SOURCE: Schlatter, James F. “Some Kind of a Future: The War for Inheritance in the Work of Three American Playwrights of the 1970s.” South Central Review 7, no. 1 (spring 1990): 59-75.

[In the following essay, Schlatter compares Fifth of July, Preston Jones's The Oldest Living Graduate, and Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child with respect to the cultural implications of the 1970s family presented by the plays.]

George McGovern built his dreams for the presidency on the passionate exhortation to “come home, America!” His decisive defeat offers strong evidence that in 1972 America was not ready to do so. She would come home anyway three years later, following the fall of Saigon, but she would arrive on crutches, in wheelchairs, and in stainless steel boxes draped with American flags. And if this “homecoming” witnessed the return of young men and women from a senselessly prolonged odyssey marked by blood and death, it also saw the return of others from a spiritual and political emigration, a mass movement of youth either toward an imminent Aquarian Apocalypse or in flight from a ruthless system of conscription. Casualties were suffered on both sides: by those who fought the war and by those who fought against it. But the deepest wounds were self-inflicted, received on our collective conscience as a nation.

America came home to herself in the 1970s, and, given the waste of lives and rage, one might have anticipated an awful moral reckoning or at least a grim settling of scores. But the seventies still seem to lack dramatic definition, especially following as they did the high theatre of the sixties. Perhaps because the wounds of conscience struck so deep and festered so long, the seventies seemed to undergo a period of emotional dormancy and moral hibernation. The sixties succeeded in unleashing not only the forces of eros but of thanatos as well. The decade ended almost schizophrenically, with the feast of love and peace at Woodstock in August 1969 followed four months later by a brutal murder during the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway in California. A young man was stabbed to death by a Hell's Angels biker while Mick Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil.” The sixties came to a close with the country physically and spiritually shell-shocked.

A number of important American playwrights “came home” as well in the 1970s, and some of them did begin to examine the critical state of American culture at a time of pervasive uncertainty and devastating moral shock. And this examination demanded a return to what has been for generations of our playwrights their deep source of inspiration, rage, and heartbreaking memory: the American family. As Tom Scanlan thoroughly documents in his book, Family, Drama, and American Dreams,¹ American drama is family drama, and his investigation of the work of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Lorraine Hansberry, and other writers locates the family at the very center of our drama and of our culture. The family, Scanlan argues, is more than a repository of national values and cherished traditions; it stands as our most representative institution. In America the family is a miniature society, and the culture at large registers and absorbs into itself the deep emotional tremors and moral tensions of the home. As Arthur Miller remarked in an interview in 1976, “The family is still the central matrix of the entire civilization.”² America contemplates itself in the image of the family, and its dark secrets and private sufferings are projected onto and played out by the nation.

I believe that a careful reading of the family plays of three representative playwrights of the 1970s—Lanford Wilson, Preston Jones, and Sam Shepard—can help to clarify the confused image America had of itself during a decade of diminished national spirit and deteriorating moral certainty. Understandably, these family plays reveal an urgency to “come home” to America to confront, and probably to exercise, the bankrupt dreams of national pride and invincibility that had been mortgaged with the lives of her children. But remarkably, plays such as Wilson's Fifth of July, Jones's The Oldest Living Graduate, and Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child are not constructed as bitter confrontations or moral inquests but as solemn meditations on the wasted life of American culture and on the prospect of its imminent death or possible survival.

Traditionally, American drama has struck deep into the heart of the family, exposing its raw hurt, unfathomable cruelty, and unredeemable guilt. But these family plays of the seventies stand back from this emotional and moral warfare to gain a wider perspective, or at least a temporary respite, to contemplate the long-term devastation. The country, like the family, has been exhausted by warfare, and a kind of spiritual exhaustion permeates these plays. They are strewn with images of barrenness, sterility, paralysis, and the afflictions of age. There are no theatrics of moral triumph in this vision of America's spent power, and no final judgment.

While acknowledging how foolishly the country has depleted its vital resources as a culture, these writers are equally moved to discover some means to preserve those resources. By distancing themselves emotionally and theatrically from the family, Wilson, Jones, and Shepard attempt to place it against a much wider horizon of history and enlarge its intimate structure to fill its capacity as the American myth. These writers are no longer writing from inside the eye of the family storm, as did O'Neill in Long Day's Journey into Night, Williams in The Glass Menagerie, and Miller in Death of a Salesman. They stand back and strive to compose an accurate portrait of America at a moment of historical transition. It is a starkly contemporary portrait, but one that offers both a vista of the distant past and a glimpse, however hazy, of “some kind of a future” for America.³

In order to estimate the significance of this shift in the perspective of American playwrights toward the family in the seventies, it will be necessary to return briefly to Scanlan's analysis of the American family as it has been portrayed by generations of playwrights. Scanlan sees our drama less as a family portrait than as a Freudian primal scene, endlessly reenacted by the playwright both as a dark, Oedipal wish and as a self-inflicted prohibition and punishment. Scanlan uncovers an excruciating ambivalence driving the imagination of our playwrights, who remain eternally caught in a trap of contradictory and unresolvable impulses. He locates this ambivalence in a protracted historical crisis within the family structure itself that extends through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In its difficult transition from an agrarian to an urban, capitalist society, American evolved two ideals of family life which grew out of the urgent need to hold the family together during this long, historical assault on its integrity. Scanlan identifies these two historically determined ideals as “the family of security” and “the family of freedom.”⁴ Ideally, the family of freedom would gradually take the place of the family of security as it became increasingly buffeted by the external pressures of modern life—constant mobility, a chronic sense of isolation, and the loss of a connection to the past. But these two ideals have remained incompatible and, in fact, mutually antagonistic. The real family remains caught, historically and emotionally, between the two.

