August: Osage County by Tracy Letts (2009)

Summary:  The three Weston sisters have returned to the home of their parents in Pawkuska, Oklahoma following the disappearance of their father.  They are joined by various relatives and a recently hired cook/maid/nurse named Johnna as they wait with their drug-addled mother for the phone to ring.  Eventually, Sheriff Heidebrecht visits the family to inform them that Bev's body has been found in the lake, an apparent suicide that will be filed as "drowning."  As the sisters attempt to figure out what to do with their mother (who has mouth cancer and is seriously addicted to painkillers), family secrets old and new are exposed. 

Thoughts:  For the second time in this project, a blurb on the back of the book compares the work to that of Eugene O'Neill.  Jeremy McCarter writes, "August:  Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007.  Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."

When I read this play for the first time in May of 2010 after spending a few years lying about having read it, I was both moved and awed by the thirteen characters Letts had created.  Each of these characters is crucial to the transmission of the family narrative, and cases can be made for many of them being the "main" character.  Accordingly, both published critics and friends of mine have called this "the best play of the decade."  If the dysfunctional family is the most celebrated subject in the canon of American drama, this play certainly holds its own in the historical record.  

However, I have now read both this play and Sam Shepard's Buried Child twice and now take issue with McCarter's compliment "something entirely original."  Not only are there overlapping subjects in these plays (which happens all the time in dysfunctional family dramas), there are details and structural issues that contain uncomfortable instances of overlap (what happens in the backyard, the role of the outsider, ghostly ending...)

I still love August:  Osage County and think it is a majorly significant work that excels at doing what many American dramatists have attempted:   a realistic depiction what happens when the adult members of a family are forced back together under emotional circumstances.  However, before making proclamations about grandeur and originality, I think it is important to take a look at the play that won the Pulitzer Prize 29 years before.  

South Pacific by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein and Joshua Logan (1950)

Summary:  American military men are stationed on an island in the South Pacific during World War II.  While a war is going on around them, the primary stories in this play are the relationships.  Featured in the Rodgers/Hammerstein adaptation of James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific are:

Interactions between stationed (and bored) sailors
A budding, serious romance between young nurse Nellie Forbush (from Little Rock) and Emile DeBecque, a mysterious older Frenchman
A flirtation and possibly sexual relationship between young, attractive Lieutenant Cable and Liat, a seventeen year old Tonkinese native.  

An illegal picture taken from my seat at Lincoln Center in August.  Instead of a curtain, Michener's text appeared on the stage before the overture.

In Act 2, Nellie informs Emile that she cannot be with him because his two children (from a deceased wife) are half Polynesian.  She explains that her Little Rock upbringing has influenced her as Lieutenant Cable sings, "You've got to be taught to be afraid/Of people whose eyes are oddly made/And people whose skin is a different shade--/You've got to be carefully taught" (136).  Heartbroken by the news that Nellie will not be his wife, Emile agrees to help the American soldiers on a very dangerous mission...that is the ultimate end of Lieutenant Cable.  When Emile returns home, Nellie is mothering his children and the play ends in a "happily ever after" embrace.

Thoughts:  It seems strange to me that this is the only Pulitzer Prize for Rodgers and Hammerstein--and even more puzzling that their one Pulitzer is for this play.  This is not a disparaging statement about this South Pacific, but in keeping with the guidelines stating that plays should be about the American experience, I am surprised that Oklahoma! was not awarded. 

When I saw the revival of this play at Lincoln Center in August of 2010, I cringed at the "people whose eyes are oddly made" line and started thinking about the issue of race in the American musical.  Clearly, this is a subject I have been thinking about during the last three months of this project.  In this play, Nellie takes a risk by exposing her feelings about race, but this issue is never dealt with after her initial confession.  In his absence, she realizes that Emile is important to her; but her discomfort with the children is never further explored.

When I saw this play, I quickly noticed that the most memorable songs of the musical take place in the first act...and though the second act is shorter, it seems to drag, certainly in part because of Emile's song "This Nearly Was Mine" which seems to go on forever.  This issue of balance was not as evident while reading the play; because unlike some of the other musicals on the list, there is a great deal of spoken text in this play...rather than text serving as a bridge to get to the next song.

