by Ben Brady
CLERK
Oyez, oyez . . . The Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, Judge Atkins presiding, is now in session. All rise.
WIDE SHOT
as the JUDGE enters and takes her seat.
Opening business of the court . . . Gressen (Joanna’s lawyer) gets to his feet.
GRESSEN
Your honor. As our first witness I would like to call Joanna Kramer.
TWO SHOT: TED & SHAUNESSY
The lawyer leans across to Ted.
SHAUNESSY
(stage whisper)
Real direct. Motherhood . . . They’re going right for the throat.
WIDE SHOT
as Joanna gets to her feet, crosses to the witness stand and is sworn in.
Note: Throughout the following we continually CROSSCUT to Ted Kramer, leaning forward, listening intently. It becomes evident that, in spite of himself, there are moments he feels great compassion for Joanna.
GRESSEN
Now then, Mrs. Kramer, would you tell the court how long you were married?
JOANNA
Six years.
GRESSEN
And would you describe those years as happy?
JOANNA
The first couple, yes, but after that it became increasingly difficult.
GRESSEN
Mrs. Kramer, did you ever work in a job while you were married to your ex-husband?
JOANNA
No, I did not.
GRESSEN
Did you wish to?
JOANNA
Yes. I tried to talk to Ted—my ex-husband—about it, but he wouldn’t listen. He refused to discuss it in any serious way. I remember one time he said I probably couldn’t get a job that would pay enough to hire a baby-sitter for Billy.
GRESSEN
Tell me, Mrs. Kramer, are you employed at the present time?
JOANNA
Yes, I work for Jantzen as a sportswear designer.
GRESSEN
And what is your present salary?
JOANNA
I make thirty-one thousand dollars a year.
TED REACTION
stunned.
[BACK TO SCENE]
GRESSEN
(switching tactics)
Mrs. Kramer, do you love your child?
JOANNA
(emphatically)
Yes. Very much.
GRESSEN
And yet you chose to leave him?
There is a long pause, then, speaking carefully, with great thought:
JOANNA
Yes . . . Look, during the last five years we were married, I had . . . I was getting more and more . . . unhappy, more and more frustrated. I needed to talk to somebody. I needed to find out if it was me, if I was going crazy, or what. But every time I turned to Ted—my ex-husband—he couldn’t handle it. He became very . . . I don’t know, very threatened. I mean, whenever I would bring up anything he would act like it was some kind of personal attack. Anyway, we became more and more separate . . . more and more isolated from one another. Finally, I had no other choice, I had to leave. And because of my ex-husband’s attitude—his unwillingness to deal with my feelings, I had come to have almost no self-esteem . . .
(with feeling)
At the time I left, I sincerely believed that there was something wrong with me—that my son would be better off without me. It was only when I got to California and started into therapy I began to realize I wasn’t a terrible per-
(MORE)
JOANNA (CONT’D)
son. And that just because I needed some creative and emotional outlet other than my child, that didn’t make me unfit to be a mother.
GRESSEN
(to the judge)
Your honor, I would like to place in evidence a report on Mrs. Kramer’s therapy by her therapist, Dr. Elinore Freedman of La Jolla, California.
And with that he hands both the judge and Shaunessy a thick sheaf of papers. Then, turning his attention back to Joanna:
GRESSEN
Mrs. Kramer, why did you set up residence in New York?
JOANNA
Because my son is here. And his father is here. As a mother, I don’t want my child to be separated from his father.
GRESSEN
Mrs. Kramer, can you tell the court why you are asking for custody?
There is a pause, then:
JOANNA
Because he’s my child . . . Because I love him. I know I left my son, I know that’s a terrible thing to do. Believe me, I have to live with that every day of my life. But just because I’m a woman, don’t I have a right to the same hopes and dreams as a man? Don’t I have a right to a life of my own? Is that so awful? Is my pain any less because I’m a woman? Are my
(MORE)
JOANNA (CONT’D)
feelings any cheaper? I left my child—I know there is no excuse for that. But since then, I have gotten help. I have worked hard to become a whole human being. I don’t think my son should be punished for that. Billy’s only six. He needs me. I’m not saying he doesn’t need his father, but he needs me more. I’m his mother.
There is a beat of silence, then:
GRESSEN
Thank you, Mrs. Kramer. I have no further questions.
ON SHAUNESSY
as he stands, collects his papers from the table and, taking his own sweet time, crosses to Joanna.
[COURTROOM]
SHAUNESSY
Now then, Mrs. Kramer, you said you were married six years. Is that correct?
JOANNA
Yes.
SHAUNESSY
In all that time did your husband ever strike you or abuse you physically in any way.
JOANNA
No.
SHAUNESSY
Did your husband strike or physically abuse his child in any way?
JOANNA
No.
SHAUNESSY
Would you describe your husband as an alcoholic?
JOANNA
No.
SHAUNESSY
A heavy drinker?
JOANNA
No.
SHAUNESSY
Was he unfaithful?
JOANNA
No.
SHAUNESSY
Did he ever fail to provide for you?
JOANNA
No.
SHAUNESSY
(wry smile)
Well, I can certainly understand why you left him.
