by Will Dunne
Fear haunts James, who under the pressure of her superior’s reign of intimidation begins to suffer a nervous breakdown that rattles her love of teaching, upsets her sleep, and finally forces her to take a temporary leave of absence under the pretext of caring for an ailing brother. Her distress is expressed in the nightmare image she shares with Flynn in scene 7: “I looked in a mirror and there was a darkness where my face should be.”
■ TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Pervading emotion: Loneliness
Topdog/Underdog brings us into a single room populated by two brothers who have lost everyone in their lives except each other. They have no parents, wives, children, lovers, or close friends, and their own relationship is so tenuous that at one point Lincoln asks, “You think we’re really brothers?” The poverty of their emotional lives is reflected in the starkness of their furnished room and addressed by Lincoln’s song in scene 1, in which he laments the loss of his parents and wife. “My luck was bad but now it turned to worse,” he sings. “Don’t call me up no doctor, just call me up a hearse.”
Loneliness has been a hallmark of the brothers’ lives since their teenage years, when their parents abandoned them and the boys were left to fend for themselves. With no healthy model of a family to guide them, they have failed not only to establish families of their own but also to build careers that might foster social relationships. Lincoln works in an arcade where he sits alone under a lightbulb being shot at by “miscellaneous strangers.” Booth works alone as a thief.
Lincoln sometimes makes references to the crowd at a local bar, Lucky’s, where he enjoys buying drinks for the house, but there is no sense of genuine friendship in the tales of his exploits there. Other than his ex-wife, Cookie, his closest relationship was with Lonny, one of his three-card monte crew, who years ago was murdered. Lincoln’s history as a card hustler may have contributed to his feelings of isolation by forcing him to disconnect emotionally from his prey, such as the father who fell for Lincoln’s scam, lost the money he had been saving for his kid’s bike, and ended up in tears as Lincoln ran off with his cash.
Booth makes no reference to friends, implying that he has no one else in his life other than Grace, his ex-girlfriend. His longing for human warmth is perhaps most apparent in the care with which he has prepared the room for her arrival in scene 5 and in the rage he experiences later when he realizes she will never show up. As with Lincoln, Booth’s career as a thief may have contributed to his isolation by keeping him emotionally detached from his victims.
While loneliness is a pervasive emotion in the brothers’ world, they embody it in different ways. Lincoln’s isolation has led to pessimism, melancholy, and selfishness, while Booth’s has become a springboard for optimism, rage, and delusions of grandeur. For both brothers, the inability to maintain romantic relationships has resulted in sexual dysfunction. According to Booth, Lincoln’s marriage failed due to his impotence. According to Lincoln, Booth’s sex life consists only of fantasies fueled by his secret stash of girlie magazines.
Most importantly, though they rely on each other for companionship and survival, the brothers find it difficult to communicate in an honest way. In their constant vying for topdog position, they tell lies, deny their true feelings, and retreat into themselves when trouble gets the best of them. As a result, their most meaningful connection to each other lies not in the events of their lives today but in shared memories of the past that they cannot overcome.
■ THE CLEAN HOUSE
Pervading emotion: Unhappiness
While The Clean House is a comedy full of humor and wit, the world of the story is permeated by a gloom that hangs over the white landscape like a storm cloud and affects the characters who come and go here.
Lane’s first words in the play are an expression of unhappiness: a complaint about her new cleaning woman. For Lane, revealing true feelings is so difficult that she nearly bursts into tears later as she attempts to give Matilde cleaning instructions. Most of the time, Lane successfully keeps her emotions in check while trying methodically to control the world around her.
This approach has produced many favorable results, such as a thriving medical career and a handsome husband, but the other details of her life tell a different story. She has trouble developing a personal relationship with the maid who lives in her house, rarely sees her husband and doesn’t realize he loves someone else, and hasn’t socialized with her sister or brother-in-law for several months, even though they live nearby. The discovery of Charles’s infidelity is what exposes the truth about Lane’s inner turmoil and results in an aborted suicide attempt, which leaves her with a bandaged wrist that she won’t discuss.
Matilde’s unhappiness is more overt from the beginning. Hired by Lane as a live-in maid, she stops working because of how the job makes her feel. “I don’t like to clean houses,” she tells Virginia in act one, scene 7. “I think it makes me sad.” Matilde’s problem stems from the realization that her job prevents her from fulfilling her desire to think up jokes and become a comedian in New York. This ambition ties back to her parents, who were the funniest people in Brazil until their deaths the previous year. Matilde’s mourning for them fuels the melancholy she feels when, instead of thinking up jokes, she has to clean someone else’s house.