I knew this illegal picture would come in handy someday.  Personal photo, August 2010.

The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan (1992)

Summary:  Nine short plays are set on the same acreage in Kentucky, spanning from 1775-1975.  The plays chronicle the lives of three families, which are intertwined through rivalry, slavery and marriage.

• Masters of the Trade-1775-Michael Rowen, a former indentured servant from Ireland, makes deals with the Cherokee exchanging ammunition (the Cherokee have recently acquired firearms, but no ammunition) for pelts and land.  This land is the setting for all nine plays in the Cycle.
• The Courtship of Morning Star-1776-Rowen has captured a Cherokee girl named Morning Star to be his wife.  He cuts her Achilles tendon so that she can never run away.  She has a baby, Michael is pleased to have a son. 
• The Homecoming-1792-Michael Rowen returns from a trip to the city with a slave named Sallie, who he plans to breed (with himself).  Enraged at the idea that he might also have a second family in the city, his son Patrick Rowen (16) shoots and kills him.  Hearing the gunshot, neighbor Joe Talbert comes over, reveals that he has been having an affair with Star (Patrick's mother).  Patrick kills him, sends his mother away and states his plans to marry Joe's daughter. 
• Ties That Bind-1819-A judge comes to Patrick's land and informs him that he is deeply indebted to a man named Patrick, who now owns his bank loans.  As they attempt to reconcile this debt, Patrick ends up selling everything that he has ever owned--including slave Sally and her son Jessie (who is actually Patrick's brother).  In the final moments of the play, it is revealed that Jeremiah is Jeremiah Talbert-son of murdered Joe and brother of Rebecca, Patrick's wife.  As part of the deal, Patrick's sons are "employed" to work for Talbert...a vengeful man who is actually their uncle. 
• God's Great Supper-1861-Richard Talbert (39), son of Jeremiah visits the rundown Rowen house and informs Jed Rowen (28) that they will be riding into Bowling Green the next day to join the Confederate Army.  Jed is needed because he knows the land better than anyone.  Jed wisely makes a deal with Jeremiah that his family's land will be taken care of while he is away (by slaves) and he will be paid for his time and allowed to work off some of his family's debt.  Richard agrees.  Jed has actually agreed to go on this trip because he has planned to kill Richard (and his entire family supports this idea).  After Richard is dead, they will only have to kill the remaining women and children of the Talbert house and then they will have their land back and no debts.  Lots of killing happens.
• Tall Tales-1885-Jed Rowen, now 52, is visited by a "storyteller" who eventually asks him if he'd be willing to sell the mineral rights to his land for $1 an acre.  After being told that someone will remove the rocks from his soil, Jed enthusiastically agrees.  His daughter (Mary Anne) narrates the story as old and young versions of herself and eventually talks about the destruction caused when the coal companies came in. 
• Fire in the Hole-1920-Mary Anne now has a ten year old son (Joshua Rowen) who is sick, probably with typhoid fever.  They have lost their house and are now living in the awful conditions of a coal camp.  A boarder named Abe (a secret union organizer) comes to stay at their home; gradually telling her about unions and Mother Jones.  Abe eventually persuades Mary Anne and her husband Tommy to start a coal union.  Abe and Tommy are eventually killed (for being an organizer and a snitch, respectively) but Mary Anne has started the first coal union. 
• Which Side Are You On-1954-Things are not good for the Union.  Joshua (44) is now the president of United Mine Workers District 16 and has been skirting safety regulations for months.  His son is recently back from Korea and takes a job as a "yes man" to his father.  As Joshua struggles with the idea of telling the Union members that there will be more cutbacks, there is an accident in the mine (because he has been ignoring safety issues to save some money).  His son Scotty and 12 others are killed because of his negligence.
• The War on Poverty-1975-Three sixty-five year old men (a Rowen, a Talbert and a Biggs--descendant of slave Sally) are walking around the land, attempting to figure out how much it is now worth.  "Mountaintop Removal Mining" has come into existence and the three men speak about it in tones mixed with awe and fear.  In casual conversation, a reference is made to grave-robbing that is now apparently popular in the mountains of Kentucky, involving the search for Native American artifacts.  As the men amble around the land, they see a partially exhumed grave and lift a buckskin pouch out of it--a pouch that contains the well-preserved remains of a baby.  This is actually the second child of Morning Star.  When Michael Rowen saw that this child was not a boy, he took it out into the woods and buried it alive. 

