Posted: 8/3/18 at 12:21am
I felt that way, too, especially as the scene was ending! Another reason I thought the direction of that scene in particular fell short of Letts' vision.
Posted: 8/3/18 at 8:40am
Well, a minority opinion: I first read it two years ago and admire the play's abject refusal to make this woman more heroic, or larger-than-life than she is. It's an unsentimental portrait of someone so ordinary, she'd disappear in a crowd. The fact that she confronts ugly terrible turns in the road with a very small tool box of survival skills -- she's unremarkable at coping, a startling even daring trait for a character -- makes the play compelling to me. She's painfully constricted by an absence of a definable life goal, other than moving on, and ill prepared by circumstance and genetic predisposition.. Yet she prevails, as many do. Within the brief running time, it's powerful to me. I actually thought the scene with Overbey and Baker was the heartbreaking turn in the middle, and a rare moment when sustained yelling delivers a harrowing reality check. Unlike many addiction fictions, this story doesn't justify or exploit. It shows that stuff happens, lives are squandered, but some happiness -- shared TV programs, a meal on a TV tray, even a conversation in a dry cleaners -- can be found. Almost William Inge-like in its unromantic simplicity.
Almost no one agrees with me on these points, but I was deeply moved, even by the perhaps too spot-on metaphor at the end.
Updated On: 8/3/18 at 08:40 AM