Briefly, the ideal of the family of security is embodied in the farm, where all family members rely on the bounty and protection of the land to achieve a sense of connection and shared identity. In this ideal, growing out of nineteenth-century agrarian society, the terms family and farm become virtually interchangeable. The farm incorporated the family in a kind of gentle, secure patriarchy. But under the pressure of our rapidly expanding urban economy, the ideal family began to be envisioned, not as a tiny kingdom but as a miniature democracy in which each family member would be treated as an equal partner in love and respect. The family was to be an enlightened community where the emotional environment would be “natural, spontaneous, and humane.”⁵ Emotional health and psychological stability would now depend on internal autonomy and on a sense of personal freedom and security, instead of on external security and protection. A sturdy democracy would replace the gentle patriarchy.

A number of other prominent critics of modern American drama, including John H. Raleigh, Robert Brustein, and Thomas E. Porter, also see the eternal conflict within the dramatic imagination of writers such as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller to be their chronic failure to mediate between these two ideals. The antagonistic imperatives of security and freedom inhibit each other to such a degree that they paralyze the heart of young protagonists such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey, and Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. These sensitive, lost anti-heroes remain torn between a desperate longing for the strong embrace and protection of the family and an equally desperate need to escape its suffocating emotional and moral tyranny. Critics such as Raleigh, Brustein, and Porter see the anti-hero almost as an American archetype of lost innocence, loneliness, and desperate dreaming.

The response to these contradictory demands for security and freedom is most often flight, or more accurately, wandering. But despite its romantic allure, flight only recapitulates and further aggravates the emotional confusion and ambivalence. Although one can never go home again, the tender and painful memory of lost innocence and security is always close. Tom Wingfield leaves home to join the Merchant Marines, but The Glass Menagerie is a “memory play” that tenderly evokes Tom's recollections of his crippled sister, Laura. Sickly Edmund Tyrone dreams of the romance of the high seas, even as he is smothered by Mary's oppressive mother-love. And Biff Loman yearns to return to the open range after the urban congestion of Brooklyn has choked the life and spirit out of his family.

Through such adolescent dreams our playwrights participate in the much larger tradition of American literature that celebrates the romance of youth revolt and spiritual vagrancy. In Huck Finn, Thomas Wolfe's George Webber, Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, we have come to idealize the run-away, a defiant and delinquent youth whose prodigal wandering is also a spiritual quest to recover that lost sense of “belongin'.” Indeed, American drama has produced its own sub-genre centered on the life of what might be called “artificial families,” transient communities that are created momentarily, and often accidentally, on shipboard, or in barrooms, cafes, and bus stops. There, every lonely stranger is welcomed and has dignity restored, if only for a brief time, in a communal embrace of souls.

Scanlan's final assessment of the American playwright is that he has failed to find any means to escape from this self-perpetuating myth of the romantic run-away. In fact, there is no escape. The emotional truant can neither grow up and bravely enter the world, nor return to the bliss of childhood innocence and security: “American drama replays its dilemmas again and again. … It is a history caught in the logic of its own material.”⁶ Raleigh, Brustein, and Porter reach very much the same conclusion as does Scanlan, that the central conflict of much of our drama is really a private war, a war fought out eternally in the arena of the human heart.

These critics examine the same excruciating ambivalence that drives writers such as O'Neill and Williams, who celebrate loneliness and wandering in their plays (and in their lives), to construct romantic tales of exhausted spiritual searching. Raleigh, in his comprehensive study, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, terms this internal struggle the “systole-diastole” impulse of the American imagination which swings wildly between the desire for revolt and the longing for reconciliation, between a fiercely guarded independence and a yearning to recover that mystical sense of existing, as Raleigh says, “at the center of the All.”⁸ Brustein draws much the same conclusion about O'Neill in his study of modern drama, The Theatre of Revolt. Like Raleigh, he, too, sees an unresolved ambivalence, even an emotional schizophrenia, fueling O'Neill's romantic quest to find his place in an alien and mysterious universe: “What O'Neill seems to get all mixed up is the fierce, amoral toughness of the pagan tradition and the moralism and compassion of Christianity: rapturous amoral cries alternate with pleas for universal brotherhood.”⁹ The preeminent representative of this emotionally self-divided character appears in O'Neill's The Great God Brown, which uses the expressionistic device of masks to project states of being. The central character, Dion Anthony, must wear the mask of Dionysus to protect his delicate spiritual, or “St. Anthony,” self.

In Myth and Modern American Drama, Porter sees this same internal war being waged, not only in Tennessee Williams's dramas but in the whole Southern Gothic tradition which has been slowly decomposing throughout the twentieth century. Porter describes the southern character as a volatile mixture of aristocratic gentility and sadistic cruelty, Puritanism and hedonism, macho individualism and the submission to feudal codes of honor. Porter offers Gone with the Wind as the epitome of the tradition of the Southern romance that creates high drama out of this chronic dualism: “The dynamism of a Rhett Butler is counterpoised by a neurasthenic Ashley Wilkes who typifies a long tradition of nervous, sensitive gentlemen.”¹⁰ One can get some sense of how far this internal war has ravaged some southern writers in the twentieth century by looking at the characters of Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois in Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

But whatever romantic yarn the writer spins to hold himself and his world together, or whatever strategy he uses to achieve a temporary truce with the warring factions in his own heart, the story which is finally being told, the core myth to which he must return again and again to replenish his imagination, is the family. The family remains for many American playwrights an unfinished and unresolvable psycho-drama, and the “homecoming,” whether of the prodigal son or the decorated war hero, opens all the old wounds. The myth of the family, whatever historical or social shape it is given by the playwright, ultimately conjures up our darkest fears and anxieties about ourselves, as well as our most heartbreaking memories and deepest longings. By coming home the playwright must return not only to the family, he must return to, and face, himself.