Thoughts:  I checked this book out of the library during the first two weeks of the project and have complained about reading it since.  9 plays?!  332 pages?!  I saved it for a long plane ride and then for the day after Thanksgiving and when both of those days came and went without me opening the cover, I knew I needed to commit to reading it in one sitting...which is what I did between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM this morning.

To my surprise, reading this play was not difficult.  Because there are nine short plays, a sustained attention span is not necessary.  Though the same characters appear in multiple plays, Schenkkan's character description page preceding each play specifically states how old these characters are in the play to follow.  Schenkkan's decision to bind the plays chronologically is also very helpful.  Though names repeat (a number of the boys are named after their fathers/ancestors), this was never confusing for me because Schenkkan is brief and direct about who these people are.

The Cycle is obviously very broad, and certain plays are more enjoyable to read than others--perhaps because some of the main characters are quite one-dimensional and therefore are easy to categorize as "good guys" and "bad guys."  Schenkkan's portrayal of the women in these plays is very interesting.  Though they are never the main characters of his stories, they are almost unequivocally good people--trying to make the right choices even when their husbands are doing evil things based on greed.

Importantly, in the first play, when Michael asks the Cherokee for land, the Cherokee attempts to dissuade him from taking land on the mountain.  He repeatedly issues warnings to the effect of, "You will find this a dark and bloody land" and "you live here, it is not the Cherokee you need fear" (23).  Though he explains that the land is cursed (and the manifestations of this curse are seen in the eight plays that follow), the curse is never mentioned again.

In Abraham's Bosom by Paul Green (1927)

Summary:  In 1885, twenty years after the legal end of slavery in the United States, Abraham McCranie has stayed near the place where his family members were once owned in North Carolina.  Two references are made alluding to the fact that he is the mulatto son of Colonel McClain (who once owned slaves) and a now deceased former slave.  Therefore, Colonel McCranie feels some sort of responsibility to Abraham.  He ensures that Abraham has a place to live and later, a job teaching in a schoolhouse.  This does not, however, prevent McCranie from savagely beating his secret son when Abraham threatens to kill his other (non-secret) son Lonnie.  The seven scenes of the play follow Abraham's life from 1885-1906...an existence of considerable tumult and struggle. 

From the beginning of the play, Abraham attempts to educate himself and is often teased for spending all of his time with books.  Near the end of the play, he gives a speech about building a new school and is harassed by some white men.  Enraged, he proceeds to kill Lonnie (his half-brother) and knows that this will be his end.  Moments later, a mob of white men arrive at his cabin to kill him in front of his wife, son and mother-in-law. 

Thoughts:  Many of the plays I have encountered in this project have raised troubling questions in relation to performance today, often because of specific treatments of race and gender.  As I have probably mentioned before, adding the tag "n-word" to the blog was an unwelcome surprise of the project.  However, many of those plays (All the Way Home, The Green Pastures) have highly redeemable characteristics; either because of the strength of their story or, in the case of The Green Pastures, the fact that the production employed large casts of black actors and was the first all-black cast on Broadway (and even God was portrayed as a black man). 

This play, on the other hand, contains multiple usages of the n-word, a savage whipping and two brutal murders.  The troubling take-away message seemed to be that, no matter how hard the white man tries to help the black man by providing opportunities for him, the black man is trouble....even savage.  While outwardly racist statements come from the white characters in the play, they are perhaps more disturbingly uttered by the black characters themselves.  Abraham's mother-in-law says to him, "Time you's learning day white is white and black is black, and Gohd made de white to always be bedder'n de black.  It was so intended from the beginning" (Coe 416).  On the third page of the play, three characters have an equally troubling exchange about Abe's mulatto heritage:

Lije:  Abe is bad mixed up all down inside.

Bud:  White and black make bad mixtry.

