Fake Plastic Trees

There’s a short little exchange in the first act. Chance is in the process of telling the Princess his story. He tells her about Heavenly and about the love he had for Heavenly. In the midst of the story the little exchange goes

Chance: “Each time I came back to St. Cloud I had her love to come back to…”

Princess: “Something permanent in a world of change?”

As I read this line I thought of the song Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead:

Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out

She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
He used to do surgery
For girls in the eighties
But gravity always wins

It wears him out, it wears him out
It wears him out, it wears him out

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

It wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out

If I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted all the time

All the time...
All the time...

The lyrics really resonated with as well as connected the issues it seemed that Chance had in the play. His constant search for love was probably this search for that consistency in the crazy world around him, and that seems to be a universal need that all humans have.  He struggles to find that between his love of Heavenly as well his love of Princess. And for all of these characters it’s all fake, all made of plastic. They struggle for that consistency whether it’s in the world of acting, aging, or love and can’t seem to find it. Chance looked for that consistency in pills, hash, and alcohol, the only constants for him throughout the play. The last lines of the song remind me of Chance’s “loss” in terms of finding that permanent thing. If only Chance could be who Heavenly wanted, if only he could be who Boss Finley wanted, if only he could be who Princess wanted he may have been able to find that consistency.  Unfortunately for Chance he ends up alone in the fake plastic world he’s created for himself, and it wears him out.