GRESSEN
Objection.
SHAUNESSY
(switching his line of questioning)
How long do you plan to live in New York, Mrs. Kramer?
JOANNA
Permanently.
Note: During the early part of Shaunessy’s cross-examination, Joanna has been very forthright, very sure of herself. Now, as he starts getting tougher, she begins to falter.
SHAUNESSY
Permanently?
(smiles, like a shark smiles)
Mrs. Kramer, how many boyfriends have you had—permanently?
ON JOANNA
Her head snaps back as though she’d been hit.
[BACK TO SCENE]
GRESSEN
Objection, your honor, on the grounds of vagueness.
JUDGE
I’ll allow it.
JOANNA
I don’t recall.
SHAUNESSY
(boring in)
How many lovers have you had—permanently?
JOANNA
(looks toward Gressen for help)
I don’t recall.
SHAUNESSY
More than three, less than thirty-three—permanently?
Gressen is again on his feet, outraged.
GRESSEN
Objection!
JUDGE
The witness will answer, please.
JOANNA
(almost a whisper)
Somewhere in-between.
SHAUNESSY
Do you have a lover now?
Joanna i
s silent.
SHAUNESSY (CONT’D)
(to the judge)
Your honor, I would request a direct answer to a direct question. Does she have a lover?
JUDGE
I’ll allow that. The witness will answer, please.
JOANNA
(in a whisper)
Yes.
SHAUNESSY
Is that . . . permanent?
By now Joanna is becoming thoroughly rattled.
JOANNA
I . . . I don’t know . . .
SHAUNESSY
Then, we don’t really know, do we, when you say “permanently,” if you’re planning to remain in New York, or even to keep the child, for that matter, since you’ve never really done anything in your life that was continuing, stable, that could be regarded as permanent.
ON PETITIONER’S TABLE
Gressen jumps to his feet.
GRESSEN
Objection! I must ask that the counsel be prevented from harassing the witness.
[BACK TO SCENE]
JUDGE
Sustained.
SHAUNESSY
(a new attack)
Mrs. Kramer, how can you consider yourself a fit mother when you have been a failure at virtually every relationship you have taken on as an adult?
GRESSEN
(red in the face)
Objection!
JUDGE
Sustained.
SHAUNESSY
I’ll ask it in another way. What was the longest personal relationship you have had in your life—other than parents and girlfriends?
JOANNA
(rattled)
Ah . . . I guess I’d have to say . . . with my child.
SHAUNESSY
(wonder, irony)
Whom you’ve seen twice in a year? Mrs. Kramer, your ex-husband, wasn’t he the longest personal relationship in your life?
JOANNA
(reluctantly)
I suppose . . .
SHAUNESSY
Would you speak up, Mrs. Kramer? I couldn’t hear you.
JOANNA
(louder)
Yes.
SHAUNESSY
How long was that?
JOANNA
We were married two years before the baby. And then four very difficult years.
SHAUNESSY
So, you were a failure at the longest, most important relationship in your life.
GRESSEN
Objection!
JUDGE
Overruled. The witness’s opinion on this is relevant.
JOANNA
I was not a failure.
SHAUNESSY
(sarcastic)
Oh? What do you call it then—a success? The marriage ended in a divorce.
So angry she forgets her cool:
JOANNA
I consider it less my failure than his.
SHAUNESSY
(seizes on this)
Congratulations, Mrs. Kramer. You have just rewritten matrimonial law. You were both divorced, Mrs. Kramer.
GRESSEN
(on his feet)
Objection!
SHAUNESSY
(to the judge)
Your honor, I’d like to ask what this model of stability and respectability has ever succeeded at?
(to Joanna)
Mrs. Kramer, were you a failure at the longest, most important personal relationship in your life?
CLOSE ON JOANNA
who sits silently.
[BACK TO SCENE]
JUDGE
This is cross-examination so I’ll allow it, Mr. Gressen. Please answer the question, Mrs. Kramer.
JOANNA
(whisper)
It did not succeed.
SHAUNESSY
(suddenly fierce)
Not it . . . Not it, Mrs. Kramer—you. Were you a failure at the most important personal relationship of your life?
CLOSER IN ON JOANNA
Silence.
SHAUNESSY VO (CONT’D)
Were you?
EXTREME CLOSE-UP: JOANNA
JOANNA
(barely audible)
Yes.
WIDE SHOT
Shaunessy smiles, turns his back on Joanna and walks towards the respondent’s table.
SHAUNESSY
No further questions.
CLOSER IN ON THE TABLE
as Shaunessy sits down next to Ted.
TED
(leaning over, in a whisper)
Jesus Christ. Did you have to be so rough on her?
SHAUNESSY
(tough)
Do you want the kid, or don’t you?
ON JOANNA
Shaken, she gets down from the witness stand, crosses to the petitioner’s table without looking at Ted. She sits, leans across to her lawyer and whispers something in his ear. As he nods
ON THE JUDGE
JUDGE
If the petitioner has no further witnesses, we will hear the respondent tomorrow morning at 9:30.