Lije:  Do dat.  (Thumping on his chest)  Nigger down heah.  (Thumping his head)  White mens up heah.  Heart say do one thing, head say 'nudder.  Bad, bad.

Puny:  De white blood in him coming up to the top.  Dat make him want-a climb up and be sump'n.  Nigger gwine hol' him down dough.  Part of him take adder de Colonel, part adder his muh, 'vision and misery inside  (Coe 387).

The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler (1969)

Summary:  Sackler’s dramatization of the life of boxer Jack Johnson (named Jack Jefferson in this play).   After winning the World Heavyweight Championship in the first few pages of the play, Jack spends the rest of his life dealing with fallout surrounding this event.  The central dramatic conflict of the play is the search for a “great white hope”—a white boxer who will fight Jack and win.  After he gets into some trouble with the law (for having sex with his white girlfriend), Jack flees the country and is repeatedly approached with offers trading his inevitable jail time in exchange for throwing a fight (losing on purpose).

Thoughts:  The play is a powerful statement about race in America, race in sports, race in families and race in sexual relationships.  Interestingly, the photo on the front of the play and the text on the back of it led me to believe that this would be a play about Jack’s rise to glory—when it is actually just the opposite.  Jack is triumphant in the first few pages of the play, but the bulk of the play’s 239 pages depict his descent into depression and desperation.  A particular low-point in Jack's departure from the glory days depicts him and his girlfriend Ellie in a performance reminiscent of a minstrel show. 

Additionally, the blurbs on the back of this play made me think about the tendency toward hyperbole when writing about culturally and literarily significant works. While I did enjoy this play and certainly do think it is important, I wonder if readers today would still draw comparisons between it and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. 

Both bad pictures courtesy of my phone and UNM's 95 cent Bantam edition of the play, April 1969.

The Teahouse of the August Moon by John Patrick (1954)

Summary:  American Captain Fisby is sent to Tobiki Village--an island of Okinawa with specific orders to establish democracy and build a school.  However, when he gets there, he soon finds himself far more interested in the Tobiki way of life.  Following the wishes of his Geisha Girl Lotus Blossom, Fisby uses governmental resources to build a teahouse rather than a school.  When a psychiatrist is dispatched to look after him, he too loves the Tobiki way of life.  However, the psychiatrist also understands that the “natives” need a source of income and starts selling the local sweet potato brandy to neighboring military bases.  

When the Colonel eventually visits Tobiki, he is outraged and orders the brandy stills and the teahouse demolished.  However they are quickly saved by another military officer who bursts into the final scene exclaiming that the village is being called a great “example of American ‘get-up-and-go’ in the recovery program.  The Pentagon is boasting.  Congress is crowing” (Gassner 214).  The natives may never get a school, but they have their teahouse and their liquor industry….thanks to the Americans.

Thoughts:  The narrator of the play is an Islander named Sakini, who often speaks in verse and is chided by American soldiers for being a lovable idiot.  He serves as a native informant to Captain Fisby, informing him of island customs and serving as an interpreter.  The play moves quickly and is often very funny but the issues of racism and salvation-by-American-soldier are troubling in terms of production today.   The Japanese people in the script rarely speak any sort of English, but instead speak John Patrick’s own version of Japanese…which seems to have no translation into the actual language.  Asian stereotypes and American aggrandizement run rampant throughout the play.

The Old Maid by Zoe Atkins (1935)

Summary:  After returning home from a perilous bout down South with a "lung disease", Charlotte Lovell opens a daycare to care for the children of the working class.  Her family treats this as folly that she will give up when she gets married.  However, when she becomes engaged and states that she will not give up her work, her engagement is broken.  Charlotte's ulterior motive for having the daycare is the ability to have daily interactions with a little girl named Clementina--an orphan who is now being raised by "negroes."

Charlotte eventually reveals to her sister Delia that the "lung disease" was actually a pregnancy that resulted in Clementina.  When the daycare is eventually closed, Delia agrees to adopt Tina so that she will have an easier life, witnessed by Charlotte.  As Tina grows, she views her "aunt" (who is actually her mother) as an Old Maid and is brutally rude to her at every opportunity.  On the eve of her wedding, Delia tells Tina that she needs to be nicer to her aunt because she has always loved her "like a mother."

