by Will Dunne
Main event: Sibling rivalry leads to murder
By focusing on the ups and downs of the duel between Lincoln and Booth, the play presents the complexities of a relationship that is both competitive and nurturing. At times, it appears that the rivalry between the brothers may doom them to failure because of their inability to resolve their differences. At other times, it appears that their brotherly love may enable them to build better lives by healing the psychological wounds inflicted on them by their parents and society. In the end, it is the rivalry between the brothers that wins out.
Booth’s murder of Lincoln—and all it entails—is the main event of the play. It is the death not only of Lincoln but also of the American dream. Each brother pursued it in his own way, one as an underdog attempting to work outside the system and the other as a topdog attempting to work from within. In the end, the dream eludes them both. The tragedy of the play’s outcome raises the question of whether the dream was ever really accessible to two men whose lives have been defined by a dysfunctional family, poverty, and low status in society.
■ THE CLEAN HOUSE
Story arc: Isolation to connection
In The Clean House three protagonists with individual quests eventually find themselves on the same journey.
First impression. The play introduces a trio of women—Lane, Matilde, and Virginia—who each live in isolation and have little in common. Lane is an important doctor who finds it inappropriate to socialize with her maid and feels estranged from her sister. Matilde, in mourning for her parents, feels sad among the living, especially in this new country where her only opportunity for work is to clean someone else’s house. Virginia, a housewife in a childless marriage to a boring man, feels so alone and empty that she would rather spend the day cleaning house or asleep in bed. Each character’s views reflect her social class, values, and approach to life.
Final impression. The play ends with the same three women working in harmony to nurse their new friend Ana through her cancer and death. In the final scene, Matilde imagines Ana as her mother giving birth to her in laughter. In contrast to the play’s beginning, where each character stands alone, the ending shows the women supporting one another as they deal with the mystery of death and, in Matilde’s imagination, the wonder of birth.
Story arc. As Lane, Matilde, and Virginia each emerge from their clean houses to accept life’s messes, the world of the story evolves from isolation to connection.
Main event: Women from different walks of life connect
Lane, Matilde, and Virginia function together as a group protagonist whose need for meaningful human relationships drives the play. To fulfill this need, each must learn to accept the messiness of life, whether it’s a failed marriage, the death of parents, or a dreary existence due to bad choices. As the women put their social and personal differences aside and join together to nurse a dying woman, they find a connection that will enable them to move on with their lives. It is this connection—embodied in the joyful act of eating ice cream together—that is the main event of the play.
ANALYZING YOUR STORY
Explore the story arc of your play and the main event it produces.
STORY ARC
• How does your story begin?
• What are the most telling details of this beginning?
• How would you describe the emotional environment at the beginning of the story?
• What information might this beginning suggest to an audience about your characters and the world they inhabit?
• How does your play end?
• What are the most telling details of this ending?
• How would you describe the emotional environment at the end of the story?
• What information might the ending suggest to an audience about your characters and the world of the story?
• Think about how the end of the story compares with the beginning. What is the story arc?
MAIN EVENT
• What is the most important thing that happens in your story? Define the main event.
• Do you see this main event as a positive or negative change, and why?
• What two or three story events most contribute to this outcome?
• How closely does the main event tie to the dramatic journey of your protagonist(s)?
• How does the main event affect your protagonist(s) in a good way? In a bad way?
• Who else, if anyone, is significantly affected by this event, and how?
• How is the world of the story affected by this event in the short term? In the long term?
SUBJECT AND THEME
No matter how long or complex a dramatic story may be, and regardless of the many topics and ideas it may present, it is ultimately about one thing. It has a subject, or main topic, such as love, and a theme, or premise, such as “love conquers all.” The theme reflects who the story is about, what events the dramatic journey includes, and how the story ends. To understand the big picture of a dramatic story is to know its subject and theme and be able to state these global elements in simple terms. Ideally, a subject can be expressed in a word or phrase, but a theme requires a complete sentence.
Most dramatic stories also have a counter-theme that stands in contrast or opposition to the main theme and is embodied by the forces of antagonism. In a drama that aims to show how “love conquers all,” for example, a counter-theme might purport that “love can be defeated by hate.” These contradictory ideas could put a pair of young lovers on a collision course with others who are bent on keeping them apart.
The counter-theme is important because it fuels the central conflict of the story. If a play is weak on conflict, it is often a sign that the counter-theme has not been sufficiently developed. The counter-theme also helps define the main theme by providing a contrast to it. We come to understand the theme more clearly by seeing what it is not.
