by Will Dunne
According to Lincoln, however, both parents were haunted by something they liked more than each other and more than their sons. For years, they resisted this longing, but eventually both mother and father surrendered to it. They stopped sleeping with each other, stopped talking to each other, took on other sexual partners, and fled separately for parts unknown, leaving their teenage boys to fend for themselves.
As the play begins, it has been more than twenty years since the parents disappeared. The brothers now live as social outcasts in a furnished room, where mother’s homemade meals have been replaced by takeout food in Styrofoam containers. The parents’ presence is nonetheless still felt in the brothers’ everyday lives and is physically manifest in a family photo album. George C. Wolfe, who directed the play’s world premiere, has talked about the pervasive effect on the brothers of becoming orphans at a young age: “One deals with one’s history, one’s personal history, and one’s cultural history, every single time one walks out the door. The ramifications of the scars that these two brothers have because they were abandoned live with them moment to moment to moment.”2
Prevailing values and beliefs
Family ties. In spite of being abandoned by their parents, or perhaps because of it, Lincoln and Booth both hold family in high esteem. Memories of their parents intrude throughout the play and demonstrate the power of the past to affect the present. In scene 5, for example, when Booth finds himself in a heartbroken rage after being stood up by his ex-girlfriend Grace, it is tales from childhood—the rare “good times”—that Lincoln uses to distract him from his pain.
One of the most potent examples of reverence for family is Booth’s treatment of the inheritance he received from his mother on the day she left: $500 in cash tied up in the toe of a stocking. Though decades have passed, the stocking has never been opened and is hidden in Booth’s room like a precious jewel. It is Lincoln’s threat to cut open this stocking that triggers Booth’s impulsive decision to shoot him at the end of the play.
Prior to that tragic end, Booth and Lincoln each value their brotherly connection more than either would care to admit. Each is the only family the other has left and the only source of support. Lincoln needs Booth for companionship in a world that has rejected him. Booth needs Lincoln for rent money and business assistance that he hopes will make him rich.
In their competing quests to be topdog, the brothers often try to deny the importance of their relationship but never succeed at doing so for long. In scene 1, for example, when Lincoln rejects his business proposition, Booth evicts him and Lincoln readily agrees to go. Despite this decisive termination of their living arrangement, however, neither brother broaches the subject again and life goes on as usual, with each relying on the other for continued support.
Social status. As the title implies, much of Topdog/Underdog centers on the social position one can achieve in life. For Lincoln, a reformed card hustler, the road to topdog status in society is an honest job. This value is so important that he is even willing to be a human target in a shooting gallery. That Lincoln has not retreated to a high moral ground, however, is first made evident in scene 1, when he brags about conning a rich kid out of twenty bucks for an Abraham Lincoln autograph. Perhaps the greatest motivation for Lincoln’s decision to go straight is concern for his personal safety after his stickman was murdered years ago.
For Booth, a topdog is measured by the amount of money he has and by the style with which he presents himself to the world, and especially to women. His dream of accumulating wealth is what inspires his idea to set up a three-card monte operation with his brother’s help. His concern about style is manageable on his own thanks to his thieving skills, which enable him in scene 2 to return home with expensive clothing and in scene 5 to redo his room to impress his expected ex-girlfriend Grace. Like his father, who was also preoccupied with his appearance, Booth is obsessed with what others think about him and wants to look successful even when he’s not.
■ THE CLEAN HOUSE
Broad social context
Set in contemporary American society and using housecleaning as a metaphor for life, The Clean House is deeply rooted in issues of gender. Housecleaning, for example, is a task traditionally associated with women. It has sometimes been called “invisible labor” because it produces not a product that can be sold for profit but a temporary absence of dust and dirt. When viewed in this light, housework tends to have low social and economic value, especially when it is performed by housewives for their families. In 1970, such attitudes prompted feminist Germaine Greer to describe women as “the most oppressed class of life-contracted unpaid worker, for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description.”3
Gender roles have changed as women have increasingly entered the labor market, yet housework still remains primarily the domain of women. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 49 percent of women do some type of daily housework, such as cleaning and laundry, compared to 19 percent of men. When men do participate in household chores, they are more likely to do gendered tasks, such as yard work and repairs, rather than interior cleaning.4
When housekeeping is hired out to domestic workers, gender, ethnicity, and class combine to define a labor force that is virtually hidden from public view and unprotected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which governs pay practices and other work conditions. In the United States, the members of this invisible labor force are overwhelmingly women (88 percent) and primarily women of color (66 percent).5 In keeping with the traditional devaluation of women’s labor in the home, professional housekeepers tend to earn low incomes with no benefits such as paid sick days or health insurance. Most live-in housekeepers (67 percent) earn less than their state’s minimum wage.6
These general social circumstances help explain why each of the women in the play has such strong feelings about cleaning. By putting a dramatic focus on cleaning, the playwright has paved the way for a story about women and their relationships across ethnic and class lines.