Thoughts:  In a departure from playwright mantra "show-don't-tell", Charlotte's humanity and martyrdom is revealed in stories of the choices she has made, rather than realistic depictions of these conflicts.  Though Charlotte gives up "everything" for Clementina, the child's actions toddlerhood to adolescence that indicate that she feels more connected to Delia.  While Charlotte has made herself a martyr, she is never "rewarded" for the choices that she has made and becomes more depressed and bitter as the play progresses.  Because people are consistently rude to Charlotte, it sometimes seems that she spends the entirety of the play (and her life) karmically atoning for having premarital sex.

Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry (1988)

Summary:  After an unfortunate accident involving the neighbor's garage, Boolie Werthan decides to hire a black chauffeur for his mother Daisy.  For the next twenty-five years, she resists Hoke's help while they both gradually develop a deep mutual affection toward one another.

Thoughts:  I flew through this play (much like my reading experience of Doubt, actually).  The language of this play is precise:  neither Daisy not Hoke wastes their time with superfluous anything--especially words.  As such, each of Uhry's lines reveals something about his characters.

In his Introduction, Uhry explains that these are real people--amalgamations of individuals he encountered over the course of his childhood in Atlanta.  Anyone who has grown up in the South has probably known their own Miss Daisy.  Maybe I loved this play because it reminded me of my own grandmother; but I also found myself moved by the simplicity of the story and detail of the characters lives as they stay together for twenty-five years. 

I have written before about film adaptions that have made it hard for me to get the voices of the film actors (Jimmy Stewart in Harvey) out of my head.  This was not one of them.  While I remember the cinematic performances offered by Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy (Academy Award, 1989), Uhry's play is as remarkable on paper as it is in performance.

I recently read a New York Times review of the 2010 Broadway revival starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones that noted the challenge of staging this play because it is certainly not a visual piece.  The article explained that the new production features slides in the background depicting the Civil Rights struggle and other events over the course of the twenty-five year setting (1948-1973).  After reading the play, I wonder why why why.  Uhry's work is strong enough to be produced with very little visual element...especially with actors like Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones.

Photo credit:  Carol Rosegg

"I am in the process of writing the screenplay.  I have won the Pulitzer Prize.  Even as I write these words they seem unbelievable to me.  When I wonder how all this happened (which I do a lot!) I can come up with only one answer.  I wrote what I knew to be the truth and people recognized it as such."

-Alfred Uhry, Introduction

That Championship Season by Jason Miller (1973)

Summary:  The 1952 Pennsylvania State Championship basketball team has gathered for a reunion-of-sorts at Coach's house.   They reminisce about the good times, share memories about an absent teammate and discuss their fairly boring adult lives.  The major conflict of the play comes when it is revealed that Phil is having an affair with George's wife.  George is the mayor and wants to run for reelection, but the boys aren't sure he is still the right man for the job--perhaps because he is the most outwardly emotional of the bunch and awkwardly mourns for an institutionalized son.  Though "the team" fights throughout the play and struggles with the reality that Coach is aging, the conclusion of the play depicts the cast listening to a recording of the last few moments of their championship game.

Thoughts:  In the Introduction, director Joseph Papp repeatedly states that he has always thought of this as "an actor's play."  He also mentions that when it was originally pitched to him, he hesitated to give it a full production.  I know what Papp meant by "actor's play"; but when I finished reading it, I also felt that it is a play that does not hold up well on paper.  In other words, this is a play that must be seen to be fully appreciated.  Much of the work I have encountered in this project also stands as literature for critical analysis and appreciation, but this is not one of those plays.

This is the first play about sports that I have encountered in the project, and I'm fairly certain that the audience demographic for this show was unusual.  With the recent debut of Lombardi on Broadway (and stories about professional athlete sightings at the theatre), this play makes me think about the importance of plays that appeal strongly to a specific audience who ordinarily wouldn't be seen in the theatre.

