commences, the Sausage Man seeks out his
adversary Cod in a final showdown: "The two of us here, together. At
last. But will both of us be here to mop up the mess?"39 The scene is per-
meated at all points by the failures of the past and the possibility of the
future, illustrating, as Benjamin expresses, "a history which does not
occur in homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the
Now."
4
0 For Cod, this threatens to overwhelm her. She scarcely remem-
3
7
Ibid., 83.
38 Ibid., 86.
39 Ibid., 86.
40
Benjamin, 261.
MARXIST FANTASIA 69
hers the place or the hour, stuttering, "I'm with the Knights of Labour ...
No .. . With the United Mine" before she can locate herself.41 At last,
however, she is able to do just that, mastering the Sausage Man and
throwing off his yoke by remembering, just in time, to call out "fire" and
prevent another catastrophe. As Benjamin describes it-ironically
enough considering Cod's transvestism- the revolutionary "remains in
control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of his-
tory."42
In Slaughter City Wallace creates a new, fantastic aesthetic by
which she hopes to recuperate Marx for the contemporary stage.
Authoring a play about a group of down-trodden slaughterhouse work-
ers, Wallace rewrites The Jungle for the postmodern generation. Forsaking
a strictly socialist, rationalist approach to the work, the playwright realizes
that the narrative of dialectical materialism requires revision in an era
which recognizes that alternate versions of history have challenged its
monolithic nature. By incorporating a new sense of space, by using alle-
gory to revise traditional Marxism, and by attempting a neo-Benjaminian
aesthetics of history, Wallace has made the socialist platform into an
almost sacred agenda-Slaughter City advances a socialism as religious as
Marx's was scientific.
It is, of course, on the basis of her politics that Wallace as an
avowedly political playwright demands to be judged. For this reason, I
wish to consider briefly the political limitations of Wallace's aesthetics. At
their core, all of Wallace's plays-with the possible exception of One Flea
Spare-offer a virtually spiritual vision of both historical dialectics and
sexuality. To color politics with spirituality makes for an interesting play,
but does it make for good political theatre?
The short answer seems to be "no." The continued importance
of Marxism rests solidly upon the cornerstone of materialism and, com-
pared with materialist writers, Wallace seems to have abandoned a still-
solid foundation for social critique. Offering neo-Brechtian plays without
Brecht's dedication to a "scientific" theatre appears to have opened pos-
sibly irreconcilable contradictions in Wallace's political thought. Reviving
dialectical materialism as a form of sacred knowledge signals to some
extent a displacement of politics into a sphere-the theological-which
cannot provide a model for political action. This is a problem shared by
41 Slaughter City, 86.
42 Benjamin, 261.
70 WISNER
those influences which loom around every slaughterhouse corner in
Wallace's play. Despite his current popularity and his staggering impor-
tance as a cultural critic, for instance, Walter Benjamin faces similar ques-
tions about the political efficacy of his "Theses on the Philosophy of
History." According to Beatrice Hanssen:
it cannot be doubted that even in the 1930s Benjamin's
thought failed to offer a blueprint for the Marxist revo-
lution but instead incessantly returned to that which
effectively precedes the political realm-the ethico-theo-
logical. . .. [H]e failed to prove the political validity of a
program that would join Marxism to Jewish mysticism.
4
3
David Savran's critique of Angels in America argues much the same thing
about the plays of Tony Kushner. He might just as easily be discussing
Benjamin's "Theses" or the fantastical plays of Naomi Wallace when he
opines, "Regardless of Kushner's intentions, Angels sets forth a project
wherein the theological is constructed as a transcendent category into
which politics and history finally disappear."44 For the spectacle of eter-
nal, metaphysical conflict between the haves and the have-nots of
Wallace's Slaughter City, this kind of materialist commitment to critique
and to postmodern micro-politics might be the last word from which the
heaped praises of The Guardian and Revolutionary Worker might not be able
to rescue it.
But if the theological cannot provide a politics, Wallace might
counter, the purely rational and the micro-political cannot offer any hope
or instigation for cataclysmic social change. If constructed, in Savran's
words, as a "transcendent category," it seems quite likely that the spiritu-
al, the spectral, the fantastic cannot inspire a politics or a history. If con-
structed as an immanent category, however, the possibilities of revolu-
tion as messianic redemption promise as much hope for radical change,
Wallace would suggest, as does a postmodern materialism bereft of a
macro-politics and historical certainty.
4
3 Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History: OJ Stones, Animals, H11111an
Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: UniYersity of California Press, 1998), 7.
4
4
David SaYran, "Ambinlence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How
Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation," Theatre Journa/47 (1995): 226.