I believe that it is the singular achievement of Lanford Wilson, Preston Jones, and Sam Shepard that they attempt in their family plays of the mid and late seventies to explore, however tentatively, possible avenues of escape from this vicious circle of wandering and return depicted by so many of our playwrights. To come to terms with the past these writers take up difficult and emotionally hazardous material in an attempt to heal those old family wounds. Wilson, Jones, and Shepard have each “come home” in a very real way to America, but they have not come to seek absolution or make final judgments. They are striving in their family plays of the 1970s to reconnect themselves, through the strength of simple images and natural rhythms of native speech, to the life of authentic American types set against the horizon of history and national myth.

It must be acknowledged that all of the plays being discussed here, as well as most of the plays discussed by Scanlan in Family, Drama, and American Dreams, have been written by men. And to a very large extent this deep-seated ambivalence about home and family, which embody both patriarchal tyranny and the warm womb-space of blissful innocence, seems to be a male complex. One of the few women playwrights that Scanlan discusses, Lillian Hellman, uses the family to project an image of an utterly corrupt and rapacious social order which must be overcome, or even stamped out, in order to create a more just society. In Hellman's play, The Little Foxes, Alexandra, the daughter of the corrupt and unscrupulous Hubbard sister, Regina, denounces her mother's moral degeneracy and leaves home forever “to start a new life for herself and for the world.”¹¹ Unlike Williams, Hellman harbors in her heart no nostalgic longing for the old Southern order, but believes that because of the advanced state of its moral decay it well deserves to die out.

A great many women playwrights of the 1970s, including Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, and Wendy Wasserstein, were struggling to break free of the past, not because the “family of security” offered them only a prison of silence and subservience. They felt no longing to “come home” because they were never allowed to leave, and when they did succeed in staking a claim to freedom, the world, deeply encoded with the structures of patriarchal authority, tried to deny them autonomy. The only security was in a hard won and fiercely guarded independence. But while it may seem that men and women playwrights in America are still fighting different fights in their dramas, I would argue that they are both trying to overcome the hold that the past has on them and to achieve their maturity as individuals and as artists. And for writers like Wilson, Jones, and Shepard, whose plays are so characteristically “American,” this means first coming to terms with their own past, and with their fear of fathers, of loneliness, and of becoming men, however difficult it is to define what that means. And if playwrights such as David Mamet and David Rabe deal with chronic male problems of sexual terror, latent violence, and the emptiness of men's lives, these family plays are marked by a willingness to let the past and its accumulated pain and rage go. They even evoke a stoic lyricism, a barely acknowledged tenderness toward the past as it is put to rest.

In order to frame this portrait of the American family against the horizon of history and memory, Fifth of July (1978), The Oldest Living Graduate (1976), Curse of the Starving Class (1976) and Buried Child return not only to home and family but to their common source of strength and vitality: the land. Each of these plays projects an image of the land as a source of sustenance which must be tended, protected, and handed down through the generations. This image serves to relocate the family within its own history and reconstitute its status as national myth. These plays are not so much unfolding actions or even “tales told” as much as they are landscapes that the characters sparsely populate, landscapes which stretch back into the past and toward the future. While so much of American family drama is pressure-cooked in the cramped, stifling dwellings of middle-class towns and urban tenements, these writers turn to America's open spaces: Texas (Jones), the Midwest (Wilson), and the West (Shepard). The expansiveness of space becomes the coefficient of the infinite extension of time, and the two meet and inscribe along the horizon of history the line where the present and the past meet in a verifiable tradition or history.

This does not mean that this history is recoverable. The horizon, as we approach it, is always receding. As Mark Busby writes in his study of Preston Jones, “[T]he frontier is a fleeting border between wilderness and civilization.”¹² The past is not a place to return to but a deep memory that fades like an old family photograph left out in the sun. Jones, Wilson, and Shepard are aware that time and space erode the past as the horizon line of history verges on infinity. Jones sets his entire Texas Trilogy, for which The Oldest Living Graduate was the last play composed, in a “small, dead West Texas town in the middle of a big, dead West Texas prairie.”¹³ And Gene A. Barnett describes Lanford Wilson's plays as a despairing response to an American culture that is not so much cut-off from the past as bent on obliterating it: “His America is engaged in ‘tearing down’ in a pointless and deliberate overthrow of the cultural icons of the past.”¹⁴ Space is both liberating and intimidating. It allows the playwright distance and perspective to reinscribe the landscape with his personal history of the American experience. But it is also a vacuum that threatens to leave him stranded in the middle of nowhere. Herbert Blau writes that Shepard attempts in his dramas of the 1970s to recover a “mythicizing space” as a means of substantiating “the experience of our experience, which is the experience of continuity in a believable self, as well as the human family.”¹⁵ By focusing on the land, and specifically on the crisis of inheritance, these playwrights stake out a wide dramatic territory and express a deep emotional connection to their own personal and verifiable histories as part of the American experience.