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori-Parks (2002)

Summary:  Lincoln and Booth are adult brothers whose parents named them as a joke and later abandoned them when they were 16 and 11, respectively.  Younger brother Booth has recently developed an affinity for three-card monty, a game accompanied by a painful history for Lincoln.  While Booth is attempting to make money on the street, Lincoln holds a job as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade.  At work, he sits in a chair (in whiteface) and gets "shot" by children on field trips and those seeking interesting entertainment.

Throughout the play, Booth attempts to get Lincoln to play three-card with him--arguing that they could go into business together and be wildly successful.  As the play progresses, the brothers laugh and fight and laugh and fight--until Booth reveals that he has killed his girlfriend and then kills his brother.

Thoughts:  I read this play shortly after reading some of Parks' other work (Fucking A, In the Blood, Venus) and it is evident that there are themes and characters that continue to reappear in her work.  In all four of these plays, Parks seems to argue that, whether we like it or not, our relationships with our families are significant and binding.  Even when her characters do everything in their power to break these bonds (including murder), they still remain.

The play also examines the the imperfection of memory--individuals in the same household remembering things in vastly different ways.  Although Booth is the younger brother, he saw his mother leave and was given the task of taking care of Lincoln--though he was certainly not old enough for this kind of responsibility.

"People are funny about they Lincoln shit.  Its historical.  People like they historical shit in a certain way.  They like it to unfold the way they folded it up.  Neatly like a book.  Not raggedy and bloody and screaming." 

-Topdog/Underdog, Scene 3  

 

They Knew What They Wanted by Sidney Howard (1925)

Summary:  Tony is a sixty-year-old Italian immigrant with a vineyard and more money than he knows what to do with.  After a trip to San Fransisco, he writes a letter to a young waitress he saw there asking her to marry him and come live on the vineyard.  Upon arrival, she is surprised to discover that Tony sent her a picture of Joe (whose stage directions specify that he is "dark, sloppy, beautiful and young") instead of himself.  Regardless, she agrees to marry him but ends up having a one-time sexual encounter with Joe on the night she is married to Tony.  A few months later, the doctor reveals that she is pregnant.  Subsequently, she tells Tony that she has no choice but to leave for an uncertain life of poverty and strife with Joe.  Tony convinces her to stay, stating that he will raise the baby as his own.  Joe seems relieved.

Thoughts:  Another play with an overly detailed plot summary.  All of the action of this play takes place at the vineyard, often with Tony holding court (due to an accident that broke both of his legs).  Outsiders are involved in Tony and Amy's business because Tony, good natured Italian that he is, talks to anyone about everything. 

Some of the most interesting things about this play have nothing to do with the plot or individual relationships between characters.  Instead, commentary about prohibition, Catholics, unions, science versus religion, abortion, immigration and race relations are hidden behind a fairly general play about family and marriage.  This play is set in prohibition-era California and Tony's vineyard is hugely profitable because it has continued to illegally make wine.  Meanwhile, Father McKee (the somehow always present Catholic priest) issues statements about his discomfort surrounding Tony marrying someone who is not Catholic and wine being used for purposes other than sacramental (this does not mean that he doesn't drink it when it is offered).  McKee's sparring partner in the play is The Doctor, who not only reveals to Joe that Amy is pregnant (before telling Amy), but refers to wine as poison and is frequently bemused by the "Wop antics" that surround him.

When dark, sloppy beautiful Joe (a member of the Wobblies--Industrial Workers of the World) indirectly suggests abortion to Amy, she replies, "Them kind of doctors is no good.  They're no good.  I'm too far gone anyway...I know...and anyway..doing that...It's worse than the other" (Act 3).  This statement reveals that Amy knows something about abortion--and perhaps has even had one before.

The often controversial social statements are always quick and usually argued from two perspectives--perhaps in a move of self-protection by playwright Sidney Howard.

All The Way Home by Tad Mosel (1961)

Summary:  The Follet Family is spread out across Tennessee and meet together in Act One for an annual picnic where familial tensions and allegiances are explored for the first time. The family quietly notes that this will probably be the last time they see their Great Grandma. In Act 2, a phone call summons Jay home because his own aging father (John Henry) is in some sort of medical trouble. He makes the trip and subsequently calls home to say that he will be back home soon because it was a false alarm. When he doesn't come home, the phone eventually rings again to inform his pregnant wife Mary that he has been instantly killed in an accident. The third and final act of the play is set in the hours before the funeral, and once again explores how families interact with each other in times of both normalcy and tragedy.