Though theme and counter-theme tend to be equally powerful through most of the story, the theme is the one that determines how the dramatic journey will end. If the theme is “love conquers all,” for example, it will prove stronger and truer than its opposite, and the young lovers will ultimately triumph. In some cases, the counter-theme may maintain enough dramatic strength to compromise the ending. For example, the lovers may die but triumph over their adversaries by staying faithful to each other, as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
■ DOUBT: A PARABLE
Subject: Doubt
Audiences may view Doubt from a number of different angles. Some may see it as a story about child abuse. Others may see it as an exposé about corruption in the Catholic Church. In both the title and preface of the script, however, Shanley tells us that the subject of the play is doubt. This subject is introduced in the opening line of the play when Father Flynn asks, from the pulpit: “What do you do when you’re not sure?”
Webster’s New World Dictionary defines doubt as “a wavering of opinion or belief, lack of conviction, uncertainty.” This is a play that explores the human condition of feeling unsure. In scene 7, when Father Flynn meets secretly with Sister James to enlist her support, he implies the inevitability of experiencing doubt. “What actually happens in life is beyond interpretation,” he says. “The truth makes for a bad sermon. It tends to be confusing and have no clear conclusion.” In highlighting the difficulty of knowing the truth, Flynn has described the context for the play and its exploration of what happens when the forces of doubt clash with the forces of certainty.
Theme: Doubt can lead to wisdom and growth
Doubt centers on Aloysius’s campaign to drive Flynn out of St. Nicholas parish because she believes he has abused an eighth grade student named Donald Muller, even though she has neither hard evidence to support her conclusion nor the support of the boy’s mother in condemning the priest. By the time the play ends, Aloysius has succeeded in chasing Flynn away, but for the first time since the play began, she begins to experience doubts. Some of these doubts may be triggered by the events
of her campaign, such as her deliberate use of deception to force Flynn into leaving. Some may be triggered by the aftermath: his departure has led not to exile and shame, but a promotion to pastor of another parish.
As she sits on a bench with Sister James, Aloysius’s reflection on all that has happened prompts her to utter the final line of the play: “I have doubts! I have such doubts!” Shanley has described this breakthrough as the birth of a modern woman.1 Having shattered her rigid belief system, Aloysius can now begin to think for herself and to evolve as an individual. It is notable that she refers here to “doubts” in the plural and that she repeats the word, as if a floodgate of questions has opened and begun to overtake her.
This ending suggests the theme that doubt is a necessary part of life, a complement to certainty that can contribute to wisdom and growth. The theme explains why the question of Flynn’s innocence or guilt is never resolved. When all is said and done, the play is not about what Flynn did or didn’t do. It’s about Aloysius and the transformation that enables her to rise above her dogmatic approach to the world and, in acknowledging her vulnerability to Sister James, make a personal connection with someone else.
The emotional impact of this ending is heightened by the defeat of the play’s counter-theme, which defines doubt as a sign of weakness that must be eliminated. During the dramatic journey leading to this final moment, we see that absolute certainty is a source of confidence, power, and peace of mind for Aloysius. Whether the topic is children writing with ballpoint pens, teachers managing their classrooms, or priests choosing topics for their sermons, she has no need to debate issues or compromise her views. She always knows how to proceed because she has a belief system that dictates the parameters of right and wrong, eliminates the complicated gray zone between them, and guides her through the demands of everyday life. Because this system has been handed down from the trusted authority of the Church, she sees it as a code of behavior that one embraces without question.
It is this belief system that fuels her campaign against Flynn from beginning to end. It is also this belief system that must be changed if Aloysius is to achieve her final transformation and see that, as Mrs. Muller earlier warned her, “Sometimes things aren’t black and white.”
■ TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Subject: Family wounds
Parks’s tragicomedy draws us into the claustrophobic world of Lincoln and Booth, brothers who vie for power within the confines of the rooming-house room that poverty and loneliness have forced them to share. Each comes to this room from failed relationships with women, a racially imbalanced society that offers little hope for advancement, and a history of parental abandonment that has left the older brother, Lincoln, the topdog and the younger brother, Booth, the underdog.
The dynamics of their competitive relationship dramatize such topics as sibling rivalry, brotherly love, family, identity, race, masculinity, inheritance, money, the power of the past, the con game three-card monte, and the American dream. In the introduction to the play, the playwright identifies the topic that matters most: “This is a play about family wounds and healing.” It is through this lens that the other topics come into view.
Theme: Unhealed family wounds kill
Throughout Topdog/Underdog, we see the power of the past to affect the present, with a focus on the psychological and social wounds that family relationships can inflict. As the play unfolds, certain events illustrate the tragic theme that unhealed family wounds kill. Other events illustrate the counter-theme that unhealed family wounds bring the survivors closer together.
For Lincoln and Booth, such wounds were first inflicted at birth, when their father thought it would be funny to name them after Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth. Perhaps it was this cruel naming of the two infants that doomed them to a future where the original Booth’s deadly act of violence would be reenacted over a wad of cash in a seedy furnished room.