This deep connection is neither nostalgic or chauvinistic. The vision of the land in these plays conjures up memories of old ghosts, but the wide open spaces also induce a state of quiet meditation and a sense of still peace—Grant Wood softened by Andrew Wyeth. If death blows across these dramatic landscapes on dry winds, those winds also seem to carry along the faint whispers of a distant, more romantic past. And since Our Town the dead have seemed to speak a simpler wisdom and with a gentler voice than the living. But if these writers look to the past for verification it is not simply to reconcile themselves with it. They are re-examining their place within America's traditions, but their response is not reactionary. The past is clearly dead, and the land is no longer an abundant Eden or the site of a simple, rustic community. It is the scene of a long, attenuated struggle against death. Each of the plays being examined here locates its action and central conflict in a war for inheritance. Who shall inherit the earth? In each play a family is poised at a critical transitional moment in its history. A generation is passing, and the next is faced with the awful choice of either receiving the land and the mandate for its care, or squandering it for a quick, fat profit. By focusing their dramas on the war for inheritance, Wilson, Jones, and Shepard open out their vision of the American family to embrace several generations, past, present, and future, and to disperse potent emotional impulses and personal values—love, dignity, moral authority, fear, freedom, and power—among both the living and the dead.¹⁶

Focusing on the crisis of inheritance, even though it is tied to the difficult passing of the old order, enables each writer to displace the anxiety and hurt that so often erupts in open confrontation between parents and children and to invest the land itself with transcendent authority as the repository of those enduring values. The passing generation does not possess those values; they are only intrusted to the old order to be watched over and guarded. But the war for inheritance involves a greater struggle than merely staking one's claim to the land or demanding one's birthright. The value of the land, whether economic or spiritual, cannot objectively be assessed; in each play the land's value is inseparable from the person who possesses it. In The Oldest Living Graduate, the aged Colonel Kinkaid has allowed his greedy son, Floyd, to modernize the family ranch and diversify its commercial productivity through oil, sheep, and cattle. But he refuses to give up a small piece of undeveloped property because of its deep, sentimental value: “What's the value of the land? The only person it's valuable to is me!”¹⁷ This land has been left untouched for years.

In fact, at the moment the land is to pass to the next generation it has been rendered worthless, or very nearly so. It has been left untended and has been allowed to fall barren and overgrown. But it has not died out, and it can be rejuvenated despite years of neglect. Whatever value the land will have can only be determined by what the inheritor will sow into it, dig out of it, or build on it. The land is not simply property or a commodity but a living extension of the self. Or rather the self is an extension of the land, and even if the older generation must pass away the land remains, potentially, verdant, a continuation of the self into the future.

The war for inheritance becomes, then, not only a struggle over who will finally receive the land but the kind of land it will be and what it will produce—life or death. The war is ultimately over personal values, between those individuals who see the land as a source of verification of the family's heritage and personal history, and those who would sell it off to reap rapidly escalating commercial profits. In Curse of the Starving Class, Wesley, whose drunken reprobate of a father, Weston, wants to sell the family farm to a sleazy speculator, calls the sprawling commercial developments that will be built on the land “zombie” cities, which are “built by zombies for the use and convenience of all other zombies.”¹⁸ Colonel Kinkaid's son wants to build an exclusive resort and vacation spa on the land. In Fifth of July, Ken Talley, a Viet Nam veteran and last of the male Talley line, lives with his homosexual lover Jed on the family property. Ken's old college radical friends, John and Gwen Landis, want to buy the property to build a state-of-the-art, high tech recording studio to make Gwen a rock-and-roll star. Land speculation and commercial development become in these plays a gauge of the growing rapacity of the coming generation, a new “culture of narcissism” which envisions the land, or any vital asset, as personal investment stock with infinite growth potential.

But the war for inheritance portrayed in these plays is not only a pitched battle between those family members guarding old, cherished values and those who would sell out to outsiders who want to rape the land and uproot its tradition. At the heart of these plays of inheritance lies a simpler but harder truth of life. And it is a truth that does not yield easy expression: the painful fact of letting go. The passing of one generation is as difficult and frightening a transition as the coming of age is for the next. Facing and accepting the finality of death is an ordeal for both parents and children, and the fear of it threatens to sever family ties. And in these plays the passing generation is far from willing to go meekly. Colonel Kinkaid, Wesley's father Weston in Curse, and the aged patriarch Dodge in Buried Child each fiercely and romantically identifies with his land. They have staked their claim to it and will not let it go. They will not allow their life to be taken from them. In a poignant and ironic counterpoint to these implacable males, Lanford Wilson presents this stubborn refusal to let go of life in the figure of feisty and tenacious Aunt Sally Friedman (née Talley), who has returned to the Talley property to dispose of the ashes of her beloved husband, Matt. She has been carrying them around with her in a shoebox, refusing for nearly a year to consign Matt to the earth and to his final rest.

Coming home involves a hazardous psychic journey for these writers, and reawakens painful memories and dreads. The fear of fathers is palpable in these plays, but it is less the fear of overpowering strength or emotional intimidation than the weight of loss and memory. I would argue that the elegiacal mood or stoic lyricism of which I spoke is not an attempt by Wilson, Jones, or Shepard to romanticize the past, but the expression of an embarrassed sadness which cannot find its voice except in oblique images of nature, the land, and the distant past. The scent of dust and ashes hangs in the air, and a spiritual entropy weighs life down and saps its vitality. Colonel Kinkaid, Weston, Dodge, and Sally clutching her shoebox remain so deeply connected to the land that they cannot separate themselves from it, physically or spiritually. They are their land, and they must finally let it go or watch it die with them. And like the dying king in Frazer's Golden Bough, they have perhaps already infected the land with their own death.

