to some extent because of its fine productions of his plays. Wilson regards the Circle Rep players as true collaborators, and much of his work seems tailored to their talents; he has, he says, “a kind of mild aversion to working alone that everybody at Circle Rep comes by honestly.”

In some ways Wilson is a very old-fashioned playwright, in others a most contemporary one. His approach to characterization and theatrical techniques fixes him squarely in the American realistic tradition of (early and late) Eugene O’Neil, the Elmer Rice of Street Scene, Clifford Odets’ social plays, and the best works of William Inge, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams—although the dramatist he most resembles is Anton Chekhov. But if his methods are traditional, his insights are thoroughly contemporary. He writes, he has said, “for that decently intellectual, politically aware social realist out there that I think the intelligent half of America is,” and his characters are absolutely attached to their time and place, be it 1944 or 1977. Yet Wilson is never a social or political polemicist. His focus is always on the effects that sociopolitical currents and pressures have on his characters as individuals and how they shape their needs, actions, and directions.

As is the case with Tennessee Williams, a dramatist with whom he has been compared (and with whom he has worked, as collaborator on “The Migrants,” a CBS-Playhouse 90 script, and as librettist for Lee Hoiby’s music in the operatic version of Summer and Smoke), the Chekhovian influences on Wilson are obvious. The action in many of his plays, especially those with a half dozen or more characters, may seem undirected, almost aimless. Characters talk, ruminate out loud, go about ordinary tasks, establish relationships, and reveal their foibles and preoccupations. The talk is believable, clever, and interesting, filled with bits and pieces of insight and information. The characters are vivid, very real, and quite sympathetic. But the design of the whole and the direction of the action is not always clear, and the emotional intensities seem muted. Frequently the individuals, or even couples, seem isolated, wrapped up in their own worlds with little connection to others or to any overtly developing plot line. Then subtly, beautifully, it all comes together in revelations that are powerful and memorable, but without the histrionics of a Williams or Albee; it is more like a Joyce epiphany than an O’Neill climax.

Although the play takes place during the evening of the 4th and the morning of the 5th of July, 1977, the title refers to much more than the time of year: it is the day after the “patriotic celebration” of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The Vietnam War is ancient history; Ken Talley’s potential high school students “don’t even know where Vietnam is.” The moral fervor, the protests, the hopes, and the anger have been long dissipated, forgotten, or barely remembered with a bitter nostalgia. Yet the people are left, no longer young, and with half a lifetime yet to live. Fifth of July focuses on a small group of onetime “Berkeley radicals” who have returned, without convictions or directions, to the family homestead, the rundown Talley farm near Lebanon, Missouri. All have been severely damaged by their experiences.

Ken Talley, Jr., began as a protester, but eventually answered the draft, served in Vietnam, and had both legs blown off. His disillusioned sister June, having sent her illegitimate daughter to live with her Aunt Sally during the years she was riding the protest circuit, now tries to establish a viable relationship with that daughter, Shirley, now fourteen. Visiting them at the Talley farm are Gwen and John Landis, companions of the radical years, who separated from the Talleys shortly before Ken’s induction into the Army. Gwen, a very rich, erratic, oversexed, would-be singer, has been physically, emotionally, and morally burned out by sex, alcohol, drugs, and feverish living. Her husband, John, seemingly the least damaged by time and pressures, hovers about her like a predatory bird. They have ostensibly come to the Talley farm not only for a friendly reunion, but also to buy the property and turn it into a “recording studio away from Nashville.”

Bracketing the revolutionary generation are two other important characters, Sally Friedman, the Talley’s sixty-seven-year-old aunt, and June’s daughter Shirley. Sally has returned to the farm in order to dispose of the ashes of her late husband before moving to a California retirement community. Shirley chafes at the dull Lebanon milieu, while constantly proclaiming her devotion to life, to art, to the future, to herself, and to everything other than the values and life-style of her mother.

Like Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, it is the intrusion of the “sophisticated city folk” into the rural environment that upsets the delicate balance that has previously prevailed. But, also like the Chekhov play, the corrupting influence is unobtrusive and ambiguous; it emerges slowly and does not so much challenge the other characters as it brings into focus their own latent weaknesses and inner crises. The Landis offer to Ken Talley promises a chance to get off the farm and evade, or at least put off, the personal tests that lie in front of him. To Shirley they offer some glamour and a possible escape. To both June and Ken they offer a return to the unfulfilled possibilities of their youth and, perhaps inadvertently, a chance to come to terms with the vital questions in that past that have remained, not only unanswered, but even unasked.

The one emotion that can sentimentalize, even destroy, a play like Fifth of July is self-pity, an easy emotion for a playwright to indulge in under the guise of “sensitivity” (as in much of O’Neill and Tennessee Williams). The characters in Fifth of July have none of it. Ken blames nobody, person or government, for his misfortune, and June has no sentimental apologies or recantations for her ex-radicalism. Even Gwen, a much less sympathetic figure, mutes her self-pity with self-deprecating wit and irony.

But if they have accepted the facts of their pasts, the Talleys do not yet know what to do with their futures. Ken has been offered a teaching job at Lebanon High School. He is, he admits, “terrified” at the prospect. Can he face the world—the young world, one that could not care less about Vietnam “heroes”—on crutches? A single visit to the school left him quaking. He also worries about his homosexuality, which is an obvious, although unemphasized, fact of his life. However, Ken knows that his expressed fears about community acceptance are only rationalizations; it is his own doubts about himself that he must overcome. Similarly, June must come to terms with her daughter’s illegitimacy if she is to break down the barriers between them, while Shirley must understand her mother’s actions in order to accept them; she must get over the notion that her birth was the result of a casual, promiscuous coupling.

John Landis unintentionally brings these questions to light. Loved by all, he has loved nobody. The disappointment Ken felt when John and Gwen went to Europe without him was the primary reason he ignored his antiwar convictions and let himself be drafted. In the climactic scene of Fifth of July, Ken learns that it was John, not Gwen, who betrayed him by leaving precipitously. John’s offer to buy the Talley farm at a ridiculously low price is only incidental to his real purpose—to get Shirley for a “visit” to Nashville. John almost confesses to being her father, but backs off from that responsibility in front of the girl. Seeing that, Shirley begins to look at June in a new light and accept some of the things she has said. At the crucial moment, Shirley rejects John and says she “will live in St. Louis with my mother.”

On that line John pushes himself by Ken, accidentally knocking him to the floor. That theatrical image crystallizes the play. John is the villain, but nobody really cares. He has survived the disillusionment of the 1960’s because he has never cared about anybody but himself, an attitude that has not altered with time. He loved and left both Ken and June because they could give him nothing; he literally pursued and captured Gwen because of her money, and he uses her weaknesses to keep her dependent while he manipulates her life to suit the corporate interests that want to keep her out of the way.

Ken, of course, is able to rise from the floor and face the tests he must. He has a responsibility to himself to do so and “responsibility” is one of the two key words in the play, the other being “survival.” Ken and June will survive because they accept responsibility for their own lives and because they can force themselves to make the best of them. Sally, who decides to reject California in favor of the Talley farm, has long shown herself to be a tough old bird. Shirley shows great promise, with a touch too much of adolescent romanticism, perhaps, but with much of her mother’s strength showing through. But Gwen will survive only as long as artificial worlds are created for her to live in, and John will survive the way all parasites do, only as long as his host animal does. In the end we rejoice with the characters who will survive and, unpleasant though they may be, lament those who will not. No other current American playwright creates characters as believable, provocative, and sympathetic as Lanford Wilson.

The underlying theme—that man must look into himself rather than to external things or causes or events for his own strength and direction—is hardly a new one, but Wilson gives it fresh verve and intensity in Fifth of July. The theme is most memorably summarized in the conclusion of a science fiction story which has been written by a young boy that Ken is tutoring. In the final moments of the play, Ken reads it to the audience:“. . . After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.”