| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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to water, which would not light. Again, the audience, at first, can only assume they are telling the truth until Norman himself enters.
Here too, one can laugh at Norman’s naïveté until the opening of the next scene: “Ruth is scraping some cat foot into a bowl. A cat comes in and eats. Kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty. Chomp, chomp. Good girl. Make a lot of milk for the kitties” (50–51). At this point one must conclude that there is a cat—though it is not seen until the fifth of a seven-scene play.
The play is filled with similar ambiguities/misconstructions/deceptions. Cootie and Mike say they are brothers, but there is no way to confirm or deny that until the last scene when they are picked up by different fathers, and seem to have no kinship at all. Ruth tells Kathy that Dick is having an affair with Professor Roper’s wife. Later Dick gives an impassioned denial and wonders who could have spread such horrid rumors about him. But at the end of the play, Bob receives a call from Mrs. Roper that implies that what Ruth said was true. The audience, in all these cases, has no way to know what is true and what is not.
The most ambiguous character in the play is Bob. One cannot make sense of his reaction to being drafted, his relationship with Kathy, or the death of his mother. But the play concludes with a three-page monologue in which he tells Kathy about his mother’s death and she simply leaves. At its conclusion, “The cat wanders in from the hallway. Hey cat, what are you doing hanging around here? All the humans gone west” (80). Finally the cat puts in another appearance, but what does it mean? Different people take different positions and seem totally convinced of them, just as the Vietnam debate was constructed of those committed to opposing perspectives.
All of this is designed to play with the audience’s expectations, and to undermine subtly the audience’s certainty of having an objective, all-knowing position from which to judge the action. Previous realistic plays empowered the audience through the illusion of detached objectivity. Absurdist plays did the opposite. Postmodern plays, by contrast, both give the audience certainty with a seemingly realistic setting, but then take it away. Weller is quite conscious about what he is doing as he toys with the existence/non-existence of the cat from the outset. Though