Immediate social context
The immediate social context for the play is a two-class household: the upper middle class of Lane and Charles, the married doctors who own the house, and the lower class of Matilde, the Brazilian immigrant housekeeper who was hired to keep the house clean.
As successful doctors at an important hospital, Lane and Charles earn enough to live in the kind of house they want and to hire help to free them from laborious household chores. By giving the characters the social status of doctors, Ruhl creates a stark contrast to Matilde’s status as a cleaning woman and sets up a story in which class difference will matter. The professions of Lane and Charles also put them in a position to deal with cancer patients and thus bring Ana into their lives. Lane’s need to forgive Ana near the end of the play is specifically triggered by the fact that Lane is a doctor who can provide medical help for her.
The boundary between the classes is clearly shown in act one, scene 5, when Lane attempts to order Matilde back to work after she has grown sad and stopped cleaning. Lane makes it clear that she is not interested in Matilde’s personal problems and that their relationship is to be nothing more than employer and employee: “I just want my house—cleaned.”
When Matilde first stops cleaning, it is Lane, not Charles, who must pick up the slack and clean the house herself. Charles is the only male character in the play and the only one with no perspective on housecleaning. He simply knows that he likes things to be clean, and the women in his life accommodate him. When Lane discovers that Charles has been unfaithful, she blames it on her poor domestic skills: “He didn’t want a doctor,” she tells Virginia in act one, scene 13. “He wanted a housewife.”
Prior to its breakup, the marriage of Lane and Charles is a distant one. Because of their work schedules they rarely see each other, and they have shrugged off any expectation of changing that. Their emotional separation is underscored by the fact that they do not appear together physically in the same room for the first 18 scenes of the play.
; As the character with the lowest rank and pay, Matilde has the fewest resources to live the life she wants. She left Brazil to become a comedian in New York but now finds herself doing housework in Connecticut because it’s the only work she can get. Since her parents are dead and she has no friends in this new country, Matilde lives a life of solitude, retreating often into her imagination to conjure up idyllic memories of her parents or to think up jokes.
Virginia enters Matilde’s world from the middle class. Unlike Lane, however, Virginia has no career and no delusion that her life is working the way she wants. A compulsive cleaner with nothing better to do, she needs desperately to reinvent herself, and this inspires her to reach across the class boundary to become friends with her sister’s maid.
Prevailing values and beliefs
Perfection. The characters in the play all value perfection and believe it will make them happy. As a result, they spend most of their time trying to achieve it, whether it comes in the form of an immaculate house, a model family, a perfect joke, or a soul mate. This hunger for the ideal is what leads Lane to hire Matilde as a live-in housekeeper. It is also what inspires Matilde to abandon the duties of her job so that she can have more time to think up jokes. For Virginia, perfection translates into an absence of dirt that will enable her to believe that she is making progress in her life. For Charles and Ana, it is the justification for a love affair that will ruin a marriage.
Desire for perfection is thus a motivating factor behind each character’s actions, a vital source of conflict in the play since it often pits one character against another, and a key element of the plot and theme. It is by overcoming their yearnings for perfection and accepting life’s messes that the characters begin to make true progress in their lives.
Love. The characters all value love and believe it will make them happy. Ranging from true romance to familial affection to friendship, love often explains why the story unfolds as it does.
Lane loves Charles even after he reveals that Ana is his soul mate. This spousal love prevents her from accepting that her marriage is over. Matilde loves her mother and father, who died last year in Brazil. This filial love draws her inward to keep them alive in her mind and propels her to emulate them by thinking up jokes. Virginia loves Lane, even though their relationship is competitive. This sisterly affection motivates her recurring efforts to help Lane and become more involved in her life. Charles and Ana love each other as soul mates, and this creates unprecedented turmoil in Lane’s life, shifting the focus of the dramatic action from physical cleaning in act one to spiritual cleaning in act two.
Though powerful and revered, love is complicated by the expectations it inspires. “People imagine that people who are in love are happy,” Matilde cautions Lane in act one, scene 14. “That is why, in your country, people kill themselves on Valentine’s day.” Love thus ties directly to the play’s theme of relinquishing impossible standards and embracing life’s messes. “Love isn’t clean like that,” explains Matilde. “It’s dirty. Like a good joke.”
ANALYZING YOUR STORY
Explore the social context of your story.
BROAD SOCIAL CONTEXT
• How would you describe the broad social context of your story?
• What historical or current events influence how your story unfolds?
• What major social trends influence what happens?
• What common social practices affect character relationships and story events?
• Why is this broad social context important to the story you want to tell? How would the story be affected if it took place at a different time in history or in a different part of the world?
IMMEDIATE SOCIAL CONTEXT
• How would you describe the immediate social context of your story?
• How does this smaller social context affect the way your characters usually feel?
• How does this context affect the way your characters interact?
