Talk:The Glory of Living
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What is it that fascinates us so about violence? Especially violence perpetrated by completely unfeeling and (seemingly) unremorseful people? These are the characters from The Glory of Living by Rebecca Gilman.
The play is about two small time “low life” criminals. They are “back woods” southerners and are stereotypical in that they are, in every way a person can be, poor. They are poorly educated. They are financially poor. They are spiritually, or perhaps better said, morally poor. Yet, the title of the play is The Glory of Living.
The play might be described as The Lieutenant of Inishmore meets Sam Shepard. These are modern Americans who see violence and casual disregard for other people as normal.
The opening is a powerful one, and funny as we are surprised by it, and gets us off to a good start understanding the world we’ll be living in for the next two hours.
The characters are sound in this play. They are believable. Wegsjac 15:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
The following was the original version of the plot.
The play opens introducing us to Clint and Lisa. Clint has come with a friend to see Lisa’s mother, Carol, who runs a one-woman brothel in a single room where the ‘bed room’ is separated from the ‘living room’ by a sheet hung on a rope.
Clint and Lisa have a conversation while Jim and Carol ‘go at it’ behind the sheet. Lisa is only fifteen and is uncomfortable with her Mother’s actions. Clint picks up on this. He treats her with respect and charms her out of the house. In the next scene, they have been married for two years and Lisa has had two babies.
In the final scenes of the play, Lisa gets arrested, tried and convicted of killing one woman and attempting to kill one man. In a scene with her attorney, we get one insight into her feelings about what has happened:
- LISA. “…That girl I killed, and them two other people, if I hadn’t called the police, if that guy hadn’t of lived, wouldn’t anybody even know they was gone.
- CARL. I’m sure that somebody…
- LISA. No, you ain’t sure. (beat)
- CARL. Well, I suppose that it’s possible-
- LISA. It’s more than possible. It’s the god dammed truth.
We know, and Lisa knows, that there is very little difference between herself and those people that she killed. What she is saying is that she doesn’t feel her life is valued, either. At the very end of the play, Lisa attempts to give Carl a toy piano, which we’re told that Lisa has insisted on keeping with her since she was arrested. (This idea is somewhat expository at this point because we have not seen the piano before now). Carl innocently taps out “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on the piano and then shows Lisa how to play the tune. She is excited about this and the final image of the play is her asking Carl to show her more music. She connects with the audience in a final, truthful moment, with the clear implication that things might have turned out differently for her if someone had showed her how to play years before. Perhaps a predictable moment, but effective.
There is one moment in the play which is worth some attention here in reference to the idea that the characters are spiritually poor. In scene six, Clint and Lisa have a brief “husband and wife” moment, when Clint shares an intimate thought. He says, “Sometimes, I look up at night, up at the ceilin’ and I think as how all of me is right there. Right there floatin’ between the bed and the roof. I think I’m gonna wake up in the mornin’ wishin’ that I hadn’t.” This can be interpreted as Clint having an “out of body experience”, perhaps without understanding what was happening, which makes the experience more profound since it’s less likely being imagined based on something he had read. Made all the more truthful because of the idea of waking up the next morning “ wishin’ I hadn’t.” It was an interesting, intimate moment with Clint and Lisa and particularly good writing.
If we think about the purpose of theatre, we recognize that the goal is to entertain. Here, we’re given fascinating characters and some good, truthful moments, and it is entertaining. More than that, though, the playwright has an opportunity to challenge the audience to think. Not just about the characters, their situation, and our attempts to rationalize the experience and discern our own truth from it. As David Mamet suggested in Three Uses of the Knife, the writer hopes that the precipitate from this rationalization will be a question that nags at people and demands attention. We are shocked by such plays as Glory. We’re shocked at Inishmore, too, even though there is something in the Irish struggle for independence (even as twisted as it’s shown), that we can understand. Glory is really just senseless violence, and all of it happens off stage. So, the question Gilman may be asking is, ‘what is this violence born from?’ Why is Lisa compelled to kill? Glory is looking (again) at people who live in the cracks and crevices of society, people no one really cares about, and putting the worst of them under a spot light for examination. If this, indeed, is a purpose of theatre, making us ask questions, the question Gilmore asks is somewhat muted. Not every audience member may take the time it takes to arrive at a question and, if they do, may despair at the hopelessness of the answer. It is unlike The Crucible, for example, with a clear message and a finger pointed directly at the evil to make the job of developing a question and answer an easy one.
There is certainly room in the world for the ‘easy’ questions as well as the ‘hard’ ones and The Glory of Living is a good entry into the world library.
Replaced by Ganymead 20:17, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
