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The Glory of Living
Mimi Kramer
In the opening scene of Rebecca Gilman's extraordinarily
affecting new play about serial murder and sexual abuse,
a 15-year-old girl (Anna Paquin) sits hunched on a couch
in a trailer trying to ignore the sounds of her mother
entertaining a john behind a jerry-rigged sheet. Sitting
with her on the couch is the client's companion, a young
drifter (Jeffrey Donovan) who proceeds to try to make
conversation with the girl. It's ambiguous talk that might
be kindness--an attempt to dispel the awkwardness of an
impossible situation--or it might not, and the girl seems
to know this. So we relax a little. We let down our guard,
and even when the drifter begins pointing things out to
the girl about her "body language," we allow ourselves to
think that she can take care of herself--that some combination
of the adolescent hostility and sexual savvy she demonstrates
will come into play before too long and act as a deterrent to
predatory behavior. Later, we will come to understand that
the scene was a seduction of the audience as much as of one
character by another. We'll look back and remember how we
were made to experience all the intricate, complex feelings
of an adolescent girl encountering predatory behavior for
the first time--the uncertainty and discomfort, the embarrassment
and fear, and, most of all, the idiotic conviction that
everything will be all right.
The Glory of Living, which the Manhattan Class Company is
presenting in a no-frills production exquisitely directed
by the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, is about how someone
who is not a psychopath could end up committing acts of
unimaginable cruelty and brutality. It sets out to make
incomprehensible acts comprehensible without suggesting
we should either condone or excuse them. As such it's very
much a play for this particular moment. It also represents
a departure for Gilman. In the past, Gilman's protagonists
have tended to be highly articulate and educated individuals
confronting specific problems, like the assistant dean
confronting campus hate-crimes in Spinning Into Butter,
or the high-powered journalist in Boy Gets Girl, whose
life is destroyed by a stalker. These were characters
who loved words and ideas, and who expressed themselves
beautifully and at great length?sometimes too beautifully
and at too-great length, so that the plays were all telling,
no showing.
The world Gilman creates in The Glory of Living is as far
as it could be from the bastions of literature and learning
that her other plays have focused on. We are in dirt-poor,
rural Alabama, where no one uses words particularly well
and few people have any experience of abstract ideas. You
do what you need to do without thinking about it, whether
that means turning tricks with your youngest on the other
side of the partition or procuring under-age girls for your
husband to violate and abuse. A case-study in the pathology
of powerlessness, The Glory of Living gives us a chance to
see how Gilman does away from the device of the insightful,
self-analyzing character, and she does just fine. Better
than fine.
The play is a sort of psychological mystery from which
everything we take away is learned without characters
explaining themselves or telling us what they think or
how they feel. As we watch Lisa, a passive and apparently
amoral young woman, take part in a sequence of unimaginable
crimes to appease her psychopathic husband, nothing is clear.
No explanation is offered. We don't always know what's
happening, and we rarely understand anything Lisa does.
But because Paquin, the extraordinary Oscar-winning actress
from Jane Campion's film, The Piano, plays her, the very
lack of an explanation becomes hugely expressive, and we
want to know what it's expressive of. What kind of rage
is this we're looking at? What would explain Lisa's
willingness to visit on others, even smaller and more
defenseless than she, the kind of suffering she inflicts?
What motivates Lisa's complicity? Why doesn't she run away
or try to help the girls? And what strange motivational
construct leads her to begin tipping off the police to
where the bodies are?
In a sense, Gilman is playing chicken with a dramatic idea,
trying to see how heinous a picture of human consciencelessness
she can paint and still, without ever asking us to sympathize
with her protagonist, manage to move us in the play's closing
moments. It makes for a difficult but ultimately rewarding
two hours. The Glory of Living is tough to watch at times,
and always bewildering, but uplifting in the way of great
tragedy that has been flawlessly produced and performed,
where the very real human achievement entailed in bringing
a grim story to life offsets the devastating nature of its
content. Here, consummate acting in the form of understated
ensemble work plays a big part. Hoffman has directed with
astonishing truth and integrity, skirting pity and melodrama,
keeping us ever a little off-balance, so that we're never
able to disengage completely and categorize or define what's
happening. "Okay that's what this is. It's a play about
spousal abuse or sexual abuse or child abuse or victimized
women. The Glory of Living is about all those things, yes,
but finally it's about something much more ineffable,
a kind of disenfranchisement exponentially projected and
endlessly mirrored in one person's defeated vision of
other people's lives.
The Glory of Living
Broadway.com, November 15, 2001
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