Virginia attempts to present a facade of cheerfulness to the world, but she is also defined by a nagging sorrow that she longs to escape. Trapped in an unexciting marriage with no career or children, she believes that her life has been in a downward spiral for the past three decades and uses housecleaning to distract herself from dwelling on her failures. In her first monologue to the audience, she says, “If there were no dust to clean then there would be so much leisure time and so much thinking time and I would have to do something besides thinking and that thing might be to slit my wrists.” She passes this off as a joke—“just kidding”—but the sentiment explains why, when she wakes up each morning, she wishes she could sleep through the day and avoid facing the truth of whom she has become.
For most of the play, Charles lives in a world shaped by his passionate love for Ana. Except for concerns about her medical condition and fights about her treatment options, he does not succumb to unhappiness until the final scene, when he returns from Alaska and realizes that he has missed his opportunity to see Ana in her final days.
Of all the characters in the play, Ana is the one who most consistently transcends gloom and lives life fully and happily on her own terms. In spite of her cancer diagnosis, mastectomy, and deteriorating health, she stands bravely against adversity like her twelve-year-old fighting fish that refuses to die.
ANALYZING YOUR STORY
Explore the emotional environment of your story.
MOOD
• What is the general mood in the world of the story when the play begins?
• What physical factors contribute to this mood? Psychological factors? Social factors?
• Who among the onstage or offstage characters is most responsible for the emotional environment when the story begins?
• What does the emotional environment suggest about the lives of your characters?
• What single feeling dominates this emotional environment?
• What character values, beliefs, and lifestyles are suggested by the pervading emotion?
• How does the pervading emotion affect each character?
• As the story unfolds, what is the biggest change that takes place in the emotional environment? When does this change happen and what triggers it?
SOCIAL CONTEXT
In any dramatic story, characters live within a social context that influences who they are, what they can and cannot do, and how they get along with others individually and in groups. This set of circumstances often explains not only why a story unfolds the way it does but also why it happens at all.
The broad social context may be related to a particular area of the world, as in Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, set on a remote Aran
island off the coast of Ireland, or a particular time in history, as in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in the 1910s, when freed slaves from the South began migrating to northern cities.
The immediate social context may be a family (4000 Miles by Amy Herzog), school (The History Boys by Alan Bennett), workplace (The Flick by Annie Baker), or other smaller community nestled within a broader one. Its makeup may be highly structured (A Few Good Men by Aaron Sorkin) or anarchistic (Beirut by Alan Bowne). Its basic nature may be nurturing (A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner) or oppressive (My Sister in This House by Wendy Kesselman).
Key elements of any social milieu are the values and beliefs that prevail among the characters and motivate behavior. In David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, for example, most characters are driven by greed and a belief that material wealth is the true measure of one’s worth. In Rebecca Gillman’s Luna Gale, it is a child’s welfare that drives story events.
■ DOUBT: A PARABLE
Broad social context
The year 1964 is a time of social unrest and change, when power in society has begun to shift in new directions. It is the year after a major civil rights march on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the death of the popular Pope John XXIII, and the assassination of the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Paul VI is now pope, and Lyndon B. Johnson is president. Meanwhile the Vietnam war is about to erupt. The Civil Rights Act has been passed, as has the Equal Pay Act. People are discussing black power, women’s liberation, and gay liberation.
This environment of change contributes to the story of Doubt in different ways. It has resulted in the enrollment of St. Nicholas’s first black student, Donald Muller, and it will lead his mother, during her meeting with Sister Aloysius, to speak frankly and without judgment about her son’s sexual orientation. In addition, the empowerment of women may to some degree fuel Aloysius’s decision to buck the patriarchal system of the Church and go after a man who has the power to have her removed from her position.
Immediate social context
St. Nicholas is a Catholic parish in the Bronx that serves two types of families: Irish and Italian. These populations are represented by a statue of St. Patrick on one side of the church altar and a statue of St. Anthony on the other. The demographics contribute to the social isolation that Donald Muller feels as the school’s first and only black student. Because he is without friends, Aloysius believes he is a prime target for a predator. “The little sheep lagging behind,” she tells Sister James, “is the one the wolf goes for.” In effect, the social context contributes directly to her suspicions about Father Flynn when she learns that he has taken a special interest in the boy. At the same time, Donald’s isolation may provide an innocent explanation for why Flynn spends extra time with him.
As with other parishes, St. Nicholas has been shaken up by the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, which asked the religious community to act less like emissaries from Rome and more like everyday members of the communities they serve. Some, like Flynn, have embraced this call to action. Others, like Aloysius, have resisted it and become more entrenched in traditional beliefs and practices that have served the Church for centuries. These dynamics contribute to the conflict between Flynn and Aloysius and their inability to find common ground, a difference that is heightened by the generation gap between them. Aloysius’s steely resistance to change also helps explain her unwillingness to permit doubt in her belief system once she has reached a conclusion.
