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VIOLENCE IN JOHN GUARE’S A DAY FOR SURPRISES, SOMETHING I’LL TELL YOU TUESDAY AND THE

LOVELIEST AFTERNOON OF THE YEAR.

Dr. Mona F. Hashish.

Department of Languages and Translation.

College of Arts and Science.

The Northern Borders University. Rafhaa City, Saudi Arabia.

Email: hashishmona@gmail.com

Abstract

The study deals with three plays of the American playwright John Guare (1938- ): A Day for Surprises

(1971), Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday (1967) and The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year(1966). Guare wrote them in

an early phase of his dramatic career. Violence is a common theme in the three plays. Guare believes that his drama

belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd. He presents violence without justification or logical context. He means to

display disorder that suggests certain meanings since absurd plays are chaotic and suggestive. He is a social satirist

as well. He ridicules the modern way of living of the American citizens. He shows characters that live under

pressures and do not enjoy their lives. Such characters become psychotic and helpless. They exorcise their negative

feelings of anger, frustration and suppression by practicing or imagining violent actions. Violence in some of

Guare’s drama ends in murder. The research attempts to determine how Guare displays violence in his three plays

and searches for the motives beyond violence to come up with an interpretation. The protagonists of these plays are

abstract and bizarre. They are not individualized as normal human beings, and their speech and action mostly sound

strange. Guare deliberately uses the technical device of grotesquery in his drama to prove that life is not as

systematic as one might think. Guare, like other dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd, believes that the world has

its irregularities and weirdness. The research mainly follows a psychological approach depending on Sigmund

Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis to analyze the protagonists’ violent attitudes or their stories about violence in

society.

The research tackles three of John Guare (1938- )’s

plays: A Day for Surprises (1971), Something I’ll Tell

You Tuesday (1967) and The Loveliest Afternoon of

the Year(1966). They belong to the Theater of the

Absurd, and they present various bizarre characters

and violent incidents. The research tries to analyze

violence as a phenomenon by searching for the

reasons of violence and studying the motives of the

violent characters. The paper also shows how John

Guare manipulates violence to satirize the American

society and depends on the Theory of Grotesquery to

do so.

These three plays in specific are chosen to be the

focus of the research because they best represent

John Guare’s drama in an early phase of the

dramatist’s career. Moreover, Phillis Hartnoll and

Peter Found remark that Guare “first attracted

attention when The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year

and A Day for Surprises were produced at the Café

Cino in 1966” (201). Besides, Don Wilmeth and Tice

Miller note that “some critics have found his

[Guare’s] plays too cerebral or abstract,[and] lacking

focus” (212). Significantly, the difficulty of

understanding Guare’s plays make them challenging

to researchers. Arnold Hinchliffe notes, “It [absurd

drama] challenges the audience to make sense of

non-sense” (12). Therefore, the researcher tries to

find order beyond violence that is not justified in

Guare’s plays.

Needless to say, violence is not a new theme. It

is reflected upon in drama throughout ages. It is

dominant in Greek and Roman tragedies where

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murder is a major event. Similarly, sixteenth-century

tragedies highlight violence because Renaissance

dramatists like William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson

were generally influenced by the classical models.

Some modern dramatists throw light on violence as a

phenomenon in the modern societies. However, they

are mostly against employing the classical rules like

the division of a play into five acts, using classical

allusion and preserving the unities of action, time and

place. They experiment with modern techniques like

the Theatre of the Absurd, surrealism, impressionism

and the like.

John Fletcher observes,

[L]iterature… cannot help but

mirror the cruelty and violence of

the times,…the hysterical cruelties

inflicted by white suburbanites on

colored people protesting that race

should cease to influence real estate

sales, or the increasingly disturbing

phenomena of mass killings, or of

the collective rape of young women

by bands of youths, are horrors that

few artists could bring themselves

to deal with, at least at the present

time, but we should not be

surprised if writers or film-makers

do eventually examine them (164).

