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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Act 1
A happy family, one husband, one wife and three lovely children. Child A has a holiday performance on Thursday morning and needs to wear a “green Christmas sweater, blue jeans and white sneakers” per teacher instructions. Child 2 has Christmas caroling at the old people’s home on Friday and needs a red dress and plate of cookies. Child 3 is receiving an award for a speech on Friday also, and will be needing a birthday present for friend’s party that same afternoon. Wife takes care of all of these things noiselessly, on top of regular work. She also lets husband know where to be on performance and award day.
Act 2
Husband: shows up.
Act 3
Society: why do women complain about mental labor? It’s a fiction that only exists in their hysterical imaginations and they invent tasks to do because they are hysterical.

Curtain. [/quote]

The way this play starts is basically Finnegan's Wake. "One husband, one wife..." Should I assume that there would be 2 or 3 or 4 wives and husbands? This grey area shows the author's depth. Is anyone else confused by the naming of the children? We move from a letter schematic to a numbering schematic. Is child A adopted? Is child A even real? Does child A represent man's inhumanity to man? Is the author of this playing then numbering children to represent a slide in the west to depersonalization over individuality? Does the mother even know she has three kids and can't count? 
Act 2 is brutal. The husband, a nameless, faceless character does something for his, alleged, children. Heartbreaking. He shows up, but he doesn't. That tension is so real, so raw, so honest. You can really feel this amorphous person doing things for his family and how much the wife resents him. It's devastating. Act 3 shook me--the chorus just comes in hot with mental labor and no context. The text does the thing it talks about--it comes in hysterically, invents itself and its' complaints, and then leaves just as abruptly. The curtain wrecked me. Is that a curtain on society? On the marriage? On the play? Does the husband kill himself because he has to listen to his wife complain about doing things she wanted and all he does is "show up"--does he just stop? This play is a masterpiece of post-structural literature. We are lucky to have this literary giant putting out these works on DCUM. [/quote]

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