The dramatic landscape of these plays is strewn with images of fatality, dilapidation, and sterility, and tension builds as characters struggle to resist the pull of death. The feeling lingers in the air that it may be too late, that death has already been passed through the genes, perhaps for several generations. In Curse of the Starving Class, Weston, who lives the life of a wanderer and loner, still feels the family “curse,” the poison that circulates in the blood of his line and dooms it to extinction. Although he has come home to his family, the only inheritance he feels he can bequeath to them is guilt, loneliness, and fear. He sees the curse in his own father: “Everybody was right there, but nobody saw him but me. He lived apart. Nobody saw that” (CSC 169). In the end he succumbs to the survival strategy of the loner. He heads out for Mexico after selling the farm to a developer to build a road-side steak house. Although it is probably a hopelessly lost cause, his son Wesley chooses to stay and fight for what is rightfully his. But whether he runs or stays, he must finally stand alone.

In Buried Child the father, Dodge, lies on the living room couch in a helpless state of decrepitude, but he continues to tyrannize his family. He is an accursed progenitor who boasts of the vast number of illegitimate children he has spawned but refuses to acknowledge any heirs to his domain. Rather than surrender his patriarchal authority he has murdered the child of an incestuous union between his wife Halie and his oldest son Tilden. He denies his own corrupted history and refuses to allow anyone to take his place. When questioned about family pictures hanging on the living room wall, Dodge shouts out: “That's not me! That never was me! This is me sittin' right in front of you, the whole shootin' match” (BC 111). Colonel Kinkaid, a World War I veteran, has seen the awful presage of his own death in the faces of his friends who were slaughtered in France and now lie in graves in foreign soil. To him death is not the surrender of patriarchal power, but simply a horrifying negation: “Dead and waxy, like them bodies seen in France.” He clings to his small piece of property because it conjures for him a memory of the only time in his life he felt truly alive and not alone. He fell in love with a young girl whose family worked the land as members of a religious settlement or farming commune. But when a drought killed the crops she and her family moved on. To Kinkaid there is nothing to leave because “damn death … don't give a goddamned thing, jest takes away” (OLG 267).

To look at the progeny of this passing generation is to see that, indeed, the curse of the bloodline has already been sown in the children. The natural process of generation has been perverted or ceased altogether. Children are crippled, impotent, illegitimate, or unrecognized. Kinkaid's only son Floyd and his wife Maureen are childless. In Buried Child not only has a child of incest been murdered, Dodge's son Bradley has lost a leg and his son Tilden his mind. Ken Talley has lost both legs in Viet Nam. He is also a homosexual and so will not be producing a new generation of Talleys. But perhaps the most tragic manifestation of this failure to produce a new, healthy generation can be seen in the sudden and shocking death of a handsome young son who represents the last best hope of the family. In The Oldest Living Graduate, Kinkaid mourns the loss of his son Franklin, who died when his B-17 crashed during a training flight. Kinkaid's spirit has been broken as much by the death of his adored and adoring first-born as by the loss of his young love. In Buried Child the family mourns the loss of a son who would have redeemed, had he lived, the hopes and dreams of the entire family. His mother Halie still grieves for him: “He would've took care of us, too. … He was a hero. Don't forget that. A genuine hero. Brave. Strong. And very intelligent. Ansel could've been a great man” (BC 73). A basketball star and a soldier, Ansel was shot to death by his wife in a bizarre and mysterious incident in a motel room.¹⁹

One could argue that all the younger generation in Fifth of July—Ken Talley and his lover Jed Jenkins, John and Gwen Landis, and Ken's sister June—represent the “best and brightest” of the sixties who are writing their own epitaph after their failure to usher in the Age of Aquarius. An uneasy listlessness hangs over the play that the Talley line is about to give up its own ghost and die out forever, and Wilson's vision is a quiet meditation on that very possibility. No contemporary American playwright has written more sensitively and elegiacally about our country's loss of its past, particularly its ideals and values, than Lanford Wilson. If his plays do not evoke as sterile, bitter, or disconnected a landscape of modern America as do Shepard's, they offer no less a despairing and bleak poetic vision of our country's wasted heritage. Wilson can paint a gently romantic, even poignant, portrait of America's past, but he brings a sharply contemporary, witty sophistication and wisdom to the present crisis.

Wilson sees the loss of our past not as a conscious act of destruction and betrayal but as a collective crime of forgetting, a mass case of amnesia. He constructs many of his plays as Chekhovian ensemble pieces, and as Henry Schvey writes in his essay “Images of the Past in the Plays of Lanford Wilson,” “Nearly all of Wilson's plays are about people who are outcasts or misfits of some sort.”²⁰ Wilson does not see the relationship of the generations as a bitter confrontation of rage and accusation, but as a gradual dissipation of native vigor through countless lost and forgotten personal histories. With his Talley family chronicle, begun in the late 1970s, Wilson seems to be seeking ways to bring his loners and lost souls home. Martin J. Jacobi notes in his essay “The Comic Vision of Lanford Wilson” that the playwright is making a genuine effort in his later work to “identify important traditions and cultural values that have been accreted by social conventions and biases, rehabilatate them, and so reintegrate their outcasts.”²¹

Fifth of July is an expression of faith that the passing generation can reach out to the living and offer them something to carry into the future. Wilson employs the image of Matt Friedman's ashes to intimate that the past may be dead and soon forgotten, but it still lingers, if momentarily, in the present. Matt is even forgotten, temporarily, by his own wife Sally, who refuses to part with his ashes but keeps misplacing the shoebox while she contemplates the best site for his final resting place. Matt's ashes, sitting neglected on the mantelpiece, become one of the milder symptoms of the historical “forgetfulness” overtaking the entire Talley clan.