John Guare is one of the few contemporary

dramatists who choose to highlight violence in

drama. Guare deals with the theme of violence in his

three plays A Day for Surprises (1971), Something

I’ll Tell You Tuesday (1967) and The Loveliest

Afternoon of the Year(1966). The characters which he

portrays in these plays are often psychotic patients.

They live and work under social pressures; and so

they are unhappy.

Gene Plunka proposes,

The resulting sense of alienation and agoisse often leads Guare’s protagonists into violence as a means of expressing their frustrations. Life in Guare’s world, much of it expressed in New York City as a microcosm for the craziness of contemporary urban life, is synonymous with violence and teeming hostilities. When Guare’s characters ultimately realize their unfulfilled

dreams, the consequences are often

brutal. Guare reminds us through

the violence that our wounds never

disappear and that this modern

neurosis is never pleasant (16).

Suzanne Dieckman also points out, “Several critics

have been shocked by the cruelty in Guare’s work,

but the majority have praised his wit and theatrical

inventiveness, particularly his ability to blend two

genres: outrageous farce and tragedy into a pointed

critique of modern culture” (246).

It may be contended that John Guare is an absurdist American playwright who is talented in presenting the tragic event in a humorous manner. This is obvious in the three plays under study in this paper. The violent characters look strange and funny. In A Day for Surprises, the stone lion leaves its perch in the street and enters the library to eat Miss Pringle (17-18). In Something I’ll Tell

You Tuesday, Hildegarde is too talkative to stop

talking about problems (8).

Last but not least, in The Loveliest Afternoon

of the Year, Maud, the young man’s disagreeable

wife is fat, ugly and aggressive(27). Jean Stine et al.

suggest, “Linking Guare with this [Theater of the

Absurd] movement is his use of exaggeration, shock,

ludicrousness, and black humor….Placed in

unpleasant situations or environments, Guare’s

characters… display negative aspects of human

nature” (203). Guare himself admits to the

interviewer John DiGaetani that his plays are not

postmodern but absurd (108);

Guare says,

It is impossible not to be influenced

by the absurd….That’s just a handy

label for that which has existed for

all time from Aeschylus on

down…. I think Theater of the

Absurd is just a critical label for

something that has existed since

ancient Greece. Euripides’ The

Bacchae is one of the greatest

examples I know of the Theater of

the Absurd (108).

Anne Cirella-Urrutia states that symbolism is a

dominant feature in the Theater of the Absurd (7-8).

The fierce lion in A Day for Surprises stands for the

capitalist American society. The librarians work for

long hours and consequently feel isolated and

dehumanized. For example, Mr. Falanzano is unable

to express his emotion naturally like other human

beings—he talks about his affair with Miss Pringle in

terms of books, data and information. He does not

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use love words. His speech takes the form of a long

monologue. He tells Miss Jepson,

She said I’ve never loved anybody

so I want this to be good. I said oh,

I had never loved anybody before

either. So I took a copy of Love

Without Fear and she took a

Modern Manual on How To Do It,

and we wrapped—like Christmas

packages for people you love—

wrapped our bodies, our

phosphorescent, glowing, about-to-

become-human bodies around each

other. And began reading (20).

At the end of the monologue, Falanzano laments his

fate as a librarian: “My life has been lived in books. I

had become a book…Library paste…we all would’ve

been better off if we’d never opened a book” (22).

This absurd play opens with violence and ends

in violence. Arnold Hinchliffe proposes, “absurd

literary means out of harmony” (1). Miss Jepson tells

Mr. Falanzano at the beginning of the play, “It’s

sitting in the Ladies’ Room with Miss Pringle’s feet

sticking out of its mouth—out of the lion’s mouth. I

know it’s Miss Pringle as I’d been admiring her blue

beaded shoes only this morning” (18). Mr. Falanzano

ran to the ladies’ room and returned sadly with a pair

of blue beaded shoes (18). At the end of the play,

Miss Jepson tells Mr. Falanzano, “The lion’s on its

perch now. You’d never know he moved. Except for

that little piece of pink garter on its tooth dangling

like a salmon” (22).