CONTRIBUTORS
DEBORAH BAILIN is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of
Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation explores the relationship
between the animal other and the animal self in 20th century American
literature. She has an M.A. from Catholic University and a B.A. from
Johns Hopkins University, both in English.
ANITA J. DUNEER is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of
Connecticut. She is completing her dissertation, entitled, "The Steamboat
and the Petticoat: Revisions of the Maritime Romantic Ideal in America."
Her research and teaching interests include American literature, women's
literature, travel and ethnic literature. She has also published in _a/ b:
Auto/ Biograpi?J Studies_.
ROBERT W. HAYNES, an associate professor of English at Texas A&M
International University in Laredo, teaches Shakespeare and a variety of
other courses in early British language and literature. His additional
research interests include classical political philosophy, the American
South and Southwest, and Horton Foote.
L. BUELL WISNER is currently a Stewart doctoral fellow in contemporary
British and American Literature at the University of Tennessee in
Knoxville, Tennessee, where his dissertation project focuses on contem-
porary historical fiction. Buell earned the M.A. in English from Georgia
Southern University where his master's thesis explored the art and ideol-
ogy of Kentucky-born playwright and poet Naomi Wallace. He graduat-
ed from the University of Georgia with a B.A. in History and English in
1998. Additionally, he has taught composition and literature at Bradwell
Institute and Armstrong Atlantic State University, both in Georgia.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES OF THE
17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@ Reauani The Ahoeut.-Miuded Lowt
@ Destoucheo:TheCo..ceitedCow.t
@ La Cl.owMe: n.. F...!.loaohle P.ej...!k:.
@ a ~ ... n.. flleDcl ol the Lo.wt
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
MARVIN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches's The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya's The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of
the Moliere inheritance, from
comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy
of the mid eighteenth century, to
comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and
politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modem era.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
r BAllY N
T t l ~ Doc or MONTAICI
TRA II 0 liND 01 D IY
DA ~ R O LD & MARVIN CARL ON
Pixerecourt:
Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by:
Daniel Gerould
&
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of
Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon,
or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of
Montatgis, or The Forest of Bondy,
Christopher Columbus, or The
Discovery of the New World, and
Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected
Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and
the two theoretical essays by the
playwright, "Melodrama," and
"Final Reflections on Melodrama."
"Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the
structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century . ..
Pixerecourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements
of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his play."
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited
by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of
Witkiewicz's most important
plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar,
The Anonymous Work, The
Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and
Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his
theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words
about the Role of the Actor in the
Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and
continues the vein of dream and
grotesque fantasy exemplified by
the late Strindberg or by
Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and
Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpeices of the dramatists of the
absurd- Becket!, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal- of the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties. It is high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Arab Oedipus:
THE ARAB OEDIPUS
FOUR PLAYS
Four Plays
Editor
Marvin Carlson
Translators
Marvin Carlson
Dalia Basiouny
William Maynard Hutchi ns
Pierre Cachia
Desmond O'Grady
Admer Gouryh
With Introductions By:
Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq Al-Hakim,
& Dalia Basiouny
This volume contains four plays based on the
Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the
Arab world: Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali
Ahmad Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali
Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus, and Walid
..._ _____________ ..... Ikhlasi's Oedipus.
The volume also includes Al-Hakirn's preface to his Oedipus, on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a
preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by Marvin Carlson.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modem Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Westem theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Comedy:
A Bibliography
Editor
Meghan Duffy
Senior Editor
Daniel Gerould
Initiated by
Stuart Baker, Michael Early,
& David Nicolson
This bibliography is intended for scholars,
teachers, students, artists, and general
readers interested in the theory and
practice of comedy. It is a concise
bibliography, focusing exclusively on
drama, theatre, and performance, and
includes only published works written
in English or appearing in English
translation.
Comedy is designed to supplement older, existing bibliographies by including new areas
of research in the theory and practice of comedy and by listing the large number of new
studies that have appeared in the past quarter of a century.
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MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium
on this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of I 999
along with the first English translations of three short plays by leading
Egyptian playwrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal
Maqsoud, and Lenin EI-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of
English translations and secondary articles on the theatre in
Egypt since 1955.
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Zeanri and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and
Samuel Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No
Theatre in the World Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997
in conjunction with the "Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the
Japan Society. The book contains an introduction and fifteen essays,
organized into sections on uZeami' s Theories and Aesthetics," 'Zeami
and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and the World."
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four
plays by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry,
and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some
ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with
an introduction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday,
Serenade, aod The Hair of the Dog.
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Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive
catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars.
Within the indexed volume, each facility is briefly described including an
outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most
entries include electronic contact information and web sites. The listings are
grouped as follows: Librari es, Museums, and Historical Societi es; University
and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies
and Acting Schools; and Film and Other.
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