While Look Homeward, Angel is an incredibly successful play from a critical standpoint in that it won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for Tony Awards, I do not believe it has withstood the test of time. The original Broadway production ran for 564 performances, which is really not bad for a play, but it has never been revived on Broadway, and as far as I know has not had a major New York City revival at all. In 1978 it was adapted into a musical called Angel (which I have frankly never heard of until just now when I looked it up) by songwriting duo Peter Udell and Gary Held (who literally do not even have Wikipedia pages) and it ran for a whopping five performances. So, why did I pick this play as the second play to cover in my blog? I kicked things off with Death of a Salesman, arguably one of the most famous plays in the American canon, and followed up with Look Homeward, Angel. I have a confession to make, dear readers. I picked this play because it was predominantly featured in the internationally acclaimed 2010 documentary, Thespians. Please enjoy the trailer for this incredible film: If you were anything like me in high school (which, let's face it, you probably were if you're reading this right now) than you were involved in drama club (or, if you were really like me, you were the vice president of drama club, but that's beside the point). Many high school drama clubs are recognized as part of the International Thespian Society, as mine was, and can compete at regional, state, national, and international levels as a troupe. Back in the day when I was an active member of Troupe 1814 I competed at many a thespian festival, and this documentary took me back. It features an INCREDIBLE scene from Danny in the Deep Blue Sea (a play which should probably be featured on this blog at some point) and awkward nerdy guys singing songs from Altar Boyz, and most importantly, a very intense high school production of Look Homeward, Angel.
So I picked this play because I was intrigued by a documentary. I'm not going to apologize, but I also am probably not going to focus so heavily on plot as I did in my Death of a Salesman post. I would like to share a few key observations instead. Key Observation 1: In a shocking turn of events, a play written by a woman actually has not only significant female characters (shout out to everyone's favorite characters in Death of a Salesman, Linda and The Woman) but has many different types of female characters! You have our protagonist, Eliza Gant, the matriarch of the Gant family and the leader of the family business, the Dixieland Boarding House in Altamont, North Carolina. You have her daughter Helen, various female boarders of different ages and types, and Laura James, the classic new character who is "just passing through" that comes in and messes everything up as the love interest of Eliza's youngest son, Eugene. Speaking of female characters, old plays have SO many characters in them. Imagine a young playwright trying to write a three act play with 19 characters in it. I once worked on a staged reading of a musical with 17 characters in it and it was horrible. It was like herding cats, except instead of cats it was actors and pages of sheet music. Cats may have actually been easier to herd. Back to the play. Eliza Gant is a pretty fantastic character. It is revealed fairly early on that her husband, Ben Gant, is an alcoholic, (which seems to be another theme in old plays- was alcoholism rampant in the 50s?) and Eliza runs Dixieland and raised a family almost entirely on her own. Of course, she's also a little bit messed up and kind of treats her kids like shit, but not at a Willy Loman level. Key Observation 2: The romantic plot in this play was SO weird. Essentially Eliza's youngest son, Eugene, falls in love with a boarder named Laura James. When they first meet they lie to each other about their ages, Eugene claims to be 19 and Laura claims to be 21, when in reality they are 17 and 23. They eventually find out the truth but it doesn't really matter cause Eugene is an old soul (read: pretentious) and Laura is honestly kind of immature so they fall in love, blah blah blah, Eugene proposes to her and decides not to go to college even though his mom has been saving up and literally sold property so he could go to UNC Chapel Hill and then Laura tells Eliza that she is actually ENGAGED and just was panicking and is going back to her fiancé. Also this play takes place over the course of two weeks. Did this actually happen in 1916? I ask this because I recently read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , which takes place at the same time, and this exact plot line happens, more or less, to Francie Nolan with the guy she falls in love with. Did men and women just pretend to not be engaged, fall in love, and then go back to their fiancé all the time? Did people fall in love in two weeks? Were you not allowed to go to college if you were married? Eugene essentially has no marketable skills except for retaining a lot of information, so how did he expect to support his wife without a college degree? Whatever. She leaves him and he goes to college so it all works out in the end, I guess. Except his brother dies of pneumonia. Key Observation 3: I'm still not quite sure what the deal with the title is. First of all, I find titles with commas in them really annoying. Really any punctuation, but commas especially because I keep forgetting where it goes. I know it's Look Homeward, Angel because I'm literally staring at the script right now but in my brain it is Look, Homeward Angel like 75% of the time. Anyway so the titular angel is Mr. Gant's prized statue. Mr. Gant's vocation is carving marble statues for cemeteries, and his magnum opus is this angel statue that he refuses to sell even though people want to buy it and it's probably worth a lot of money but no, he won't give it up because he is literally saving it for his own deathbed, which is kind of messed up if you ask me. Carving your own tombstone is maybe one step above actually digging your own grave. It's very morbid. I thought that when his son died he would give the angel to his grave because that would make dramatic and poetic sense but nope. He's just saving it for himself. Maybe if I did a more in depth reading I would figure it out. But when you don't say the title of your play in the play you really can't expect me to know what you want me to get out of it. Just kidding, Kind of. No really, I'm joking. Maybe. Anyway, I think that's about all I have to say about this play for now. If any of you have read it or seen a production I would love to hear your thoughts, because to be honest I'm not quite sure what to make of it right now. Join me next time as we (finally) read a comedy: Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. I love a good farce.