This love story is sad because Mr. Falanzano could

not marry Miss Pringle as he had planned. Jack Kroll

points out, “The glory of Guare is his unabashed (or

perhaps abashed) romanticism, his bifocal vision of

the tragic and the absurd” (206). However, Kroll

adds that Guare’s characters often search for certain

‘utopias’ (206). Mr. Falanzano indeed searches for

remedy after he has lost his beloved. Miss Jepson

consoles him. She touches him seductively and sings

for him to show him her love. Both Mr. Falanzano

and Miss Jepson dream of establishing a humanized

love relationship away from book and library. Gene

Plunka notes,

Guare is interested in exploring how we can remain true to the ideals on which American Society was originally established …. The fragmented life of modern urban society may corrupt us and channel us into disingenuous behavior, but the utopian spirit and our personal dreams can still exist…. We must gain the self-understanding and spiritual self-awareness that once

defined our greatness and created

high culture. Guare thus often

allows his protagonists to dream,

even if their utopian desires are

ultimately dashed by the brutalities

of the real world (17).

Hildegarde’s frequent fights with her husband

George is the source of violence in Something I’ll

Tell You Tuesday. Hildegarde always complains to

her parents Agnes and Andrew of George and

expresses her dissatisfaction with his deeds. She

enrages and provokes George to reply back. This also

leads her parents to get bored. The parents do not

want to drive with Hildegarde or George to the

hospital where Agnes will receive treatment. Andrew

tells Agnes, “Ah, it hurts me the way they fight” (6).

Though Agnes is bothered by the fights, she thinks

fighting is healthy because it indicates love, youth

and vivacity and it releases tension (16). She reminds

Andrew of one of their old fights:

That streak on the wall.

Remember? …

The painters had just finished

painting this room and the walls

were still wet and we were fighting

about something and I got mad at

you and threw the grapefruit I was

eating at you and you ducked and

the grapefruit stuck to the wet wall

and slid all the way down to the

floor (6).

Hildegarde’s harsh speech is obvious when she

furiously blames George for knocking over yellow

markers on the bridge while driving and insists to

drive her parents to the hospital instead of him (7).

George cannot control his manners and say in front of

Hildegarde’s parentst, “I do not know where she gets

her voice from. She screams and it does something to

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your ears” (8). Hildegarde resumes the fight saying,

“He called me the worst names once we got off that

bridge. Names you wouldn’t call the lowest scum on

earth he called me” (8-9).

Violence in this play is incarnated not only in

words but also in gesture and action:

Hildegarde: Okay, George, drive

me insane. If that’s what’s going to

make you happy, you go right

ahead and drive me insane.

(George stands up disgustedly.

Hildegarde covers her head with

her arms.) Don’t you dare hit me!

(Andrew starts for her. Agnes pulls

him back.) Papa, help! (8)….

(Whispering.) He’d hit me. He has.

He will. (9).

Then Hildegarde complains that George bought

an expensive fancy dress to their daughter Monica

and he knows that her underclothes are torn with

holes. George accuses her of being jealous (11).

Agnes and Andrew use the chance of the departure of

Hildegarde and George to fetch the car and walk to

the hospital. They want to go to the hospital in peace.

Agnes enjoys walking by Andrew because she misses

intimacy. She tells him, “We haven’t been out

together like this in a very long while. This is like a

date. I feel very young” (15).

Agnes urges Andrew to go to a café to take two

cups of coffee before going to the hospital. In the

café, Andrew expresses his worry about Hildegarde’s

marital life, but Agnes assures him that she is okay.

She explains to him,

You know what I’m gonna tell her

Tuesday when she comes with the

kids?.... I’m gonna tell her she’s

lucky they still fight. That’s the

worst part of getting old, I decided

…Not even a hot bath or a cup of

tea can make you feel as clean as

when I’d finish yelling at you and

you’d finish yelling at me….You

just don’t have the energy to fight”

(16).

Guare’s perspective on violence in A Day for

Surprises and Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday is not

quite different from his in The Loveliest Afternoon of

the Year. In the three plays, Guare shows that

violence can be positive in healing people’s

psychological problems. In The Loveliest Afternoon

of the Year, young man and woman meet by chance

at a public park. Her way of feeding the pigeons

attracts him to her. He startles her when he asks her

to stop because he has seen pigeons foaming at the

beaks at another place.

She thinks him a mugger because he

approaches her closely and talks nonsense (21). The

man assures her he is not a mugger and begs for one

crackerjack (21)! She is scared and hits him with her

bag. She believes he is richer than her for he wears a

fancy sport coat (22). His advances are considered

sexual harassment because the lady does not

welcome them. Alison Thomas argues, “Like many

feminist sociologists, I see acts of sexual harassment

…as instances from a continuum of male behaviors

through which men consciously or unconsciously act

to assert and maintain their dominance over women”

(135). Rosemarie Skaine agrees with Thomas saying,

“sexual harassment… is not about love or romance, it

is about social control…[and displaying] male

power” (11-12).

The man swears he is poor and tells the lady

weird stories about his life. He narrates to her how

his wife takes his coins and subway token and bends

them in her teeth. He adds that she shoots his feet

with her rifle that has a silencer whenever he comes

home late (22). Moreover, he narrates to the lady

about his sister Lucy whose arm was stuck in the

cage of a polar bear, so the bear bit it off. Though

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doctors could set back the arm by a surgical

operation, white bear hair grew on Lucy’s body (23-

24). The lady does not take his horrible stories

seriously and calls them “awfully funny” (23). She

finds the man amusing. He starts to love him.

The lady says a long monologue that shows she

has been suppressed by society:

SHE: I have been in this city

eleven months now and you are the

first person I’ve spoken to. That’s

spoken to me. Eleven months of

silence—till now. I feel like I’ve

just been released from a

convent—a goddam convent. No,

I’m not laughing at you. I’m a

young girl and I’m pretty and

nobody ever speaks to me—not

even to ask directions—and you’re

the funniest man I’ve ever met and

I thank you in all the languages

there are. Thank you for speaking

to me (22).

Here, an accusing finger turns against the capitalist

American society again. People under the capitalist

system are too busy to make friendship with

strangers. They

work like machines to make money and lead a

comfortable life. They suffer from loneliness though.

The lonely man and lady are happy to be

companions. They meet every weekend in the park.

They fall in love before they know each other better.

The lady suspects that the man’s strange stories are

true. She tells the audience, “He has his life and I

have mine… mugger or not—I like him very much”

(23). The lady is weak enough to submit to the man’s

advances. If she had been psychologically balanced,

she would have never loved such a weird man.

In the meanwhile, the man submerges her in a

romantic atmosphere. He sings loudly and sweetly to

her. He also assures her that he does not have a wife.

He adds, “You’ve saved my life. I’ve never picked

anybody else up before but something about you—

the way you fed those pigeons—I wanted to know

you, and now…now it looks like I’d better thank

you” (25). He feels he is cured of certain

psychological illness.

However, the last part of the man’s love song

shocks the lady. He sings, “We saved both our lives/

Which should lead to husbands and wives/ But since

we must part/ Feed the pigeon that cries in my heart”

(26). That message demonstrates that he cannot

marry the lady he loves. The young lady is shocked

more when she sees a fat woman pushing a stroller

where two ugly fat babies sit. She realizes that that

woman is the man’s wife especially when she finds

her holding a blind dog by a leash.

The young man is scared of his violent wife

Maud. He asks the young lady to hide with him

otherwise Maud will get her rifle from beneath the

children and shoot them (27). Without thinking, the

young lady replies, “And would that be any worse

than you leaving me, me leaving you, you going back

to her, me going back to my empty apartment” (27-

28). This means that she cannot imagine living

without him.

The lady’s courage and sincerity give the man

spiritual support. He immediately overcomes his

fears and decides to face his fate. The couple happily

courts violence. They enrage the wife by calling her

and kissing in front of her.

[26]

7Once she notices what they are doing, she shoots

them, and they fall dead (28). Suzanne Dieckman

remarks,

Violence in Guare’s dramatic world

is never merely gratuitous—it

seems to be the only course of

action for people trapped in a

cellophane-wrapped society….

[T]he couple [in The Loveliest

Afternoon of the Year] chooses to

be murdered by the man’s

grotesque wife rather than separate

and return to their isolated, dreary

existences (244).

On a point suggestively relevant, violence in

these three plays sounds illogical and is unjustified

by John Guare. In A Day for Surprises, it is not

mentioned why the hungry lion leaves the people in

the street and library and chooses to eat Miss Pringle.

In Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday, nobody knows

what kind of marital problem is there between

Hildegarde and George. And in The loveliest

Afternoon of the Year, the man’s wife is abnormal for

carrying a rifle under her children’s seat in the

stroller and shooting her husband and the young

woman without even talking to them. Edmund

Thomas and Eugene Miller says that absurdity is

“[s]omething that is foolish, ridiculous…,plainly not

true , not sensible or contradictory” (249).

Guare’s violent characters seem dangerous and

grotesque. Gene Plunka determines, “critics have

accused him [Guare] of creating cartoonish

characters whose eccentricities bear little

resemblance to reality…..[However, Guare] finds the

sources for his ‘bizarre’ material in everyday life [as

he admits]” (17-18). In fact, avant-gardist writers like

Guare use the grotesque to prove that life is irrational

and full of irregularities.

In The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year, the

young man tells the young lady in the park that life is

full of “weirdness” (24). Here, he is Guare’s

mouthpiece. Gautam Dasgupta points out, “Horrific

and bizarre incidents clutter the plays [of John

Guare], and …they seldom stray from the realistic

premise on which they are grounded. Although

danger lurks at every corner, and events unfold

without the least provocation, there is a sense that

such things belong to normal everyday life” (204).

Grotesquery is, in fact, one feature of the

Theatre of the Absurd. J. A. Cuddon remarks, “In

literature one is most likely to find grotesque

elements in caricature, parody, satire, invective,

burlesque, black comedy, the macabre and what is

known as the theatre of the Absurd” (295). Jonnie

Patricia Mobley points out, “plays in the absurdist

tradition attempt to show the irrational and illogical

aspects of life through absurd characters, dialogue

and situations” (1).

Rodney Simard also notes that the absurdist

dramatists try “to expand the definitions and

boundaries of dramatic reality beyond the limits

imposed by naturalism… [and] destroy

reader/audience identification and have the effect of

forcing subjective interpretation” (22). Therefore,

writers of absurd drama employ imagination and

exaggeration to make what is familiar looks

‘grotesque.’ Accordingly, the audience get alienated

and detached. They feel that the play they watch is

not a real life but mere imagination.

Philip Thomson determines, “The grotesque is

the expression of the estranged or alienated

world…(…this strangeness may be either comic or

terrifying, or both). The grotesque is a game with the

absurd, in the sense that the grotesque artist plays,

half laughingly, half horrified, with the deep

absurdities of existence” (18). Emma Brockes states

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that John Guare is against Naturalistic drama that

shows reality as it is and avoids imagination” (n.p.).

She quotes Guare, “What I hate about kitchen-sink

dramas is that the set is real, therefore, you’re going

to be seeing truth….Naturalism believes by just

replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than

earning the truth” (n.p.).

Hence, violence in Guare’s drama functions as a

psychological remedy. Guare does not exhibit

violence haphazardly. It is a measured violence.

Guare deliberately portrays grotesque figures like the

stone lion, Hildegarde and the young man’s wife to

perform violent deeds that exorcise or drive out

charges of anger. Clive Barnes asserts that Guare’s

drama belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd for

involving organized irrationalities or as he mentions

“calculated irrelevancy” and “astonishingly logical

illogicality” (203).

Guare’s characters whether initiators or victims

of violence are city-dwellers.

They all suffer from social ills like capitalism, heavy

workloads, utilitarianism,….etc. Gautam Dasgupta

thinks that Guare has specialized in city drama

because he was born and raised in New York City

and so he “is acutely aware of the many problems

that face urban man…” (204). Dasgupta describes

Guare’s city characters’ attitudes as follows:

Down-and- out characters, forever

arguing or complaining about lost

opportunities, inhabit shabby

middle-class dwellings and display

extreme forms of urban paranoia….

Clinging desperately to dreams of a

better life, they continually chase

after their visions, only to be drawn

deeper and deeper into frustration

and despair….More often than not,

they express their anguish through

senseless violence or festering hate

(204).

Guare is considered a social critic. He criticizes

urban communities for putting psychological

pressures on American citizens at home and work.

Guare criticizes society in a humorous way. He

cannot be called a serious writer. Suzanne Dieckman

says that “Guare creates a cartoonlike dramatic world

that at its best is both agonizing and outrageously

funny” (243).

Though the characters are funny, they stand for

sad frustrated individuals. For example, Miss Jepson

in A Day for Surprises loves Mr. Falanzano and is

jealous of Miss Pringle. When Mr. Falanzano tells

Miss Jepson that he used to love Miss Pringle and

planned to marry her, Miss Jepson gets shocked. She

says a long monologue that reflects her suppressed

love at-one-side:

Well, you sneakies! You and Miss

Pringle! Why don’t you let

anybody know! Isn’t this a day for

surprises! You and Denise

Pringle—It’s like all the surprises

of the world store themselves up

for a day when the one thing you

do not need is a surp…you and

Denise Pring…sonofagun…(18).

In that monologue, Miss Jepson expresses her

subjective unpleasant feelings. Her psychological

disturbance is reflected in the elliptical telegram-like

phrases that form a compressed syntax and

incomplete or unintelligible words like “surp” which

stands for “surprise.” Besides, “sonofagun” is a

nonsensical word. Non-conventional discourse often

has such slipping and sliding of language.

Furthermore, Miss Jepson’s consolation to Mr.

[28]

Falanzano for the loss of his beloved proves that she

is emotionally attracted to him. “She touches his

shoulder comfortingly” (19). “She begins pasting him

with paste from the paste pot. She pastes her hand to

his cheek.. She pastes his hand to her breast” (22).

All such gestures show Miss Jepson’s love to Mr.

Falanzano.

The stage direction in Something I’ll Tell You

Tuesday show that tension and unhappiness appear

on Hildegarde and George’s faces: “Hildegarde’s

hair is askew. George looks like he’s on the brink of

either murder or an ulcer” (6). And in The Loveliest

Afternoon of the Year, both young man and lady

suffer from loneliness. The lady says that no-one

wants to communicate with her for eleven months, so

her life has changed into “a goddam convent” that

lacks fun and entertainment (22).

The young man also needs to have a good

partner. He is disempowered as a man by his

domineering wife. It seems she abuses him and

reduces his job only to having sex and guiding her

blind dog (26). He redeems his feelings of being

coerced by his wife by dominating the young lady.

First, he harasses her, and then he tells lies saying he

is not married to make the lady fall in love with him.

We can see even more clearly that the

characters in Guare’s three plays—A Day for

Surprises, Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday and The

Loveliest Afternoon of the Year—are neurotic.