But Matt Friedman is eventually given his final rest as Sally, in a simple gesture of acknowledgment to the living and of faith in the future, consigns him to the earth. She pours his ashes onto the garden of lilies that Ken's lover Jed has planted on the property. This gesture is symbolic of a much bolder gesture of faith and affirmation as Sally purchases the family property, which is in Ken's name, and bequeaths it to Jed to watch over and tend. By treating the land as a gift Sally restores its original and authentic value as a source of life. As she says, “There's no such thing (as death). It goes on and then it stops. You can't worry about the stopping, you have to worry about the going on.”²² There is no death, only the continuation of life.

Fifth of July is Wilson's own testament of hope about the possibility of a future for American culture. One would be tempted to call him “optimistic,” as Martin Jacobi has done, although the term usually evokes critical scorn.²³ Wilson remains acutely conscious of the kind of dislocated world that his generation, growing up in the sixties, has come to inhabit and even help create. Fifth of July is a composite portrait of a new “lost” generation of post-Viet Nam, post-drug culture American children still struggling to find their way. In Wilson's vision of America a very uncertain future lies in the hands of a homosexual couple whose “offspring” is a severely autistic boy named, appropriately, Johnny Young. Despite his introverted condition, he has an I.Q. of 200, and he possesses the singular gift to be able to create stories of survival. Although Ken had refused an offer to become a teacher at his old high school because of his war injury and homosexuality, he finally chooses to accept his charge to become Johnny's teacher and, in effect, his spiritual father. The play closes with Ken's profession of faith: “I've got to talk to Johnny about the future” (FJ [Fifth of July]128).

Like Wilson's, Shepard's “homecoming” in the seventies reveals the weariness and loneliness of one who has had his soul sapped of that frenetic energy which fueled the drive for infinite self-discovery in the sixties. In one sense this playwright came home because there was nowhere else for him to go. America ran itself out in the 1960s, and at the end of the decade Shepard found himself, along with many others, at the end of the road. Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child are saturated with the weariness and weakened spirit of a generation that had tried to defeat death by constant movement and the restless roaming for new experience. Dodge's son Tilden exulted in the Easy Rider life of highway cruising and small town drifting: “I drove all the way sometimes. Across the desert. Way out across the desert. … Nothing I dreamed of was better than driving” (BC 103). But while on a trip to Mexico Tilden suffered a mental breakdown that convinced him that he had died, but only because, as he says, “I lost my voice. … I was alone. I thought I was dead” (BC 78). Tilden, helpless as a child, has come home for good.

In Curse of the Starving Class the entire family is “cursed” with the loner's itch to desert. Weston and his daughter Emma dream of Mexico, his wife Ella of Europe, and Wesley of Alaska. (Wesley believes that Alaska is “full of possibilities,” but Emma reminds him that it is just an empty, frozen, dead landscape, and “who wants to discover a bunch of ice?”) By returning to the great American subject of the family, these playwrights are acknowledging, however obliquely, the need to come to terms with the spiritual dead end to which wandering has brought them, leaving them stranded in an intolerable loneliness. American writers have typically treated loneliness in terms of the romantic myth of the loner and vagabond. By focusing on the painful moment of letting go, these playwrights confront the terrifying reality behind the myth: everyone, both parents and children, dies tragically alone. It is the curse that Weston sees in his own father, the man who lived apart. It is loneliness that causes the emotional “starvation” which cannot be satisfied.

Lanford Wilson concentrates on the children of loneliness and their collective search for hope and certainty on the day after the day of independence. But Jones and Shepard focus their meditation on the fate of America upon the generation that is passing. And that passing is not easy, especially for the fathers. Colonel Kinkaid and Dodge are monumentally lonely men who are petrified with age but who cannot acknowledge the sadness that envelopes them until the very end. Both men have been wanderers themselves from another time. The Colonel ran off to join the cavalry and roam the world with Black Jack Pershing. He came home a psychic invalid paralyzed by a morbid fear of death that he saw on the waxy white faces of his fallen friends. In the final moments before his death Kinkaid, in terror, suddenly faces the absolute finality of his passing: “Ah'm gonna shut off, just shut off, and slip into nuthin' at all” (OLG 328). Like Kinkaid, Dodge has lived a life of self-exile, although he has never left home. Like Weston's father in Curse, Dodge has lived a life apart, and when death approaches he sees it, not as the theft of his patriarchy but as the harrowing apotheosis of his own loneliness. His being is slowly being dissolved or eaten away: “I'm an invisible man!” (BC 68).

If the war for inheritance forces sons to confront death and loneliness in the faces of their own fathers, it also leads them back to a common source of strength, security, and gentleness of spirit: the land. Traditionally, land in America has been a private resource or commodity, something to buy, build on, extract wealth from, or stake a claim to. But in these plays of homecoming and inheritance the land becomes a source of rest, peace, and personal verification. The land no longer lures the wanderer to open territory but welcomes him to a familiar locale, a fixed point of spiritual reference. This sense of an almost visceral recognition of connectedness to the land draws Shepard's characters irresistibly to it. In Curse Weston experiences a resurrection of consciousness as he awakens in the early morning from a drunken stupor. He bathes, cooks a huge country breakfast, and then walks out, naked, to see his farm. He is gradually revitalized as he recognizes his spread in every detail and remembers intimately the people who live on it. He returns to the house to collect the family laundry, and begins to examine it:

I felt like I knew everyone of you. Everyone. Like I knew you through flesh and blood. Like our bodies were connected and we could never escape it. … That a family wasn't just a social thing. It was an animal thing.

(CSC 187)

Weston calls this sense of connectedness the “blood rhythm,” and his son Wesley has inherited, along with the family curse of loneliness and wanderlust, this power to connect himself to the land through an intense envisioning of his immediate surroundings. As he lies on his bed late at night he carefully registers the multitude of sensations—sounds, images, smells—that impinge on him in the dark: “Even sleeping people I could feel. Sleeping animals, too. Dogs. Peacocks. Bulls. Even tractors sitting in the wetness waiting for the sun to come up” (CSC 137).

And in the final reckoning of Buried Child Dodge speaks his last will and testament as he bequeaths his land to his grandson Vince (Tilden's son), and slowly lets go of his life. He rises from the couch on which he has lain for the last years of his life and recites the vast inventory of his farm, including every tool, piece of machinery, and “all the furnishings, accoutrements, and paraphernalia therein” (BC 129). Having let it all go, he lies down to die.

For Wilson, Jones, and Shepard, the land represents more than a natural source of shared life and love, and in no way do these writers espouse a rural ethic. The land revitalizes the possibilities of the self and affirms a tentative faith in, as Dodge so derisively terms it, “some kind of a future.” By turning to the land these writers rediscover both a very old and a very young America. Land eases the burden of death and dying by opening the imagination up to eternity. The land is ages older than history and so eternally young. Inheritance enables the generations to share in a continuum of life, rather than stoically accepting the grim cycle of living and dying. Our Town's answers come too late. The garden that Jed has planted on the Talley property is a lily field, and Matt's ashes will fertilize it. And, as Gene Barnett points out, Jed has also rediscovered a “lost” American rose, and so has consequently “re-created ‘new’ life.”²⁴ Both Dodge and Colonel Kinkaid finally give up their land because, as the embodiment of eternity, it preserves and perpetuates the life they had lived in the past. The dead, by dying, consecrates the land to the living.

Despite these strong images and powerful dramatic moments, Wilson, Jones, and Shepard remain far from certain about the prospects for America's future, although they do give voice to a stoic faith that the country must and will somehow come through. As Barnett says of Wilson's dramatic vision, “He is proud of the American heritage and concerned with preserving it.”²⁵ Of the three writers, though, Shepard is the most ambivalent about America's future, and both Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class (like so many of his earlier works) are constructed as openended visions. In Buried Child the land has suddenly burst forth with new life. After over thirty years of barrenness, the fields behind Dodge's house have miraculously sprouted corn, but the torrential rains that have brought new life have also exposed the long-buried family secret. Has Dodge's death and the exhumation of the murdered child released the family from the grip of death? Doris Auerbach argues that the play “ends like a miracle play, with a symbol of resurrection.”²⁶ But along with the images of life, images of death appear, like ghosts hovering on the stair, and strongly suggest that the past still can pull the uncertain future back into its grasp.

Both Curse and Buried Child end with the inheritors literally taking the place of the passing generation. Wesley has put on his father's old clothes, which Weston had discarded after his drunken binge and early morning resurrection. Everyone, including Wesley's own mother, mistakes him for his father, and he can feel his father's power taking him over: “I could feel him coming in and me going out. Just like the changing of the guard” (CSC 197). It remains an open question whether Wesley will succumb, like his father, to the curse of the bloodline, or stay and fight to the end for the land that is his birthright. In Buried Child, Vince, the eventual inheritor, first abandons the family to which he had returned and takes to the open road. But as he drives through the night into the heart of the country (Iowa), he suddenly sees his face in the rear-view mirror dissolve into the faces of his ancestors: “As though I was looking at another man. As though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy's face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time” (BC 130). Having seen his father's and his grandfather's face replace his own, he returns to claim the family farm because, as he says, “I've gotta carry on the line.”

In the same way as Wesley, Vince takes over, or is taken over by, the identity of the passing generation. He wraps himself in Dodge's blanket and takes his place on the couch, after having driven the sadistic son Bradley off it and out of the house. In a cryptic statement, Vince tells Father Dewis that “[t]here's nobody else in the house,” and that he intends to buy “[a]ll brand new” machinery to build his future. At the end of the play, all of the contradictory images of life and death come together in one figure: Vince.²⁷ He is both “dead and alive at the same time,” and I would argue that Shepard intends us to read Buried Child neither as a “miracle play” of resurrection nor as a recapitulation of the sins of the past. Perhaps Shepard is our most representative playwright because he understands that both the forces of life and of death are endemic to American culture and equally capable of boiling to the surface of our national consciousness. That perception is, perhaps, the lesson and the legacy of the sixties.

The sixties witnessed love-ins, Woodstock, and Camelot, but also war atrocities, racial hatred, and four major political assassinations. By centering their family dramas on the war for inheritance, Wilson, Jones, and Shepard conjure up an image of a very old America whose resources have been left to waste in the barren or overgrown fields of the past. The land can be rejuvenated only if it is tended long and carefully. By coming home to accept their birthright, these playwrights have attempted to lay the burden of the past gently to rest, and they have accepted the burden of responsibility for the future. As Wesley says in Curse of the Starving Class, “So it's more than losing a house. It means losing a country.” The risk of failure is very great. But there's no place like home.

Notes

1. Tom Scanlan, Family, Drama, and American Dreams (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1978).

2. Quoted in Robert A. Martin and Richard D. Meyer, “Arthur Miller on Plays and Playwriting,” Modern Drama 19 (December 1976): 397-404.

3. Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981) 109. Subsequent references are indicated parenthetically in the text by BC and the page numbers.

4. Scanlan 17-48.

5. Throughout this paragraph I am indebted to Scanlan 34.

6. Scanlan 180-81.

7. John H. Raleigh, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964) 160. In his chapter “O'Neill as an American Writer,” Raleigh connects O'Neill to the whole nineteenth-century New England tradition of literature, in particular the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Raleigh sees the same preoccupation with “dualism” or “polarity” in the work of O'Neill as in the essays of Emerson, including “Nature” and “Friendship.”

8. Raleigh 252. In his romantic quest to achieve a mystical connection with the “One-ness of All,” O'Neill was drawn irresistibly, as was Herman Melville, to the sea. As Raleigh points out, both writers were fascinated by the sea as the projection of their desire to dissolve themselves into the mystery of life, and also of their feeling of being spiritual castaways, lost in the vast loneliness of their own psyches.

9. Robert Brustein, “Eugene O'Neill,” in The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962) 330.

10. Thomas E. Porter, “The Passing of the Old South: A Streetcar Named Desire,” in Myth and American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1969) 160.

11. Scanlan 183.

12. Mark Busby, Preston Jones, Western Writers Series No. 58 (Boise: Boise State UP, 1983) 16.

13. Preston Jones, A Texas Trilogy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976) 3.

14. Gene A. Barnett, Lanford Wilson, Twayne World Authors Series (Boston: Twayne, 1987)151.

15. Herbert Blau, “The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy,” Modern Drama 27 (December, 1984): 528.

16. The theme of inheritance has of course been a staple of world drama since the Greeks. It has been widely used by playwrights to portray societies either suffering the shock of a deeply unsettling moment of historical transition, or undergoing an extended period of decline or moral decomposition. Aeschylus's Oresteia and Ibsen's Ghosts use inheritance as a progressively debilitating “curse” which threatens to bring an entire family, and by extension a whole society, to ruin. Plays such as King Lear and The Cherry Orchard use the crisis of inheritance to portray an old world dying and a new one struggling, sometimes violently, to be born. As the world moved into the modern era, playwrights increasingly began to identify inheritance with heredity and economics. Many of Ibsen's characters are women who are tied to the past as their fathers' children, and must struggle fiercely to free themselves and live independent lives. In America inheritance very often takes the form of family money. It is used by the older generation to intimidate children to obey their elders, as in Philip Barry's Holiday, or by the passing generation to free children from the failure and despair of the past, as in Clifford Odet's Awake and Sing!, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, in which Willy Loman's insurance money becomes one more example of the failed promise of the great American success story.

17. Preston Jones, The Oldest Living Graduate, in A Texas Trilogy 283. Subsequent references are indicated parenthetically in the text by OLG and the page numbers.

18. Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class, in Seven Plays 164. Subsequent references are indicated parenthetically in the text by CSC and the page numbers.

19. The death of the first-born has been used by other playwrights as a symbol of the failure or “death” of the American dream and its promise of the unlimited possibilities of the future. In Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Joe Keller is made to face the reality that he, in fact, caused the death of his son. Keller allowed his company to ship faulty airplane engine parts to Europe to reap greater profits from the war, and not only his son but all the young men who were killed in their planes as a result become, in Keller's stricken conscience, his sons. And in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George actually “kills” the imaginary son that Martha created and whose existence offers them a last refuge from the reality of the emotional barrenness of their marriage. But by accepting the death of their “son,” George and Martha at least have a chance to escape from their vicious circle of petty assaults and ritual game playing.

20. Henry Schvey, “Images of the Past in the Plays of Lanford Wilson,” in Essays on Contemporary American Drama, ed. Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim (Hamburg: Max Hueber Verlag München, 1981) 225.

21. Martin J. Jacobi, “The Comic Vision of Lanford Wilson,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 21 (Fall, 1988): 121.

22. Lanford Wilson, Fifth of July (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) 114.

23. Jacobi, I think, effectively counters the charge of optimism and worse, sentimentality, leveled against Wilson by critics such as Gerald Weales, Robert Brustein, and Harold Clurman, who regard his later plays as a softhearted and softheaded response to an unarticulated pessimism about the true state of American culture in the seventies. These critics share a fondness for the “tougher” writings of men such as David Mamet, David Rabe, and Israel Horowitz who portray an America riddled by violence, cynicism, and unrepentant greed. Wilson's optimism, Jacobi argues, is an expression of his essentially comic vision of America which uses the reintegration of misfits and outcasts into society as a sign that the country will somehow come through and survive. The survivors, like Ken Talley, will not be either physically or spiritually unscarred by the failures of the past, but may be wiser and more chastened for having made it through the decade of the sixties when many didn't.

24. Barnett 112.

25. Barnett 149.

26. Doris Auerbach, Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theatre (Boston: Twayne, 1982) 61.

27. See Bruce J. Mann, “Character Behavior and the Fantastic in Sam Shepard's Buried Child,” in Sam Shepard: A Casebook, ed. Kimball King (New York: Garland, 1988) 91.