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First, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge to all of my readers (because I know you exist), that I am incredibly bad with self-imposed deadlines. I am also bad with deadlines imposed by others, but not quite as bad and I also have a college degree and a handful of accomplishments to prove that procrastinating never got me into a mess I couldn't get out of.
That being said, now that the show I was working on has closed and I am forced to seek theatrical fulfillment on my now semi-regularly scheduled free time, I anticipate being more dedicated to this project. Now on with my thoughts on Arthur Miller's seminal classic: Death of a Salesman. Going into my read of this play I had a few preconceived notions, and I am pleasantly surprised that I was actually right about a couple of them. Notion 1: The titular salesman would die, likely by suicide. Notion 2: The play would be about a "perfect American family" but actually be about the failures of the American dream/capitalism/patriotism/other quintessentially American things. Notion 3: The salesman's son, Happy, is gay. Is now a bad time to mention that this post will contain spoilers for Death of a Salesman? Because obviously it will. Anyway, I was right about 2/3 of my notions. I was wrong about Notion 3. I'm not sure why I thought Happy would be gay, like in a weird mid-20th century euphemism-y sort of way? Maybe I conflated Death of a Salesman with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another Pulitzer Prize winning, capital G Great American Play? I've actually read that one though... So anyway, Happy's not gay. He is actually described in Miller's stage directions as, "powerfully male" and Miller goes on to say, "Sexuality is like a visible color on him, or a scent that many women have discovered" (Miller, 19).* One of my favorite things about reading old plays is their stage directions. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and all the great playwrights of that generation just have this lovely novelistic way of depicting scenery and writing character descriptions that just isn't really in style anymore. Now playwrights say "maybe" and "might" a lot (i.e. "he might sigh here, maybe a song starts to play"). At my school they called that "invitations to collaboration." Then you have Arthur Miller who is like: "[Willy] opens the refrigerator, searches in there, and takes out a bottle of milk. The apartment houses are fading out, and the entire house and surroundings become covered with leaves. Music insinuates itself as the leaves appear" (Miller, 27). Music INSINUATES itself. That's freakin' poetic. OKAY BACK TO THE PLAY STEPHANIE. FOCUS. So obviously my first two notions were correct, because this is an Arthur Miller play so the aging and tragically yet beautifully flawed male protagonist is either going to kill himself after some horrible realization at the hands of their pride-and-joy son (looking at you Joe Keller) or be lead to their death knowingly and with moral resolve (hi John Proctor!) leaving behind a mourning yet stalwart wife (Kate and Elizabeth, my homegirls) as a testament that their life meant something. And Death of a Salesman would be no exception to this rule! I will say Willy Loman's death was less shocking than either of the previously mentioned plays, although The Crucible probably shouldn't be surprising since it's (loosely) based on a true story. That scene at the end of the second act when Elizabeth is called in to bear witness and they ask her if John is a lecher and she denies it and as he's being dragged away to his cell and ultimately his death he yells, "Elizabeth, I have confessed it!" (Miller, 91) always gets me. God, I LOVE dramatic irony. Wow I am really getting tangential tonight. Anyway, as opposed to John Proctor's death, Willy Loman's felt more inevitable. We find out early in the play that he's been attempting to kill himself, or at least contemplating suicide, fairly regularly. It's also literally the title of the play, so, you know. The salesman's gotta die. I believe it was Ibsen that once said "if you put a gun onstage in the first act, it has to go off in the third." And as everyone who has ever met me once said, "Stephanie, you are a pretentious asshole." So onto the third notion. Miller describes the setting of the play as follows: "The action takes place in Willy Loman's house and yard and in various places he visits in the New York and Boston of today" (Miller, 10). One could take this to mean the play takes place in 1949, the year of the play's initial publication and Broadway run. But I read Miller as a little more ballsy than that. And I am going to take a second to acknowledge that ballsy is a gendered term for acceptably male over-confidence but other people call me that sometimes so I'm going to use it freely. What I mean to say is I think Miller is asserting that his play is timeless and universally relevant. And while in some aspects the play is notably dated, such as the scene where Howard Wagner, the young head of the company Willy works for, is showing off his tape recorder, the themes are still obviously resonant. I could imagine a baby-boomer seeing Biff as a whiny and misguided millennial. I don't think that's a very intelligent read on the play, but I can imagine someone making a case for it. Willy and Biff are both products of a broken system (*cough* capitalism *cough*) who were promised certain outcomes from hard work and determination. In Death of a Salesman they are confronted with their realties. Their dreams aren't going to come true, they aren't going to amount to what they thought they could be- what they were expressly told they could be. The American dream, like the salesman, is dead. And on that note I think I'm gonna close out this reflection. Thanks for making it to the end of this post. Next up I will be reading a Tony-nominated, Pulitzer Prize-winning, ~LADY WRITTEN~ play, Look Homeward, Angel by Ketti Frings. *Do people use MLA citations in blogs? |
Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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