16 August 2002: Gilroy, The Subject was Roses
Gloucester Stage, Massachusetts. A play by Frank D. Gilroy
Israel Horovitz’s company in its twenty-third season. This company has survived far longer than most shoestring, wish-and-a-prayer companies do. Horovitz greets the audience himself, makes a few aggressive jokes about cell phones left on during the performance, puts the screws to the audience to buy $100-a-ticket raffle chances (first prize: $5000) — he got three takers, whose credit cards were immediately confiscated — and apologizes for taking so much of the audience’s time, already hot and impatient in this un-air-conditioned theatre seating perhaps 175 and just barely tolerable after five days of 90° + weather.
Finally, the play begins, and almost immediately it all seems to have been worth the wait. This is a crisp, tautly written family drama that swept the critics off their feet in 1965 in New York, winning a Pulitzer and other awards. It is currently enjoying a revival in various regional venues. Horovitz says he thinks it’s as good as Death of a Salesman and that the only reason it hasn’t achieved the reputation of Miller’s’s play is that Gilroy is not a self-advertiser like Miller. Irritating. The play is not in the same league with Miller’s’s, but it is a fine example of kitchen-sink realism all the same.
Timmy Cleary has arrived home from World War II (the scene is an apartment in the West Bronx, in May 1946) unscathed; but in the three days he spends with his unhappy, frustrated, warring parents he picks up a bodyful of shrapnel and by the end of the play is planning to move back out the next day. Gilroy’s take on dysfunctional families is that two is company and three is a crowd, and in the threesome it’s inevitable that two take sides and gang up on the third. In this case, the mother and the son gang up on the father, the son being used as a weapon by the wronged wife and mother, Nettie Cleary, to punish her wayward husband John. (The truth of Wilde’s Earnest comes true again here, in Gwendolen’s prescient remark: “I pity a woman married to a man called John. She will never know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude.”) Nettie tends toward passive-aggressiveness, a mode of behavior that reaches its apex when she disappears for twelve hours, leaving father and son (and her own mother, who communicates her anxiety by telephone) frantically worried about her whereabouts. The father, John, is just plain aggressive, and as stubborn as any Irishman (his metaphor, not mine). The son is no match for these manipulative, self-destructive parents, but he has actually learned a certain amount of such strategic ploys from them. His way of operating is to hold out and hold out until he has achieved the desired disruptive effect and then to reverse himself and let the other two drown in their own bile. Ugly.
Gilroy is enough of a dramatist to keep this going for over two hours, but the mechanism can be heard creaking and groani