FADE OUT12
The drama of the wholly realized woman coming home to a reunited family remains to be written: there have been no successful sequels to A Doll House or Kramer vs. Kramer. That diminishes neither the achievement nor popularity of these two dramas. Both underscore what an on-going process the attempt to achieve sexual equality is in Western society: we can imagine the problem, but not yet see its solution.
We raise this point about social process to confront the weaknesses in Kramer vs. Kramer. At no point do religion, conventional mores, conformity, and society play the same role as in Torvald’s desperate attempt to hold onto Nora. Shaunessy asperses Joanna’s character in a way that has become a cliché when he asks about the number of her lovers, and Joanna herself admits how wrong it was to leave her child. In both cases a conventional moral outlook is taken for granted. Nora, on the other hand, is overtly defiant. What have morals to do with me? is, in effect, her response to Torvald’s conventional use of them. Nora recoils from taking a lover earlier in the play, but at the end she clearly tells Torvald to forget her and look to others and implies she will do the same as a right of self-exploration.
Religion doesn’t come up at all in Kramer vs. Kramer, though its connection with the family in conventional thinking is apparent. Similarly, what society thinks and expects is unexamined: Kramer vs. Kramer assumes conventional attitudes toward both, which is made apparent by Joanna’s conventional sense of guilt. There is no guilty tone in Nora when she takes her stand.
If we had only these dramas to deduce their societies from, Ibsen’s would evoke a sense of individuals in a complex of issues, Benton’s a picture of individuals almost isolated in egocentric concerns. As a consequence, Joanna is a less important character than Nora. Nora refuses to accept any preconceptions about proper behavior—we can imagine her shocking Shaunessy on the stand, instead of the reverse. Nora is a revolutionary; Joanna, a confused woman operating within the prevalent attitudes of existing middle-class society. Ibsen is after a profound social transformation, ready to “torpedo the Ark,” but not Benton in Kramer vs. Kramer. If you’re going to tackle the remaking of woman, why pull your punches as Kramer vs. Kramer ultimately does? Kramer vs. Kramer is a popular film and will have a long afterlife in reruns and video rentals; A Doll House will be given new productions repeatedly.
This said, what Benton does choose to handle comes across with greater credibility than what Ibsen achieves at the end of A Doll House. A Doll House prepares us to accept a defiant Nora, but not the revolutionary. Kramer vs. Kramer establishes characters who accept their society in general, but wish to change their roles within their affluent, middle-class world. At no point do Joanna and Ted, pursuing their own interests, imply Ibsen’s kind of revolt. They remain consistent.
Nora, once she drops her disguise as a doll, is remorseless and without conflict. Joanna is fallible. She begins in confidence and is nearly shattered by Shaunessy. His first attack makes her leaving Ted seem an exercise in whims
y. His next attack undermines her character: lovers, a lack of permanence, failure in her most important relationship. She tries to maintain that their marriage (“it”) failed and that Ted was at fault for his insensitivity, but she is driven to see and admit that she failed, too. She grows as a character in this scene as the action works on her. She reacts; she changes. She moves Ted and us. We feel for her, and we must feel for a character if thematic material is to matter to us. Nora can shock us, but her certainty keeps her at a distance.
We said the audience must care about your characters’ immediate situation for thematic material to be effective, too. Ted’s situation dominates the story before Joanna reappears, and so this scene is our first chance to develop feelings about her. The earlier part of the scene with Gressen disposes us favorably to her, not because she is now making $31,000 a year, but because she has struggled to change herself. When she reveals the nature of that struggle, we are made to feel it is an ongoing thing. She does not march relentlessly to conclusions like Nora, but struggles to make clear as much to herself as to Shaunessy what has happened to her. Look at her language.
I was getting more and more . . . unhappy. . . . He became very . . . I don’t know, very threatened. . . . Anyway, we became more and more separate . . . more and more isolated . . .
Joanna searches and discovers here; she doesn’t make a speech. Nora speaks as if she knows everything already. Look at Joanna’s language where her dialogue becomes overtly thematic:
Don’t I have a right to a life of my own? . . . Is my pain any less because I’m a woman?
Earlier in this same speech she asks:
But just because I’m a woman, don’t I have a right to the same hopes and dreams as a man?
Joanna asks questions; Nora delivers certainties. Joanna lets us come up with the answers. When Shaunessy turns on Joanna and forces the admission of failure out of her, we sense his victory is Pyrrhic. She wins the moral victory. Just how should a woman struggling to find herself behave? Why shouldn’t there be lovers? Why wouldn’t there be failures? Of course she went into therapy. How natural to come back for her child when she realized she was normal to want a life and occupation of her own! Her effort to blame the marriage—“it”—rather than herself for failure is only too human.
We already care about Ted; now both Ted and Joanna seem right to us. How are we to put them together? What would be the ideal marriage, that real transformation of male and female roles and conceptions of self that Nora alludes to at the end of A Doll House? We might wish Benton had Ibsen’s breadth or that he had not chosen to speak about “wholeness” or indicated Joanna had gone to California and gone into therapy. One is a cliché; the other, now a stock laugh. Although Benton and Ibsen raise similar issues, we live them with Joanna; we listen to them with Nora. It is a crucial difference.
