Happy Endings

In the Blood, recently put on by UW Drama, does not have a happy ending. The run is over now and the play has been published for many years, so it’s no spoiler to say that. 

The main character, Hester, ends up killing her oldest child, ruining her own life and the lives of her other four children. You sort of see it coming and sort of not. Chekhov’s gun is brandished multiple times, as Hester says, to her children and others, “Don’t make me hurt you.” But you think, if you are like me, that that is maybe the end of it, and meant to show the impact of her circumstances. The world, embodied in the other adult characters, has treated her horribly. Anyone in her place would be justified in being angry and lashing out in some way. Alas, the lashings move beyond verbal in the final scenes. 

Buried Child, by Sam Shepard does not have a happy ending either. Each character is more desperately pathetic than the next. Instead of empathy, the suffering portrayed produces distance between you and the people on stage. A family sort of finishes disintegrating, right in front of you, into a pile of betrayal, weakness and death. Not good.

But it’s different. In the middle of a conversation with a friend today about In the Blood, I said one of those thoughts you did not realize you had until you speak it. I said In the Blood has a difficult, maybe even depressing ending. Even so, you feel a call to justice. The tragedy of Hester is that the world mistreated her so badly that she took the action she did. In a better world, you think, no one would ever live in such desperate circumstances. In a better world, no one would inflict so much cruelty on Hester. Let me think about what my part is in creating the world as it is. Let me think about how to make it better. 

Buried Child is not that, at least not for me. I came away thinking that people are irredeemably awful, life is an unfunny joke, and it just keeps getting worse. And there is no way out. There was a miasma over me for days. I like to say I saw it at age 18 and I still have never gotten over it. (As an aside, I also think maybe seeing that show has something to do with my love of theater. After all, if a show could have that much impact, there must be something really special going on in there, in that dark room.) 

So I could see, I told my friend, why people don’t like plays like these two, that don’t have happy endings. But I had never really distinguished for myself that there are two (at least, I suppose) kinds of unhappy endings. One leading to hope, or maybe even action and change. And another leading to a sort of stunned stasis. I think there is something to that.