Prevailing values and beliefs
Education of children. For Sister Aloysius, education is a duty that demands vigilance, self-sacrifice, and hard work. This belief leads her to rule the school with an iron fist, to be on the lookout for trouble, and to issue such proclamations as “Good teachers are never content” and “Satisfaction is a vice.” She is a school principal who views her domain with suspicion and disapproval. Her implied conclusion is that the world is full of lazy, restless children who need to be disciplined and evildoers who need to be punished. This view explains such statements as “Don’t be charmed by cleverness” and “Innocence is a form of laziness.”
Integral to Aloysius’s view of her job is a strict sense of duty that embodies the letter of the law rather than its spirit. Her calling, she believes, is to provide “educational, spiritual, and human guidance” to her students, and she will do everything in her power to do so. This duty does, however, have a limit, extending only to students while they attend her school. Once they graduate, they are no longer her concern, as in the case of eighth grader William London, who, she believes, will never graduate high school. “But that’s beyond our jurisdiction,” she tells James. “We simply have to get him through, out the door, and then he’s somebody else’s problem.”
While the other characters also revere education, they have significantly different views of it, and this leads to much of the conflict in the story. Flynn sees education as an opportunity to play a meaningful role in the lives of students. His humanistic approach is summed up in his belief: “Children need warmth, kindness, and understanding!” This view puts him at odds with Aloysius and enables him ultimately to form an alliance with James, who is of like mind. For her, education is a source of joy, especially when she’s teaching history. For the more practical-minded Mrs. Muller, education is the path to a better future for her son.
Service to God. As members of a religious community, Aloysius, Flynn, and James all espouse service to God through the Catholic Church, though again they have different views of what this involves. For Aloysius, it means giving up worldly pleasures, such as sugar, the arts, and married life. “When one takes the habit,” she explains, “one must close the door on secular things.” Service to God for her also entails a selfless commitment to combatting evil, regardless of the cost. “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service,” she says. This belief explains her campaign against Flynn and her decision to use deception in order to scare him out of the parish.
Flynn’s view of his role as a priest is influenced by the Second Ecumenical Council, which asked the religious community to take a more inclusive approach to modern life. He distinguishes himself from Aloysius when he reminds James of the importance of love in administering their vocations: “Have you forgotten that was the message of the Savior to us all. Love. Not suspicion, disapproval, and judgment. Love of people.” Flynn’s belief may explain why he pays special attention to Donald Muller, the only black student in the school and a boy without friends.
For James, service to God translates into obeying rules and respecting her superiors. This faithfulness to the system leads her to report her suspicion about Flynn to her superior and then to suffer an emotional breakdown when she finds herself questioning what she has done.
■ TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Broad social context
Assuming that the play takes place circa 2000, it is nearly 140 years since the Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery and more than three decades since the civil rights movement legally ended segregation. African-Americans account for 12 percent of the US population and have made significant progress in most sectors of society, yet blacks still face many socioeconomic disparities as they reach for the American dream in the capitalist society of the new millennium.
Nearly a quarter of all blacks still live below the poverty level, compared to one-tenth of all whites. One in four black children who enter high school do not graduate, a dropout rate double that for white children. Adult blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts, and those who are employed, on average, earn less. Due to a variety of factors, including a criminal justice system often weighted against them, black males are far more likely to be arrested: one in four will likely be incarcerated during their lifetime. Violence is a key contributor to the death rate among African-Americans, with homicide the leading cause of death among black males, usually from gunshot wounds.1
Suc
h socioeconomic inequalities are embedded in the characters of Topdog/Underdog and woven throughout the story, but only occasionally do they surface as topics in the play’s dialogue. In other words, the characters live these realities rather than discuss them. One exception is when Booth, in scene 2, tries to get Lincoln to admit that racial prejudice was the reason the arcade offered him less pay than his predecessor for doing the same job: “Go on, say it. ‘White.’ Theyd pay you less than theyd pay a white guy.”
It is within this broad social context that the brothers’ parents once attempted to achieve the American dream: a stable family, a house of their own, and work that would enable them to be upwardly mobile and enjoy a comfortable standard of living. It is the social context itself that raises the question of how attainable that dream really was for them and how attainable it will be now for their sons, who struggle to pursue new dreams they believe will make them happy.
Immediate social context
The immediate social context for the play is the family of Lincoln and Booth. This is a family once run by parents with good intentions. The mother put food on the table every night, kept her sons in clean clothes, and had a knack for sewing on buttons. The father prided himself on his wardrobe, kept his shoes shined, and drove off in his car each day to work. Though the professions of the parents are not revealed, we know that they once held steady jobs and earned enough money to buy a house. It had only two rooms, a cement backyard, and a front yard full of trash, but this was for them the beginning of a dream come true: their own property, where they could be “just regular people living in a house.”