During the story, we get glimpses of the early family life that shaped Lincoln and Booth into the men we meet in scene 1. We learn that they grew up in a two-room house with a cement backyard and a front yard full of trash, that their father was an abusive drunk, and that both parents had lovers on the side. We also learn that the parents had attempted to achieve the American dream by getting steady jobs and taking on a mortgage to buy a house, and that it was the strain of this effort that led to the breakup of the family.
When Lincoln and Booth were in their teens, both parents vanished, first the mother, then, two years later, the father, leaving the brothers to quit school and fend for themselves. “I don’t think they liked us,” Lincoln muses in a passing reflection of Moms and Pops. Their desertion has had both a positive and a negative impact on the brothers. In line with the hopeful counter-theme, parental abandonment has led them to join forces in a struggle against the world. We see their brotherly love in many moments throughout the play, such as Lincoln’s efforts to soothe Booth’s pain after he is stood up by Grace, his ex-girlfriend. Underlying the conflict of the play is the hope that this love will lead the brothers to a better life.
In line with the tragic main theme, however, the desertion of the parents has taught them that loved ones are not be trusted: they can be abusive and can disappear at any moment. Perhaps this is why the brothers have such a hard time managing relationships, not only with each other but also with the women in their lives.
Prior to running away, each parent gave one son a $500 cash inheritance. The mother secretly gave hers to Booth, and the father secretly gave his to Lincoln, each with the instruction not to tell the other brother about the money. This parental advice may explain why the brothers find it difficult to trust each other. The life example of the parents also taught them that steady employment is a source of misery and that they should pursue other lifestyles. For Lincoln, this meant card hustling. For Booth, it meant petty theft.
In their power struggles, we see that the brothers often use lies to impress each other and cruelty to exert control, behaviors that can be traced back to their parents. Because the brothers have not learned to overcome the wounds of their childhood, they find themselves on the path that leads to their final showdown. As the play ends with Booth hugging the body of the brother he has slain, we witness how unhealed family wounds can kill.
■ THE CLEAN HOUSE
Subject: Life’s messes
While focusing on relationships among women from different walks of life, The Clean House explores a number of topics, such as housecleaning, humor, laughter, class differences, grief, apple picking, infidelity, soul mates, sibling rivalry, friendship, cancer, healing, death, forgiveness, and the nature of love. From a global perspective, the sum of story events suggests that the subject, or main topic, of the play is the messiness of human existence: not dirt and disarray in the physical realm so much as the failures, losses, accidents, and other disappointments that affect us emotionally and sometimes make life painful and complicated.
Theme: Accepting life’s messes can lead to renewal
Each character in the play is faced with a mess: the end of a marriage (Lane), the loss of parents (Matilde), an everyday life that has become meaningless (Virginia), the potential loss of a soul mate to cancer (Charles), and the diagnosis of a fatal disease (Ana). Each of these messes threatens the character’s “clean house” and challenges her or him to find a solution.
At first, most of the characters have difficulty accepting their messes and instead choose diversions that perpetuate their problems or make them worse. Lane clings to anger over her husband’s betrayal. Matilde keeps her parents alive in an imaginary world where everything is perfect. Virginia tries to avoid the meaninglessness of her life by cleaning obsessively. Charles denies the inevitability of his soul mate’s death and flees to Alaska in search of a cure. Only Ana immediately accepts the misfortune that has changed her life. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she demands a mastectomy, and later, when the cancer returns, she attempts to live the rest of her life on her
own terms, even to the extent of choosing the time and manner of her death.
The other women eventually learn to accept their messes as well and begin to heal. Lane moves on with her life by letting go of her anger and forgiving Ana for taking Charles from her. Matilde learns to accept the loss of her parents by getting more involved in the real world and participating in the death of Ana. Virginia overcomes her cleaning compulsion by making an “operatic mess” in her sister’s living room. Charles is the only character who fails to accept his mess in time; consequently, he loses the opportunity to be with Ana at the end of her life.
By showing how most of the characters grow, The Clean House asks us to understand that life is a mixed bag that includes both funny jokes and ruined marriages, apple-picking parties and lonely afternoons, chocolate ice cream and fatal disease. The underlying theme is that we cannot heal from our failures and losses until we come to accept them as parts of who we are. It is through the messiness of life’s entanglements that we can become open enough to begin the process of reinventing ourselves.
This theme is opposed by the counter-theme that the key to true happiness is perfection and that life’s messes must, therefore, be avoided or eliminated. The power of this contrasting idea explains why, at different times in the story, each character struggles to achieve his or her version of a “clean house,” whether it takes the form of an immaculate dwelling, the world’s funniest joke, the tastiest apple, the best way to treat cancer, or a soul mate.
ANALYZING YOUR STORY
The subject and theme are keys to understanding the “big picture” of a dramatic story.