Thoughts:  This play is an adaptation of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family (which also won a Pulitzer Prize). Though the play is set in 1915 and contains references to the "war between the states" and repeated usages of the N-word, it retains timeless appeal because it examines the way that normal families interact--strained individual relationships and a common bond. I think that this play will continue to retain much of its timelessness because of the central idea that families (consciously or unconsciously) prepare for certain deaths, but not others.

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley (2005)

Summary:  Sister Aloysius is convinced that Father Flynn has had an inappropriate relationship with Donald Muller--a twelve year old in the parish.  She is hellbent on getting him fired and Sister James, an eager young nun, is not sure who to believe.

Thoughts:  After writing about reading Harvey, Our Town and Fences after seeing them on stage/film, I began to wonder if reading a play after you have seen it performed completely changes the experience.  While I have seen the 2008 film version of Doubt (directed by the playwright) I did not find myself constantly thinking about the inflections of Streep, Hoffman and Adams while reading this text.  Shanley's precise writing enables the text to stand alone.  With or without performance, this piece of writing is remarkable.  The language of Doubt is uncomplicated and (perhaps because of this) the dialogue moves rapidly.  The play is one of the fastest reads I have encountered in the project.

Additionally, Shanley's Prologue explains that this play was inspired by his own experiences as a child of the 60s in a strict Catholic school.  Speaking prosaically about the tension between doubt and certainty, this piece of the text is evidence that Shanley writes well in a variety of genres (he does have an Oscar for Moonstruck, after all).  Go to a bookstore and read the Prologue.  It will probably make you want to read the play.

"We've got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty.  There is no last word.  That's the silence under the chatter of our time."

-end of the Prologue

Abe Lincoln in Illinois by Robert Sherwood (1939)

Summary:  This play chronicles 30 early years in the life of Abraham Lincoln.  The opening scene depicts him being tutored (around high school age) and the final scene is his farewell to Illinois immediately before leaving for Washington, D.C.

Thoughts:  This play was a little dull, but raised a number of historical "did that actually happen?" questions for me.  Lincoln's humanity is most vividly depicted early in the play when he reveals his romantic feelings to a girl named Ann...who dies a few pages later.  He later convinces himself that marrying ambitious Mary Todd is the right decision, though feelings of romance toward her are never illuminated.  Clearly, Lincoln's oratorical skills warranted exploration which results in this play having a number of long sweeping monologues, most about labor and abolition.  This is another play whose audience enjoyment would depend almost entirely on the strength of the lead actor.

The Gassner/Barnes introduction revealed a number of interesting facts about Robert Sherwood.  As a teenager, he attended Milton Academy and then Harvard, where he "survived the threat of three expulsions for youthful capers and became an active member of the Hasty Pudding Club."  Additionally, Sherwood is responsible for writing The Best Years of Our Lives which happens to be one of my most cherished movies.  Near the end of the short biography, Gassner/Barnes remark, "The rest of his career, which included conspicuous assistance to to President Roosevelt and the invaluable service in the O.W.I. belongs to political history" (306).  An interesting followup to Archibald MacLeish, it seems.

"Ran into Stephen Douglas--and we had some argument in public..."

No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Cordone (1970)

Summary:  Johnny Williams is a young black man who owns a bar in New York City in/around the late 1960s.  The people who come in and out of the bar have their own set of agendas and each character fulfills a very specific role/purpose.

Thoughts:  The summary above is probably the most insufficient I've written since starting this project.  There's no way to compactly summarize this play without a scene-by-scene plot description and an annotated character list.  Much like The Time of Your Life (1940), the dramatic action of this play is dependent on the actors who enter and exit the bar, but unlike ...Life, there is an enormous amount of action in this play.  The play makes a number of statements about race, ethnicity and gender in the way that it casts it's characters.  For example, the primary female characters (Dee, Evie) are whores, and the only other important female in the play is Mary Lou--a white civil rights activist who is ultimately used only as a pawn because her father is a judge and Johnny is trying to outsmart some Italian mobsters.

