Z/Web

Author: August Wilson

Of the three plays I saw this weekend, this was undoubtedly the best. However, it was not perfect. It’s an amazing play: Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1990. It’s about a Black family in 1936 Philadelphia. A wild brother shows up from down south, ready to sell the family piano. He and his sister co-own it, but she refuses to sell it. He needs the money to buy a farm so he can control his own destiny. But the piano has a history for her family: their slave ancestors were bought with that piano, and it was paid for with their sweat and blood. The sister won’t play the piano, however: it’s haunted with too many memories. She also won’t marry, still stuck on her husband who’s been dead for three years. Thus the conflict brews. Meanwhile there are ghost sightings, and it turns out the piano really is haunted, and in the end, the sister must overcome her fears and play it, which (apparently) banishes the ghost… and her brother, who leaves peacefully without the piano.

Plotwise, there’s not too much to this story. This is a play all about the characters, and they are amazing. The varied personalities are all strong and bold, presenting plenty of conflict, and none are alike. Each has obvious good and bad aspects, just like real people. There’s tons of humor, as the outrageous situations are unusual and funny, yet that’s tempered with genuine drama, as the piano represents serious emotional baggage. I loved the play, the characters, the presentation, and the acting was astonishly good, but I found myself waffling over the whole ghost thing. Unlike the ghost in

Author: Henrick Ibsen

An amazing play about a bizarre, incomprehensible woman. Hedda is a newlywed who returns home with her husband, George, a boring academic who spent their seven-month honeymoon doing research. They’ve purchased a large house beyond their means, apparently because Hedda expressed a fondness for the mansion, but in truth she doesn’t like it, but now that her husband bought it for her, she must lie in the bed she made (there’s a significant pun in there). Bored, Hedda begins to manipulate the people around her. There’s a girl from her childhood who’s flightly and weak, who has left her husband to pursue a lover. That lover turns out to be Hedda’s former lover, and a man who’s competition to George: he’s in the same field and is working on a new book. George reads part of the book and thinks it’s brilliant, one of the best book’s ever written, but when the drunken author accidentally drops it, George recovers it. It’s the only copy. But before he can return it, the guy goes nuts, thinking someone stole it, and his violence ends him up arrested. When he’s released he goes to see Hedda, who encourages his sucidical thoughts — even giving him one of her pistols! She doesn’t tell him she has the manuscript and when he leaves, she burns it. Why? Good questions. She tells her husband it’s because of her great love for him and he believes her, though he’s horrified at the loss of such a great work. News comes that the author is dead, though not exactly the way Hedda expected. In the end she’s blackmailed and caught with the prospects of a husband she doesn’t love and forced romance with a blackmailer, she shoots herself. The end.

This is a play about questions, not anwers. The questions are many and fascinating. Why does Hedda marry George? Why is she so bored? Would anything satisfy her? Why does she waffle, changing her mind so frequently? Does she even know what she’s doing herself? Why is the play’s title her maiden name instead of her married name? Why does she keep seeing visions of her father? Why is she so jealous (if that’s what it is) of the other girl? (Hedda is beautiful and shouldn’t be jealous.) Why does she kill herself in the end? Was life so unbearable to her? Or was it guilt? The answers to these questions are not impossible, but they are subjective: everyone who watches the play will have to form their own conclusions, and every production interprets the play in their own way, making for a fascinating experience. Granted, Hedda’s incomprehensive behavior does make her difficult to like or relate to, but she’s fascinating. Most of the other characters are also severely flawed: the husband’s a simpleton, the author tempermental, the girl an idiot, the judge a corrupt blackmailer. The only innocent in the bunch is old Aunt Julia, virtual mother to George, but she’s not a main character. That lack of compassionate characters does make the play more difficult to connect with, but I still liked it. It’s a fascinating intellectual exercise. I’d actually like to see if again a few times: there’s enough depth here to study for a long time.