| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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The reason for the darkness is that three students have turned out the lights on the fourth, who was reading there, purportedly to allow their cat to give birth to her kittens in privacy. The humor of the scene is in the conversation of the students while they wait, and after ten pages of the scene, Mike looks into the cat’s box once the lights are turned on and says, “She wasn’t even in there” (14). Perhaps the three were playing a joke on Norman who was reading. But the playwright is simultaneously playing a joke on the audience, which can only assume that the opening lines are honest exposition. A few pages later, Dick explains to Norman that there is no cat: “Norman, there is no fucking cat. We haven’t got a cat. Boy, for a graduate student you got a lot to learn” (17).
Because Norman was the student reading, one can assume that Mike and Cootie, who seem never to be serious, were simply playing with him. When he confronts them at the opening of scene 4, however, Mike takes umbrage:
This seems funny because Norman is so sincere, and Mike and Cootie can put him on (and do) at will. The funniest moment in the play comes when they burst in after the anti-war demonstration screaming that Norman has set himself on fire; then Shelly comes in rebuking them, and Norman enters with a burnt wrist because they had changed his gasoline