Most of the statements about equality and civil rights are relegated to Gabe, the poet of the group who is given long soliloquies in the form of poems that talk about black anger, white oppression and the relationship between whites and blacks in the 70s.  Gabe's statements are often eloquent, but sometimes seemed forced in a play that details the day-to-day activities of a bar.  At intervals throughout the play, a character will say something to the effect of, "Gabe!  Give us a poem now!" and the soliloquy/diatribe/important social message will begin.

Additionally, the subplot involving Johnny and the mobsters seems incredibly out of place.  With a few days distance, it almost feels like Cordone wrote a play about a bar and the characters who come through the doors, didn't think it was enough and needed to add another element of drama.  Though this play is unquestionably important (first black playwright and first off-Broadway play to win a Pulitzer), I found a surprising number of flaws.

The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly (1930)

Summary:  In the first scene, children in a “negro church” are asking typical children-at-Sunday-School questions, concerning why God decided to create the world.  Their teacher gives them typical “I don’t know, read the Bible” answers.   In the next scene, God is in Heaven, lamenting his boredom and decides to create man and the world.  The next thirteen scenes follow God and man’s interactions from The Garden of Eden to Noah to Moses to the eventual crucifixion of Christ.

Thoughts:  In the spirit of Rice's Street Scene, I found myself having to read much of this play aloud because it is written in “typical negro dialect.”  The play is full of sentences like, “An’ you better take an’ git married an’ settle down an’ raise some chillun.  Dey ain’t nothin’ to make a man fo’git his troubles like raisin’ a family.  Now, you better git” and “You got two bad lookin’ eyes.  I bet yo’ hot coffee ‘mong de women folks” (402, 403).

While the play was written by a white male and much of the dialogue is stereotypically problematic, I was intrigued and appeased (?) to discover that this was the first play on Broadway with an entirely black cast.  I wasn’t always thrilled to be reading it, but now I am very interested in the play’s production history, audience reception and critical reviews.

Street Scene by Elmer Rice (1929)

Summary: The entire play takes place on a street in New York when neighbors actually talked to each other and sat on their stoops in an attempt to obtain the most recent gossip. The neighborhood contains a wide range of immigrants and people who are fairly comfortable discussing their own religious biases and prejudices.  No one seems to have much money, but it also doesn't seem to matter very much.

From the outset, the older married females in the play are gossiping about Mrs. Maurrant who is having a not so secret affair with the milk collector. Meanwhile, Mrs. Maurrant’s daughter Rose is starting to have feelings for a neighbor boy named Sam.  Sam's sister cautions Rose against falling in love with her brother because he is Jewish, stating that mixed marriages are just too complicated. Ultimately, Mrs. Maurrant’s husband shoots the milk collector in a jealous rage. However, after all of this excitement, things in the neighborhood seem unchanged. Love will remain unrequited and gossip will continue to be an insidious way to make the time pass.

Thoughts: Random library selection caused me to read this play the day after reading Why Marry? and I was impressed that another play written decades ago contained women with such progressive attitudes toward the relationship between love and marriage.

Some of this play was a struggle to read because, instead of specifying race or nationality through stage directions, Rice actually scripts the variations in speech. Sentences like, “E talka lika dat een Eetaly, Mussolini's gonna geeve 'eem da castoroil” needed to be read aloud for comprehension.

A Soldier's Play by Charles Fuller (1982)

Summary:  A black soldier has been found dead just outside of Fort Neal---a segregated army camp in Louisiana (1944).  First, the shooting is blamed on the omnipresent KKK, then on racist white soldiers, before finally on a black officer who hates black men who (to him) perpetuate the stereotype of lazy and uneducated.

Thoughts:  Fuller’s character list is a simple list of names, with no description provided noting the age or race of any of these characters.  For me, this made reading the play confusing at times because I was trying to track the race relations without being certain of which characters were white and which were black.  After finishing the play, I feel confident that this was an intentional choice for Fuller.  Clearly, if you were watching the play, this wouldn’t be an issue; but the omission of these details demands a more careful reading of the text…which results in more attention to the nuanced relationships and dialogue of Fuller’s characters.