“Oh, I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You
won’t help me! You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You don’t know how to
act in a home! You don’t really want one! You never have wanted one- never
since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in
second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!” (P 69)
Whoa. Clearly Mary isn’t too happy about
her home… or James’ home… or whatever it is. Point is she doesn’t like the
family’s summer residency. She makes it very obvious to the readers and her
family that she can’t stand living in this run-down countryside home. In fact
it’s even better than the second rate hotels she and James used to live in
while he worked. That image really
resonated with me for some reason. An image of a dark, old hotel room with
walls covered in faded flowery wallpaper that makes the room look like a
nursing home built in the 1920’s. Obviously the rooms were never described like
this in the play but these are the images that shot straight to my mind. A
smoky bar with a couple big guys in biker jackets and tattoos playing pool,
with a 65 year old female singer in a sequin dress singing Barbara Streisand
songs on a small stage in the far corner. In my mind it all just seemed very OK…
very mediocre, subpar… call it what you will but the many homes the Tyrone
family inhabited all kind of stunk. And if those hotels were the best they’ve
had I began to understand each of their homes as a metaphor for the family
dynamic, which is dysfunctional to say the least (shout out to CORE 102 Family
Feud).The lack of a steady home, or home at all, is a way to represent the
issues that plague the Tyrone family. Yet just as James strives to call the
summer place a real home, the family strives to be a classic happy family, and
at least throughout the first two acts the family fails miserably. It’ll be
interesting to see how this image of a home in relation to the family ties
continues to play out in the rest of the play.
-Ameet Eini
No comments:
Post a Comment