• For most characters, what are the most positive aspects of this social milieu? The most negative aspects?
• Why is this immediate social context important to the story you want to tell? How would the story be affected if the specific nature, makeup, or structure of this world were different?
VALUES AND BELIEFS
• What common values dominate the world of your story? List a few examples of what matters most among your characters.
• Onstage or off, who is most responsible for these values?
• Who in your story is most influenced by these dominant values, and how?
• What values may be important elsewhere but dismissed by most of your characters? For example, truth is held in high regard by many people but is of little use to the ruthless real estate agents of Glengarry Glen Ross.
• Right or wrong, what two or three beliefs dominate your characters’ lives and most explain why the story unfolds the way it does?
• What do these beliefs reveal about your characters?
• How is each of these beliefs shown in the story?
LAWS AND CUSTOMS
In any dramatic story, characters are governed by laws and customs that affect how they behave with others. These social rules can be as varied as the disparate societies that have existed around the world and throughout history. In nineteenth-century Norway, if a woman needs a bank loan, she is legally required to get her husband’s written permission (A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen). In 1930s Berlin, if a man is openly gay, he can be sent to a Nazi concentration camp (Bent by Martin Sherman). In seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, if someone is accused of witchcraft by a court official, he or she can be put to death (The Crucible by Arthur Miller).
Sometimes the laws and customs that influence characters stem from a subset of society, such as a family, business, club, or other organization. In Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker, for example, a group of strangers enrolled in an adult acting class find themselves subject to the rules of theatre games devised by their instructor.
Individual characters may regard the rules that govern them as good or bad, important or unimportant, protective or threatening. A character’s decision to obey social mandates or to rebel against them often explains how and why dramatic events occur.
■ DOUBT: A PARABLE
The world of St. Nicholas is subject to the rules and tenets of the Catholic Church as well as the policies and dictates of the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius. Laws and customs here include:
Dress code. Nuns and priests are subject to a strict dress code, which adds to the formal atmosphere of the play. As Sisters of Charity, Aloysius and James must wear black bonnets and floor-length black habits. As a Roman Catholic priest, Father Flynn wears liturgical vestments when he’s in church saying Mass and a black cassock when he is elsewhere in public. Informal dress is allowed, however, when he is teaching gym.
Chain of command. The Catholic church and school system has a chain of command that Aloysius has taken a solemn vow to obey. When issues arise at school that she cannot resolve on her own, her sole recourse within the system is to report the problems to the monsignor. This rule is introduced in scene 2, when Aloysius reminds James about how the system works. It becomes important in scene 4, when she learns that a student in James’s class had alcohol on his breath after meeting with Flynn in the rectory. Aloysius fears that, if she were to report the incident to the senile Monsignor Benedict, he would not believe her, since he worships Flynn, and would instead brand her a heretic for besmirching a priest’s reputation. Because Aloysius cannot trust the monsignor or go above his head to the bishop, she must deal with the problem of Flynn herself.
The Church’s chain of command gains further weight in scene 8 during Aloysius’s final confrontation with Flynn. He reminds her that she has no right to act on her own because she is a member of a religious order who has taken the vow of obedience. For a woman who has devoted her life to the Church, it is a powerful reminder that she has stepped outside of her
traditional bounds. It is also a foreshadowing of the doubts she will experience at the end of the play.
Altar boy conduct. Any altar boy found drinking altar wine must be removed from his post. This rule is introduced in scene 5 when Flynn must explain why Donald Muller had wine on his breath after a visit to the rectory. According to Flynn, the caretaker, Mr. McGinn, caught Donald in the sacristy drinking the wine. When Donald begged to remain an altar boy, Flynn decided to give him another chance by keeping the incident secret. The rules governing altar boy conduct thus provide a relatively innocent explanation for an incriminating circumstance.
Meetings between nuns and priests. A nun and a priest may never be closeted alone or even cross paths in the garden without a third party present. This rule is introduced in scene 4, when Aloysius demands that James be present while she grills Flynn about Donald Muller. It is demonstrated in scene 5, when Flynn arrives for the meeting and cannot enter the office until James also arrives. As the meeting begins, we learn another part of the rule: when priests and nuns meet, the door of their room may not be closed completely. Accordingly, Aloysius “closes the door but for an inch.”
The third-party rule becomes important in scene 7 when a distraught James, sitting in the garden, is visited unexpectedly by Flynn. They proceed to have a private meeting, which breaks the rule and adds a forbidden quality to their interaction. The rule is again important in scene 8, when Flynn storms into Aloysius’s office without a third party present. To heighten the tension of the moment, he not only fails to leave the door ajar but also slams it shut. It is a signal that no holds will be barred during the showdown that is about to take place.
■ TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
The immediate world of Topdog/Underdog is governed by the rules of three-card monte and the dictates of Booth, who considers himself in charge of the premises. Social rules include:
