SOURCE: Martine, James J. “Charlotte's Daughters: Changing Gender Roles and Family Structures in Lanford Wilson.” In Lanford Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, pp. 37-63. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.

[In the following essay, Martine investigates the evolving role of women in Wilson's plays.]

There is no inconsistency in the fact that serious and important writers can be placed in a literary tradition while the contribution of their artistic originality is applauded. It is possible to appreciate Lanford Wilson's literary affinity to Luigi Pirandello, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in matters of form; his relation thematically to William Faulkner and John Steinbeck as a confirmed humanist; an added indebtedness to Williams; and acknowledge concerns leading eventually back to Henrik Ibsen.

Audiences of several of Wilson's plays recognize, for example, the influence of the more celebrated playwrights in his use of the engaged narrator—some more engaged, or engaging, than others: Alan in Lemon Sky; Matt Friedman of Talley's Folly; and Timmy Talley in Talley & Son who is a synthesis of both the Stage Manager and Emily from Our Town (1938) which was on stage when Wilson was one year old. An examination of the autobiographical aspects of Lemon Sky, and perhaps other Wilson plays, must await another and different essay. The play's theatrical techniques, however, in which characters move down halls and into rooms yet at other times cut across the entire stage paying no heed to room “divisions” are reminiscent of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). If the temptation is to see in Wilson's engaged narrator a character like Alfieri in Miller's A View from the Bridge (1955), one is better advised, in an attempt to understand the perspective of Lemon Sky, to recall Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1945) in which the play is Tom Wingfield's memory or that Miller's approach in Death of a Salesman (1949) may be summed up in the play's draft title “The Inside of His Head.” Lemon Sky is such a memory play.

None of this is to suggest that Wilson's work is derivative. It is, for the most part, not. His relationship to other world-celebrated writers properly places him in a context of themes and techniques that have attracted other first-rate minds. In the end, perhaps, the bromide remains valid: an author does not choose his topics, they choose him. This may apply to Lanford Wilson, and all of us. Yet it is not comparisons here which are most interesting, but contrasts. As Wilson is of the great modern dramatic traditions, he is unique. If he has taken from the pool of themes and techniques, he has contributed to it in that his major work may be seen as a watershed in its engagement of the applicability of age-old questions of the heart and mind to provide a record of new challenges and changing roles, especially for modern women. It may be that, as reflected in Wilson's plays, people fundamentally have not changed much in their needs and aspirations, but their relationships and roles have changed. Since World War II, the ways we relate to one another in a family—and out—have changed, and the role of women especially has evolved precipitously.

Lemon Sky (1970) is one man's recollections of his search for a functioning traditional family. This play concerns an especially contemporary American family: a second wife; two “wards of the state” who are living with a family which takes their ＄60 per month; two young stepbrothers of Alan, an engaged narrator; and Douglas, a loathsome, repellent and repulsive father figure. Alan may conclude that “we're all of us selfish” (52), but none are quite so selfish as Douglas or Ronnie, his wife, who puts up with Douglas's philandering and wandering eye (and hands) because “I have two kids to think about” (57). Alan is not one of those kids. He is the son of Douglas but he is not Ronnie's son. Alan recalls having come to California in his need for a functioning family unit and discovering there really isn't one. His search for a father turns up a lecher. There's no further west to go, young man. America ends in California.

A brief examination of the purposes of the techniques used in the play may be informative. Characters cross boundary lines and they cross “times” as well. They can converse of the past as in the present. There is a double sense of time which suggests that Alan, the engaged narrator, does more than provide exposition, but that he has the entire play, like Willy Loman, inside his head. So Alan continually cries out for what once was and is gone. As he walks off at the play's final curtain, Alan cries out, “LIGHTS!,” yet everyone in the play follows after him “before Alan can escape them”; (68)—which are the play's final words. Thus the repetition of the lines which open the play in the play's concluding scene suggests the entire play is to be seen as having taken place in Alan's mind:

DOUGLAS.
Hugged me, by God. By God you can't—
PENNY.
Pleased to meet you, I've heard a lot about you.
DOUGLAS.
No matter what anybody anywhere says, you can't separate a kid from his father.

(68)

Moreover, it is Carol, the seventeen-year-old ward of the state living with Douglas's family, who continually reminds the audience that it is a play they are witnessing: “Nothing but big cars in this play” (37). After slinging a cigarette all the way off into the wings, Carol explodes: “I hope it burns down the theatre” (43). The “characters” all float in and out of the play. When they drift too far from the subject, one of the “actors” must call them back as when Penny, the other ward of the state, reminds them “Weren't we doing a play a while back?” (44) Carol again and again in Act Three insists that she is, she exists, only in the theatre, but she provides a history, a reality for herself beyond the theatre. Yet she always serves to remind the audience that this is a “story.” One must make out the theatrical function of all the asides to the audience. Because Alan and the play project forward in time, and within that play Carol can further violate an established sense of reality, the audience's interest is focused not upon what happens but why. Moreover, the asides blur the demarcation between illusion and reality throughout. These are, after all, actors playing actors in what is effectively a play within a play, and as they drop “roles” the audience is tempted to forget that they are in roles still. It further heightens the blurring of illusion and reality. Here technique serves theme perfectly in a play set in California about an American family, which is what Alan seeks and which is, finally, an illusion.

There are a number of curious aspects to Lemon Sky, not the least of which is the title. A great deal is made of color in the play in which “… as many scenes as possible are bathed in bright cloudless sunlight” (4). The stage directions insist “There is no green in set or costume … nothing green” (4). This suggests that the audience is to see no hope, no possibility of fruition or regeneration. Moreover, Carol comments that “the color green does not occur in California naturally” (43) which restates and amplifies the intention of the earlier stage directions. Alan addresses the audience directly about California and Californians: “They're insane—well, you've seen the movies they make out here, they have no idea at all what people are like—well, it's not their fault; they've got nothing to go on—they're working in the dark” (32-33). This is more than an enterprising playwright making sport of the dream factory in a play which is to have its first production in Buffalo, New York, for this image of darkness is pressed even further. While Act One ends with the family's smiles at riding out an earth tremor as though it were a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland, it is fire, “something that the Californians do fear” (58), that opens Act Three, a far more serious act. Alan's opening address to the audience at the beginning of this final act is drawn in red and black, the red of fire and the black of ashes. He describes the California landscape in terms reminiscent of a wasteland: “… ashes six inches deep” (58). Wilson's literary figure is not lost on his audience. There is little hope for any of the play's characters: Carol will become a violent “highway statistic” (59) and Alan, the controlling consciousness, will never be rid of his continual “incredible headache” because those he cries out for—“Where are they! Penny! Carol! Jerry! Jack!” (16)—are all gone, except as each member of the family is inside his head inextricably intertwined in his memory. Gone is the word which characterizes the most pervasive mood of the play.

For all of the somber colors and moods in the play, however, Wilson chooses Lemon Sky as his title. His stage directions are very explicit: the play's setting is “against a broad expanse of sky (which is never yellow)” (4). The lemon then is not to be taken as suggestive of light or brightness, nor even of the color yellow. Lemon is presented not as a color but in its suggestion of bitterness. Even in its slang connotation, a “lemon” is something or someone undesirable or inadequate, which is what Alan discovers in pursuing his horizons, the sky, in California, the land of sour fruit.

Lemon Sky celebrates an autobiographical reunion in San Diego with a father from whom he had been separated since his parents' divorce when Wilson was five years old; the recreation in art is a bitter memory, if not for Wilson, then certainly for Alan, his protagonist. The interaction of character, actor and audience striving for the illusion of life on the stage, a technique redolent of Pirandello, is perfectly appropriate for this bitter Lemon Sky which insists on its own existence as an illusion. Alan, the youthful American “hero” who has gone west in search of his American dream, has discovered that there is no further west to go. As Nathanael West had suggested in The Day of the Locust (1939), the American dream had ended. It is illusion. As Alan informs his audience in a direct address:

ALAN.
It's beautiful. It is. I always wanted a big old family like this, it's just great. And it's not going to last. …

(33)

The manner of the play is perfect for its matter. The play, insisting on itself as an illusion, presents the dream of “a big old family” as an illusion. Alan's need for a family and the fact that there really isn't one is demonstrated throughout. Alan's reiterated line “what am I supposed to do?” (67) articulates the dilemma for someone who wants a family, and a father, when there are none. The play's penultimate tableau is a sharp picture of the fragmented family:

Douglas and Alan are very far apart. Jack beside Alan, Douglas by Ronnie, Jerry alone outside. Penny and Carol together near their room.

(67)

An Act Three exchange between Alan and Douglas stresses Wilson's point that this family is not atypical but to be seen as symbolic of the average American family. Alan, nearly crying, accepts that this family is “quite normal” (60) and Douglas's “just ordinary” (60) is not self-delusion, but Wilson's commentary on the new character of the contemporary American family. Wilson's next major play will show the development of a new unit to replace the “big old family,” and that play will be far less bitter. It will, in fact, be delicious and will win the New York Critics Circle Award as the Best American Play of 1972-73.

The Hot l Baltimore (1973), quite unlike Lemon Sky, observes unity of time, place and action. In fact, here Wilson, while his stage directions call for “music popular during production”; (xiv), carefully structures his drama by using the techniques of opera. Wilson did, of course, provide the libretto to Lee Hoiby's music for an opera version of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke which opened at Lincoln Center in March of 1972. Hot l [The Hot l Baltimore] composed of duets and double duets, and the grand ensemble with Jamie stunned by the naked Suzy and everybody laughing which ends Act One is opera buffa and gives the curtain of the initial act the “upbeat”; and “positive”; conclusion which Wilson wants (xiv). He even describes his dramatis personae as baritone, tenor, mezzo and so forth. As Wilson likes to set some of his dramas on national holidays, Hot l's setting is a “recent Memorial Day”; (xiv). The world of the Hotel Baltimore is one in which “you got to be crazy even to do anything good” (122). It is a cynical, sardonic, down-at-the-heels, hard world, but “share” (128) and “sharing” (130) are the words which best sum up the theme of this play.

As in Lemon Sky, the principal concern is human, indeed familial, relationships. The engine of the play is called simply Girl, a call girl who at age nineteen has found reasons to reject the associations of a surname and uses different given names weekly: Billy Jean, Lilac Lavender, Martha (which may or may not be her real name). Bill Lewis, the night clerk, cares for Girl, but cannot communicate his feelings for her. A telephone “call” for this call girl precipitates a scene in which Bill and Girl punish each other: Girl says, “Would you stop being a daddy to me” (55). Ignoring Bill's responses, she then concludes:

One minute you're friendly and nice and the next minute you're … as bad as my own daddy. Worse. Because he at least didn't care what I did. He didn't even care if I was a hooker as long as I kept him in enough money to buy beer. That's why I left, only you're worse than he is.

(57-58)

Her daddy may not care; Bill, who is only thirty years old, does care but cannot express it; but if there is one thing Girl does and can do, it is care and express her care. In Girl's relationship with her “daddy” there is an odd similarity to the situation of Carol who is accused of being a whore by Douglas, the failed father in Lemon Sky. Carol is promiscuous if not a pro like Girl. April Green, the large and pragmatic prostitute of Hot l, like Carol in Lemon Sky, has a wry, satirical and earthy comic sense, only April is far funnier than Carol and a more interesting character. One of her bons mots deserves special attention. It is April who says, “If my clientele represents a cross-section of American manhood, the country's in trouble” (108). In point of fact, generally speaking, if Lanford Wilson's male characters represent a cross-section of American manhood, the country is in trouble. In his major plays, it is Wilson's women who are more effective both as characters and as functioning people. It seems no coincidence that Girl and April are the most thoroughly likable characters in this play. Douglas, in Lemon Sky, by contrast, is all libido, who, to cover his own guilt for fumbling Penny, accuses Penny's boyfriend Phil of being “queer” and damns his son Alan as a “homosexual” (Lemon Sky 64). Many of Wilson's most effective males are, in fact, homosexual: Alan; Ken and Jed in Fifth of July; Larry in Burn This among them. It is almost always Wilson's women who are the voice of hope and regeneration. It is the women of Hot l who take the leadership roles; they are the most active persons in the pursuit of establishing a purpose in life and a new, functioning family unit.

There are several examples of malfunctioning families in Hot l in addition to Girl and her tale of her father. In Act Two, the audience learns that Paul Granger III has come to the Hotel Baltimore searching for his grandfather who was rejected by his parents: “He wanted to come live with Mom and Dad, and they wrote him they didn't have room for him. They didn't want him” (94). Paul, who has never met his grandfather, now says, “I want him! I have room for him!” (95) Paul, like Alan in Lemon Sky, wants to restore what he can of his fragmented family. In Paul's case, it is his grandfather, but like Alan, it is all too late; it is, like Paul's grandfather, gone.

The character of Jackie, age 24, with her name written on the back of her denim jacket, despite the fact that “her manner, voice, and stance are those of a young stevedore” (xii), wants nothing so much as to proceed to twenty acres of land she has purchased (having heard about it on the radio) in Utah and establish a “family” life there with her nineteen-year-old browbeaten brother Jamie. Jackie wants to raise organic garlic on land that in truth won't grow cactus. Neither Paul nor Jackie will get what they desire.

It is Girl, who never wants to hurt anybody, who inadvertently kills Jackie's dream (102-03), and Act Two ends with Girl pursuing Jackie in an attempt to make up for the hurt in the destruction of the dream. Jackie knows “instinctively” that she has been foolish to purchase land she has not seen but only heard advertised on the radio. Her “dream” is a misinformed illusion which can come to no good end. Jackie abandons her brother Jamie, and Paul abandons his search for his grandfather. Paul just gives up the search; however, it is now important to Girl that Paul find his grandfather or at least continue the search for him. Girl says, “I like getting involved” (139) in the face of Bill's wisdom that “you can't help people who don't want it” (139). It is the male voice that is hard and pragmatic, non-involved and finally selfish. Audiences will hear this male voice again in John Landis of Fifth of July and the trio of Mr. Talley, Eldon and Harley Campbell in Talley & Son. It is the female voice that is hopeful, that insists on “getting involved.”

Many of the characters in Lemon Sky and The Hot l Baltimore are portrayed as having a need for a sense of family in an essentially rootless, shifting contemporary American society. When another prostitute who has been a denizen of the Hotel Baltimore, Suzy, moves out of the hotel to move in with one other girl and a black pimp, “Billy Goldhole,” she, “super-emotional,”; bursts back in and says, “We been like a family, haven't we? My family” (136).

Why doesn't the center hold? Why is everything being destroyed? Girl speaks Wilson's indictment: “That's why nothing gets done; why everything falls down. Nobody's got the conviction to act on their passions” (140). Girl does. One of her passions is trains, and she sends the “front office a telegram of congratulations—I honestly did” (124) when the Continental comes through on time. She likes things orderly and on time; moreover, she likes getting involved and she does in Paul's search for a grandfather, even when Paul, disillusioned, gives up and quits his search. Girl is no exceptional romantic. It is she who points out the reality of the condition of the Utah land to Jamie (120-21), not maliciously to disillusion him but to help him. As for Paul's abandoning his search and Jackie's abandonment of Jamie, Girl again seems to speak for Wilson: “I don't think it matters what someone believes in. I just think it's really chicken not to believe in anything!” (141)

She is more than the stereotypical whore with a heart of gold. She is the voice of hope (much like Steinbeck's Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath) who insists on being “involved.” Whether she is successful in her attempts does not matter. In the world portrayed by Lanford Wilson, the attempts themselves are important. Even if no one makes it (Suzy's “escape” from the Hot l Baltimore may be into exactly what April and Girl suggest, a situation even worse), it is the effort that is important, the attempt, the involvement. April, who knows that Bill “aches” for Girl but will not pursue her, drives home the point when she says to him: “Bill, baby, you know what your trouble is? … You've not got the conviction of your passions” (142).

This is the world of the Hotel Baltimore; it is contemporary society and “the bulldozers are barking at the door” (145). It seems all about to come tumbling down unless someone somewhere keeps the “conviction of passions.” Is it just the Hotel Baltimore? Is it just Baltimore? Trying to answer that would be like trying to ascertain the present location and identity of Twain's Hadleyburg. Notice the following exchange:

GIRL.
Baltimore used to be one of the most beautiful cities in America.
APRIL.
Every city in America used to be one of the most beautiful cities in America.

(129)

April's comic, and true, observation is more than an expression of contemporary cynicism. It is an indication that Wilson uses Baltimore and the Hot l Baltimore as a symbol for every city, every town. Perhaps too many people are too self-consumed and in too big a hurry. As Suzy says as she exits, “the whole fuckin' country is double parked” (134-35).

The final scene of the play suggests that from the ashes of the disintegration of old units of relationships a phoenix of a different sort arises. Bill, Millie, Girl and April now will adopt Jamie into their family unit—the larger unit of mankind. April expresses her concern for Jamie. Has he had anything to eat? Then, keeping her hope, she brings Jamie into the group by dancing with him: “Come on; you're so shy, if someone doesn't put a light under your tail, you're not going to have passions to need convictions for” (144). This is not sexual innuendo. When Jamie says that he doesn't know how to join in the dance, April insists, “Nobody knows how. What does it matter; the important thing is to move. Come on” (145). The dance is the dance of life. No one really knows how to do it; the important thing is to do it, live it. Why? Because “they're gonna tear up the dance floor in a minute; the bulldozers are barking at the door” (145). Hot l is, in some ways, a modern call to carpe diem.

Mr. Morse, the grandfather figure adopted much earlier in the play into the family of the Hot l Baltimore, has not, in the play's conclusion, touched the celebratory champagne Suzy has provided. He blurts out, “Paul Granger is an old fool! … He's an old fool” (143). Both Paul Grangers are fools—grandfather and grandson—the grandfather for making it difficult if not impossible for his grandson to find him, and the grandson for “giving up” the search for the father figure in his grandfather.

Morse, his wife long dead, settles into his new “family” which consists of Bill Lewis, Girl, April and Millie and is now a “grandfather” to Jamie who has been abandoned by his sister Jackie. If the old family unit malfunctions, a new unit is formed. Steinbeck expended an entire novel so that Ma Joad could learn that it used to be that the “fambly” was first. It “ain't” so now. It's anybody. This is called, in the cliché, the family of man. And like Steinbeck's characters, it is misnamed, for it is womankind who are the repository of hope, of endurance. Now, finally, in the last lines of The Hot l Baltimore, Mr. Morse “sips the drink and watches on”; (145), as April shows Jamie how to survive in the dance. Like the conclusion of The Grapes of Wrath, the important thing is not where they are going. “The important thing is to move” (145), to live, to believe in something, to keep the conviction to act on passions (140-41). Because people are like Suzy who needs love (133), they must, like Girl, get “involved” (139).

There are several points to note that make Hot l a far more hopeful, optimistic and comic experience than Lemon Sky. Wilson's bulldozers at the door bark on several levels. It is not just a philosophical expression encouraging people to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow they die but a reminder that American society is changing. The important thing is to move, not out and away, but into the dance. Wilson's voice here asks to keep belief and to stay involved. Moreover, one notes the detached, cynical and dysfunctioning men. The women can be aware, alert and cautiously caustic yet remain hopeful, hopefilled and potent. Wilson's men? If this “represents a cross section of American manhood, the country's in trouble” (108). Wilson, like Steinbeck before him, observes the formation of the new family unit in contemporary American society. It doesn't look like the Victorian family. Then again, Wilson is not describing Victorian times.

Why is it the “e” that is missing in the Hot l Baltimore? Of course, it suggests the sleazy quality of a neon sign with a non-functioning part outside a seedy flophouse—that used to be a grand place—with some sexually hot residents. Is there anything else in that missing “e?” Steinbeck makes a good deal in Grapes about the movement from “I” to “We.” Is this the “e” that Wilson suggests is missing in “every city in America?” As Lemon Sky is a curious, brooding and troubling play, The Hot l Baltimore is the positive and upbeat song of a confirmed humanist.

Wilson has been concerned with the dysfunctional family unit and the changing role of women in Lemon Sky and Hot l; these elements will provide the thematic mainsprings for the plays of the Talley cycle: 5th of July (1978; revised version, Fifth of July [1982]), Talley's Folly (1979) and Talley & Son (1985). All three plays are set on the Talley Place, a farm near Lebanon, Missouri. That they are set, wholly or in part, on Independence Day, in 1977 for the first play and in 1944 for the latter two, seems hardly a coincidence.

While the comic elements in Hot l are natural and organic, attempts at humor in Fifth of July seem strained and reached-for. Take for example this exchange involving June Talley, Sally Talley Friedman and Ken Talley:

JUNE.
I think that and Mahler are in a class by themselves.
SALLY.
He loved swimming naked.
KEN.
Mahler? Loved swimming naked?
SALLY.
Your Uncle Matt, darling.

(18)

Or consider this brief exchange between Jed, Ken's lover, and Aunt Sally:

JED.
And no botanist has ever known anything at all about gardening, or there wouldn't be mildew on the phlox.
SALLY.
Mildew on the phlox … What's the name of that novel?

(20)

Neither the herb nor the George Eliot joke are organic here.

Early in the first act the audience becomes aware that Fifth of July is something different from Lemon Sky or Hot l. In 1974, Wilson collaborated with Tennessee Williams on a television filmscript for The Migrants which was nominated for an Emmy. Actually, Williams gave Wilson a story outline in 1973 and the credits for the Playhouse 90 drama acknowledge a teleplay by Lanford Wilson, suggested by a story by Tennessee Williams. Fifth of July seems to be written under the sway of Williams's influence. The play is loaded with eccentric, down-home dramatis personae who are “characters” and the drama is laden with “curiosities”—an overly dramatic fourteen year old smoking cigarettes with a cigarette-holder who climbs trees to witness a cunnilingus-masturbation scene (21); an apparently eccentric widowed “Aunt Sally” who carries her husband's ashes with her for a year, uses them to dry roses (23) and occasionally stores the ashes in the refrigerator (27); and a crippled Vietnam veteran, Ken Talley, and his lover, Jed Jenkins. It all begins to look like Tennessee Williams—bad Williams. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but not when it is bad imitation and seems to lead a younger writer away from his own genius.

Fifth of July's Act One curtain, with Jed picking up his crippled lover Ken—who has lost both legs in the Vietnam War—and carrying him up to bed is supposed to be moving, but, curiously, it is not. This might have been a powerful curtain but it isn't. There is no felt life here; the characters remain curiosa, curiosities for whom the audience senses they are being manipulated to feel … yet don't. There are some interesting moments and some funny lines, but no play. Even as a let's-get-together-ten-years-after-Berkeley-and-the-1960's exercise, this is just adequate. The physical damage (Ken) and the disillusionment (Gwen and June) subsequent to Vietnam are present; this is, after all, the fifth of July, the time after the major national event, and Wilson has a fecund title.

Much of the play is mired in a slough of facetiae. Sexual variants abound: Ken and Jed now; John and Gwen now; Ken and Gwen and John and June then; even, as children, John and Ken and June (57); and Ken in love with John (then)—quite a sexual mélange. John Landis is the newly constituted capitalist who keeps his spacey, ding-dong wife Gwen away from the companies she owns so he can run things; she is not “blind” (73). She's “gotta have John” (73). He, after all, performs “cunnilingus all over her and his face was all over mucus” while he masturbates (21).

Well, all's well that ends well and in the play's final scene (68-75) everything rushes together satisfactorily: Ken does not sell the Talley place and property and he will prepare to face the high school students as a teacher in the fall; Gwen will get a genuine singing career despite John's manipulative efforts and we're told (not shown) “she's really good” (73); Shirley, “the last of the Talleys” (75), will remain with her mother despite the threats of John who is sure he is Shirley's father; Aunt Sally will not go to California but remain on the Talley place; she and Jed have finally scattered the ashes of Matt “all over the rose garden” (70) to help things grow. No longer are the ashes of Matt Friedman to be used to desiccate roses, but as fertile matter to help them grow. Yet, as in Lemon Sky and more especially Hot l, a new and peculiar “family” unit is restored: Ken and Jed, Aunt Sally and Shirley and June. They will all live apparently happily ever after. Or as Ilya, the character played by Melina Mercouri in Jules Dassin's film Pote Tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday), concludes after her viewing of Medea: they all went to the seashore.

The audience finally may be tempted to identify with Ken Talley in his reaction to the absurdity of the conversation about slugs: “Does anyone have something I could open a vein with?” (61) As the pieces of the Talley cycle fall into place, however, Aunt Sally and Matt Friedman, whose ashes will help things grow, will be of far more central importance than might appear here. For that, the audience will have to come forward one year in their time to 1979 and go back thirty-three years in Talley time from Fifth of July to the Fourth of July of 1944 on the Talley place for the events of both Talley's Folly and Talley & Son.

Set in an old boathouse called “Talley's Folly,” an excessively romantic structure, a “genuine Victorian folly. … Constructed of louvers and lattice and geegaws” (4), which was built in 1870 by “Uncle Whistler,” Everett Talley, Talley's Folly, this two-character drama played without intermission, opens with a monologue by the engaged narrator directed to the audience as in Lemon Sky. But this piece delivered by the same Matt Friedman whose ashes some thirty-three years later eventually decorate the roses in Jed's garden in Fifth of July is of greater uninterrupted length (3-6) than anything written for Alan in Lemon Sky. As Lanford Wilson is roundly praised by critics for his realistic and naturalistic dialogue (a good ear is an important appendage for a playwright), the small cost is that often in lengthy soliloquies the realistic lacks poetry. The advance here is that Wilson gives Matt Friedman language that is appropriate to his character yet is a full cut above the colloquial or prosaic. There is poetry here, and Matt is a more persuasive and charming interlocutor.

Again it is a musical figure which best serves to identify the play. As Lemon Sky is a fugue and Hot l is an opera buffa, this play is, as Matt insists several times, a waltz. Informed by more than the waltz or the level of diction, at once both realistic and poetic, Talley's Folly is a mature play with two real, likable characters. There is felt life, and the wit of Matt Friedman and the humor of the play are warm and human, not forced and stilted like much of Fifth of July.

The plot is simple, but America has a fresh Romeo and Juliet—a 42-year-old Jewish Romeo and a 31-year-old radical Midwestern Juliet from a Methodist family. Matt and Sally will live happily ever after for three decades. How they got that way makes a remarkable play. With only two characters, there is believable life here, two people an audience will like and care about. This is the stuff of which Pulitzer Prizes are made. Talley's Folly received its Pulitzer in 1980.

Matt is a wonderful storyteller; he tells tales to Sally to win her, and they are good stories. Even if they are tragic and may be true, they remain winning stories. In the play's lovely sotto voce ending, Matt has won his Sally Talley; they kiss and, finally, sit “perfectly relaxed” (60); then Matt says, “and so, all's well that ends … (Takes out his watch, shows time to SALLY, then to audience) … right on the button …” (60).

As Matt, whose wondrous abilities have won Sally, has promised the audience in the play's opening line, it has been “ninety-seven minutes here tonight—without intermission” (3). Matt has won Sally by telling her jokes and stories. At the same time … in the same time … he has presented a lovely, moving romantic waltz for the audience. And he has won them as well. At that same time, however, the ominous events of Talley & Son are occurring. It would be a mistake to underestimate a play because of its charm. Talley's Folly is, in the context of the Talley trilogy, about one woman's escape from an oppressive paternalistic family, and it comes exactly one hundred years after Nora slams the door on A Doll's House (1879). Sally will leave in Talley & Son. She will not slam the door, but she will leave. Since Sally is the only character to appear in all the Talley plays, the & Son in the title of the last drama in the cycle is powerfully ironic, and she is far more significant than has been heretofore acknowledged.

An early draft of Talley & Son, then called A Tale Told, was presented during the Circle Repertory Company's 1980-81 season. In both versions, once again as in Lemon Sky and Talley's Folly, Wilson's tale is told by a narrator. This time it is Timmy Talley, who has just been killed in World War II. Timmy, like Alan and Matt, addresses the audience and provides exposition and asides, yet unlike them he does not interact with the play's other characters except through an extraordinary human empathy with Sally but most especially with Aunt Charlotte Talley, called Lottie in the play, at the play's conclusion. Even then he seems to speak Lottie's mind and through Lottie's character.

In Talley & Son, Wilson adds another impressive theatrical weapon to his panoply of dramatic tools, this time a Rashomon effect which Alan Ayckbourn had used so brilliantly in The Norman Conquests (1973), three plays which represent the same characters, events and instant in time seen from different places in the house and garden. Ayckbourn's accomplishment is duplicated by Wilson if with less comic intent. Talley's Folly and Talley & Son are indigenous entities that are perfectly satisfying if seen separately. Yet since they occur at the same instant in time, taken together each sheds new lights on the other and creates a third, even richer, tapestry.

Aunt Charlotte, Lottie, is a fiercely independent person; she encourages Matt to continue his relationship with Sally who will be like her aunt in being not just liberal but radical. Lottie and Sally are the independent ones in the family in these plays set on the Fourth of July, and Talley's Folly is about, among other things, how Sally, who only appears briefly in Talley & Son, finally became “independent.” There are many references in Talley's Folly that make it clear that Aunt Charlotte is the one who encourages Matt's pursuit of Sally (see pp. 9, 31-32, 50-51, 52). Aunt Charlotte has become great friends with Matt, and when we eventually meet her in Talley & Son, Lottie smokes and curses at a time when “ladies” like Olive, Buddy's wife, think it inappropriate for men to smoke in the house or curse in the presence of women. Olive, in calling her father-in-law, Eldon, “Dad” and her mother-in-law, Netta, “Mom” and “Mother,” is trying to hold an old sort of family unit together. Olive is a throwback to Victorian times: annoyingly obsequious, in the way in the kitchen but in the kitchen nonetheless, and a desirous, if not desired, bed partner. Olive almost always exits to the kitchen or up to the bedroom. She acts the traditional female roles—in the kitchen, concerned with feeding “you men” (83)—and she talks in accepted stereotypical “female” fashion: she says to Lottie, “you're going to go straight to H-E-double-toothpicks” (84). Lottie, shackled by no such delicacy required in a lady's avoidance of the vulgar, responds as a male might: “Oh, kiss my ass” (84). Olive, who will make a concession to progress in Leclede County by wearing slacks (33), would never think of wearing them when her husband Buddy comes home. Women do not wear the pants in this family—at least not Olive's conception of the family.

The patriarch, Calvin Stuart Talley, whose circumstances and actions may remind some of Big Daddy in Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), is dying, and a way of life will die with him. This good Methodist family will not allow inappropriate behavior for a woman—no smoking, drinking or cursing. Sally must surreptitiously go down to the boathouse as she does in Talley's Folly to sneak her cigarette and nip of gin. And none of the men would think of allowing a Jew to court a Talley family member. The anti-Semitism of the men (Eldon, Buddy and Harley Campbell) is blatant. It is the independence day for two women, Aunt Charlotte and Sally, that will allow for Sally's growth to happiness in marrying Matt Friedman. Sally (who is, recall, Aunt Sally in Fifth of July) is Aunt Charlotte's spiritual offspring—the independent, radical woman who escapes the decaying order of the Talley decline.

Charlotte never marries, but her spiritual child is Sally. Sally can never have children and Matt doesn't want them, but in Fifth of July, it is Shirley who says that not John and June, but Matt and “Aunt Sally” are the only real parents she has ever had. Sally has raised Shirley, and she will go on to be a great artist (or scientist, or whatever). In many of Wilson's major plays we see the disintegration of a dysfunctional family unit tied by blood, to be replaced by a new sort of family unit, one formed by selection, election and a shade of chance. Only in the declaration of independence from some kinds of blood ties could women be prepared to be the center of the new “family” unit. It may be why the audience of Wilson's plays has a slim sense of Steinbeck's Ma Joad (Grapes) as a new “fambly” structure develops. Wilson's men die or are wounded, and the women remain memorable. The men are the narrators, Alan, Matt and Timmy, but the strong characters are the women, like April and Girl in Hot l or Lottie and Sally in Talley's Folly and Talley & Son.

Some critics see the power of Talley & Son in the relationship of fathers and sons and that may in part be so, but it overlooks too much, especially the role of Wilson's women. Both Sally and Lottie are college-educated, independent women, and Sally, Lottie and Shirley have more in common than the fact that all three smoke cigarettes. The Talley cycle is about many things, and the individual plays are of varying merit, but the one consistent factor is Sally Talley Friedman who alone appears in all three plays. Lottie is an independent, college-educated woman who never marries, a life-long spinster. Her spiritual progeny is Sally, the radical, college-educated woman of the next generation of Talley women who has no natural children but raises Shirley of Fifth of July who believes, at age fourteen, that she can and will have it all. Both Sally and Lottie make it clear that they would not have returned to their individual father's home—Sally to Eldon Talley's—“I'm as eager to leave as they are eager to get rid of me” (Talley's Folly 26)—or Lottie to Calvin Stuart Talley's—“if there'd been another place to go” (Talley & Son 39).

It is in a consideration of all three women of the Talley cycle that we see two major themes come together: the changing nature of the American family and the evolution of the role of women and its part in that change. If the movement from Charlotte, the spiritual mother, through Sally to Shirley seems an incomplete matter, that may be because America has not yet written a conclusion to the evolving role of its women. One thing is certain, however. The culture will be quite different. Sally is committed to making the world a better place, and Lottie's concern is with the welfare of her fellow human beings (Talley & Son 39, 46). She has little concern with material “things” or with the male pursuits of wealth and power. Eldon Talley would leave everything to the sons Buddy and Timmy, who, as the audience knows, has already been killed, and nothing to his daughter Sally (49); Buddy, Sally's brother, agrees. Wilson's women are excluded from male obsessions.

The only thing a woman is good for according to the men in the Talley family is to have children, and because tuberculosis has descended to Sally's fallopian tubes she can have no children; that is what broke up the engagement between Sally and Harley Campbell (Talley's Folly 58). A woman who cannot bear children would be no good in a match between two rich and powerful patriarchal families. It is the modern man, Matt Friedman, who loves the woman because she is like him. She's a worthy mate. The woman's child-bearing is unimportant. She is his equal. It's a match. In these plays set on Independence Day, it is only certain women who are independent. The Talleys have, as Eldon says, “got to have one in every generation” (Talley & Son 49), and Lottie has influenced “that girl [Sally] since the day she was born” (Talley & Son 49), as Sally, in her turn, will be the major influence in raising Shirley.

The women are far more admirable human beings than the men portrayed here. Harley Campbell, for example, has little humanity or social concern, especially for women, in sharp contrast with Lottie and Sally. Harley would sell the firm of Talley & Son, in which he is a business partner, to the Delaware conglomerate. He has no concern for the workers or what would happen if Talley & Son were to close: “Divorced women, unmarried mothers. The town would be better off without them” (55). Calvin Stuart “Granddaddy” Talley agrees about the women who work in the mill: “Moral corruption. Never trusted those women. Broken homes and moral weakness” (55). Moral corruption? Moral weakness? At the curtain of Act One, Avalaine Platt arrives, claiming to be Eldon Talley's illegitimate daughter; almost at the same moment the news arrives of Timmy's death. It is the arrival of an unwanted daughter and the death of a son for whom all the dreams were held which concludes Act One. Buddy Talley apparently has several times tried to seduce Avalaine who is the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter of his father Eldon, who brusquely dismisses Avalaine as he had dismissed her mother Viola earlier in the play. Buddy, who throughout Act One has avoided sex with his wife Olive, is moved to go upstairs with her only by the thought of begetting a son.

Women are clearly second-class citizens and good only to provide sons—in a play about Talley and son. It is grandsons who “mean more to” Granddaddy Talley “than almost anything” (70). Sally, who is at this moment down in the boathouse (Talley's Folly) with Matt, has been forgotten by everyone. Timmy is, after all, Sally's brother, and she is the grandchild of Talley, whose concern is with grandsons. Just Lottie and Netta even think of her, and Netta does because Sally is “so strong” (72). Netta's concern for Eldon at the loss of his son is because “he's not resilient like we are” (71). Since she speaks this line to her daughter-in-law Olive, someone she does not especially like, the “we” must mean women. Lanford Wilson's women—like Steinbeck's women—are, in fact, more resilient than Lanford Wilson's men. Moreover, Lottie, like April in Hot l, has vision and wit in addition to her concern for the well-being of her fellow humans. It is noteworthy that Carol in Lemon Sky, April in Hot l and Lottie have the readiest wit in each play. Among the men, only Ken, a legless homosexual in Fifth of July, has the same combination of vision, intelligence, sardonic wit and concern for his fellow man that the women do.

The exchange between Talley, a war-profiteer, and his daughter Lottie (Talley & Son 79-81) establishes firmly that with her education, assertiveness and independence of mind, she is perceived by her father as having acted in ways generally reserved for males. It is further evident that men like Talley, Eldon and Harley prefer their women “frail and beautiful” (80). Lottie's bitter revolt concludes with the response which suggests that the lack of choice relative to contraception killed her mother: “Well, Momma, bless her, didn't live that long. Doctors told him she wasn't strong enough; it's not like we're Catholic. Didn't they have rubbers back at the turn of the century?” (Talley & Son 80) Even minor characters reflect changes in gender behavior: Viola Platt is disposed to acquiesce, to be submissive while her daughter Avalaine, though nasty and eventually succumbing to the power, ruthlessness and superior negotiating skills of Talley, is more than assertive—she is aggressive in her attempt to stand up to the Talleys.

Sally finally exits from the action of Talley's Folly, enters directly back into Talley & Son, and Lottie's identification with Sally is complete and total. Sally makes peace with her father and makes her escape to fulfill Lottie's thwarted hopes and dreams. Lottie conspires with her, lies to protect her and insists upon her escape which is the fulfillment of prohibited ambitions.

In the penultimate lines of Talley & Son, Timmy says that returning servicemen will find “the country's changed so much I don't imagine they'll recognize it” (115). The play's final line, Lottie's “I know” (115), seals the theme of the country's changes, in the role of women, in the nature of the family unit and the implications both will have for the country itself. The custodianship of the Talley garden which has become “pretty bad” (114), nourished by the ashes of the liberal and liberated man Matt, will fall to Jed in Fifth of July. “Women's work” will no longer be work for women, and behavior once reserved for men will no longer be the exclusive domain of the male.

What has Wilson captured in his play cycle? He has caught in mid-flight and permanently fixed very real and significant accommodations and adjustments in social continuity. What had wrought the changes in the family and the role of women? An answer is found in two allied forces—independent, liberated women who are educated and the immutable fact of World War II. That is the importance of 1944 and the background of the war to the plays. Is there other evidence of the changes and their impact? There is, perhaps, one massive symbol: in Talley & Son, the one thing that will tempt Buddy to bed with his very interested wife Olive is the thought of fathering a son. That son turns out to be Ken, who thirty-three years later will be the veteran who has lost both legs in another war, this time Vietnam. Ken, a homosexual, will father no son since he is, if we are to trust Wilson's genealogy provided in Talley & Son, married to his lover Jed. With Timmy Talley, the hope for effective male progeny, at least as recognizable to the Talleys, has died on Guam. In stark contrast to this pre-war insistence on fathering a male heir is the sex act described in Fifth of July. John Landis performs cunnilingus on his wife Gwen as he masturbates himself. What changes had World War II, the 1960's and Vietnam brought? They are depicted in the comparison of the sexual relations between John Landis and his wife Gwen, who has been liberated by Berkeley and the 1960's, and Buddy and Olive Talley. The contrast of these two sex acts is significant. They are a potent set of decades, those thirty years. Men had changed, women had changed perhaps even more, the family structure even more than that, and gender expectations had changed to an even greater degree. The end result to date of this evolution is Anna, whose last name appropriately is Mann, the central protagonist of Burn This (1987). Anna is the figure of modern, educated, liberated, talented, urban woman—the achieved person.

Burn This is a slick piece of New York (or Los Angeles, where it premiered) dramaturgy. It is sure-fire, fast, funny and hip. Like most Wilson drama, it plays well. By 1987, this man who knows theatre in its many aspects well enough to write excellent drama, knows the commercial theatre well enough to write a Broadway hit. It would be a mistake, however, to sell Burn This short merely because it has all the schtick to generate a decently long run on Broadway. Burn This is less experimental—no crossing boundary lines; no blending times, no narrator, engaged or otherwise; just straightforward theatre that the matinee lady can cope with. The traces of Pirandello, Wilder and Miller are gone, only a touch of Williams remains, and a fair dollop of Neil Simon has been added; but Ibsen's Nora is still looking for a comfortable new residence where the price is not too high.

At the play's opening, Anna is “huddled on a sofa, smoking. … She is thirty-two, very beautiful, tall and strong. A dancer”; (5). She is recovering from the loss of one of her gay roommates, Robbie, who has been killed along with his lover Dom in a boating accident. Wilson's audience may have been transported to a huge loft in lower Manhattan, but they are on familiar ground. Alan, who in Lemon Sky is in the process of discovering his sexual identity, has grown through Ken and Jed in Fifth of July, who are in some ways a fairly conventional married couple except for the fact that they're both male, to the character of Larry, Anna's remaining roommate. Larry is a gay who is quite comfortable and happy with who he is; he is very witty, funny and a winning character. Although he concedes what he calls his “protective sense of humor” (56), that just means he is human.

Early in the play, Anna describes her relationship with her mother—“all she wants is grandchildren” (11)—but Anna's expressions of self-doubt seem gratuitous, and like Larry's, are just indications of her humanity. She is, in truth, able and quite confident. She has quit dancing and is attempting to establish a reputation in choreography. Half seriously she tells her well-to-do suitor Burton that perhaps it is time for them to move to Martha's Vineyard “permanently” (19), which Burton would love. Yet Anna recalls that she did not fit in “with the women” at Robbie's funeral where she had been expected to join with his mother in “some little back bedroom, with all the aunts and cousins, with the women, right?” (20) in mourning. Anna, a contemporary woman, just does not fit in with yesterday's fashion for women. In addition, it is clear that Anna is beyond and above “prevailing opinions” (31). This educated and intelligent woman has no time for social mores or conformity to expectations relative to gender.

Robbie's brother, known as Pale, enters, and the major dramatic complication has been struck. Anna is, to use an appropriate colloquialism, a very “together” person—confident, strong and sensitive, perhaps too sensitive. At the beginning of the relationship, she does indulge Pale too much in what seems to her to be his grief. The audience suspects that he is high and on the make. After their initial one-night tryst, she is super-cool, unemotional and calm as Pale's possessions reveal a photo of his wife and children. She is unaffected by the knowledge that Pale carries a gun. She tells Larry that she went to bed with Pale after knowing him not even an hour because of the “bird-with-the-broken-wing syndrome” (47). Act One ends after Pale has left without so much as a “have a nice day” (47), and the audience is unsure which bird really had the broken wing. It is not Pale. It is certain, however, that this is a funny play and that its hero, Anna, is an exceptional woman.

Act Two reassures the audience. In the fight scene between Pale and Burton, Anna is the one who commands the situation. It is she who is most in control. She may say that Pale is “dangerous” (82) and that she's “frightened” (86) of him, but she is not intimidated by him. Anna says she's never had a personal life. There was no place for it. It wasn't important. All that is different now and she is “very vulnerable” (86), but she firmly indicates that she is not going to be prey to something she does not want. She is still in command of herself, and of the situation. Pale is impressed:

PALE:
You're a real different person in the sack than you are standin' up.
ANNA:
I know.

(82)

She is a passionate, vibrant woman, but she is more than a horizontal being; there is also an upright, rational being to Anna. She continues:

ANNA:
I'm sick of the age I'm living in. I don't like feeling ripped off and scared. … I'm being pillaged and I'm being raped. And I don't like it. … If I can't have a life at least I can work.

(87-88)

In fact, she wants it all—work and a life too. Earlier in the play, Anna delivers a speech on “mother love” (54). It has been proposed that she choreograph a piece the overall theme of which is to be mother love. Burton proposes that they should “have kids or something” (54). Anna hears “the sound of the biological clock or something” (55). Note the vague “or something” used twice. This is more than two people feeling tentative about entering a serious commitment. Parenthood and a child are part of what is wanted; they are not all that people are about. That would no more be enough to satisfy Anna than it would Burton. Her art is important, and it will take a different shape.

As this discussion is taking place, at 2 A.M. on New Year's Eve, Anna is preparing to go to bed with Burton in what is a quite conventionally romantic scene. The audience may be secretly cheering for Anna and the near-perfect, very rich, unmarried Burton. Yet she will choose Pale. Why? It is not merely animal magnetism. That is apparent in this scene with Burton, and to suggest her choice is based on only sexual attraction to Pale would be to cheapen the play to a cliché.

The opening dialogue in Act Two between Anna and Burton about the first few pages of a new script he has written is revealing, first of all, as a sly commentary on the previous act of Wilson's, not Burton's, drama:

ANNA:
Oh, I like it. It's so sad. God.
BURTON:
Sad? I thought they were having fun.
ANNA:
Oh no, sure. But underneath all that, God, they're so lonely.

(51)

Late in the play, however, when Larry discovers that he and the others have been used as prototypes for characters in Burton's now completed script, he is pleased but surprised. Burton responds:

BURTON:
Nobody's safe around a writer. I thought you knew that.

(90)

Burton no longer has written commercial science fiction but has taken real life and turned it into art as Anna turns her relationship with Pale into art in the dance she eventually choreographs. Earlier in the play, Anna has been reflecting upon a dance she is creating, and she says she thinks it is all getting a little too personal. Burton's response is crucial:

BURTON:
Good, it's supposed to be—make it as personal as you can. Believe me, you can't imagine a feeling everyone hasn't had. Make it personal, tell the truth, and then write “Burn this” on it.

(60)

Lanford Wilson has, of course, so marked his play. He presents Anna as the achieved woman, all that Charlotte and Sally might have wished. What is the truth, then, upon which Wilson will write Burn This? It may be that having what Anna has leaves her wanting more. As Pale does, she wants something more than polite, civilized life “… like the ocean. That hurricane … those gigantic, citywide fires—Somethin' that can—like—amaze you” (38).

Something that can amaze you. Part of the irony is that this is why the audience in some measure has come to the theatre. As well, when the achieved person does achieve it all, he or she wants even more. When one gets what life has to offer, there is the need for something larger than life. Life does not have to be life-size. Something to amaze you: there is no other way to explain why Anna, beautiful, intelligent, mature, witty, educated, talented, strong and tall, will enter into a relationship with a vulgarian like Pale. That it is not merely animal attraction is made clear. What moves Anna is to reach for that which is beyond the pale. (Pale's name, after all, is really a mundane “Jimmy.”)

Burton too wants “something larger than life” (51) and advises Anna to “Reach! Reach for something! God! Reach for the sun! Go for it!” (52) Burton's own desires and his hopes for Anna connect Anna's aspirations to all persons, people, humans. For a woman to be accepted as a person is not the end of the journey; this acceptance, by society, and by the woman herself, is merely the beginning. Anna Mann is an achieved person who will reach for something, something larger than life yet something personal, something “amazing.” She is not a symbol for contemporary women. She is every man, … every person. The choreographed piece she achieves finally is “phenomenal. It's great” (91), according to Larry. “The dance she's done is Pale and Anna” (92). Even Pale thinks the dance is “real good” (96).

Larry leaves a note which is read in the play's conclusion that itself concludes: “This isn't opera, this is life, why should love always be tragic? Burn this” (98). Thus the audience is reminded of Burton's earlier line and recognizes that Anna has “made it personal” and has told the truth. She has turned her relationship with Pale into art, into the dance she has choreographed.

In personal terms, as critics have said of the unlikely romantic couple at the play's conclusion, it would be injudicious to see the ending as happy. It is not. This is not merely a love story. Whether Pale and Anna could possibly live happily ever after for longer than the six days that Pale's own marriage “was good” (80) is unlikely, and perhaps unimportant. What matters, what is beyond life, greater than life, better than life-size, that thing which people seek that is personal and “amazing,” is the art, the creation of Anna in the dance, the creation of Lanford Wilson in the play.

The last of Lottie's daughters is Anna Mann. In an evolutionary line from Charlotte through Sally and Shirley, it is Anna who is the achieved person. She is the dancer. That dance which April in Hot l has said nobody knows how to do, Anna has mastered. She can more than dance it, she can choreograph it, control it, shape it, mold it. At once concerned and committed, she strikes an almost perfect human balance between selfishness and selflessness. She wants it all. She has it all. Still, there is the curious irresolution of Burn This's conclusion. Anna is the achieved person indeed. Yet there is always that something beyond—beyond the pale. This is part of the artist's condition as it is part of the human situation. No artist ever writes that one true sentence. All art is a sacrifice made upon the altar of intention. No one ever gets it all. So Anna Mann is the complete person, strangely incomplete, exactly the appropriate figure for the achieved person—male or female. Everyman, this time, is a woman.