According to Sigmund Freud, the cause of the major

neuroses is the disorder in one’s “contemporary

sexual life or in …[one’s] past [sexual] life” (149).

Gene Plunka confirms, “Freud’s clinical

investigations convinced him that childhood or adult

sexual disorders formed the basis for all types of

neuroses—mental disorders characterized by anxiety,

insecurity, depression, or unreasonable fears” (93).

Miss Jepson and Mr. Falanzano suffer from

neurotic problems. First, Miss Jepson is occupied

with fear on discovering the disappearance of the

stone lion from the street. She gasps and stammers

while telling Mr. Falanzano about the incident. She

says, “Ppppppardon me, Sir—bbbbbbbbut you have

got HAVE GOT to llllloooook out your window”

(17). She picks up the word lion in an encyclopedia

saying “LLLLLLLLLLLinnaeum Linoleum Lion—

Lion” (18). All these unintelligible utterances mark

an absence of linguistic poetics. Slipping and sliding

of language are forms of non-conventional discourse.

Second, Mr. Falanzano looks insane when he

“has a fit and rips all the books in the room in

pieces” (146).Then he tells Miss Jepson that once he

was in a bad need of communicating with anybody,

so he goes to search for a good book and met Miss

Pringle by chance among the stacks. They developed

a relationship because she too badly needed to have

human company(147). This past sexual experience

has psychologically troubled Mr. Falanzano since it

had a sad end. Miss Pringle became pregnant and

“did not want the child” (21). So, Mr. Falanzano read

about abortion and helped her to miscarry the baby

(21).

In Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday, it seems that

George is too cold to express his love to his wife.

Hildegarde’s ego makes her nervous and aggressive.

According to culture and society, a wife should be

decent and tolerant. The superego often resigns to the

will of culture and society and stands for one’s

conscience. In this play, Hildegarde’s ego is stronger

than her superego.

Further, both the young man and lady in The

Loveliest Afternoon of the Year are psychologically

troubled. They fear each other on their first meeting.

He is “[t]error-stricken” and talking nonsense (21).

He says, “pigeons were foaming at the beaks” (21).

[29]

She, on the other hand, thinks that the young man is a

mugger and searches for her “tear gas gun” in her

purse (21). Fear and uncertainty make both of them

aggressive. He asks for crackerjacks and the present

in its box (21-22). The man’s unsuccessful marital

life affects his mentality and makes him look insane.

Gene Plunka notes, “As is typical in Guare’s

plays, the frustration of being unable to connect in

any spiritual way because our fantasies or our egoism

interfere usually results in violence” (100). Plunka

adds, “As is typical in his plays, Guare demonstrates

the lack of compassion and spiritual connection may

exacerbate the insanity and violence so prevalent in

contemporary life” (93).

Therefore, frustration leads to violence in

Guare’s plays: Miss Jepson, before knowing about

the actual death of Miss Pringle, expresses her wish

to get rid of her by imagining that a stone lion ate her.

Her story of the lion is like a dream. Joan Mellen

states that according to Sigmund Freud dreams reflect

on people’s inner realities that lie in the unconscious

(57). Hildegarde’s unhappy marriage creates of her a

nagging wife. The young man’s wife, who is fat, ugly

and disagreeable, works to satisfy her ego by abusing

her husband and shooting anybody who enrages her.

Her superego is too weak to make her change to

become socially acceptable. Her failure to be as

attractive to her husband as the young lady creates of

her a miserable vindictive character.

All these characters are indeed imbalanced and

psychologically broken. Violence is a result of their

helplessness to communicate right. Society and

people are to blame for being intolerant and ruthless.

They degrade them to be grotesque clowns instead of

helping them to become sociable and agreeable.

Michael Steig defines the grotesque from a

psychological point of view. He notes that it reflects

on one’s “intrapsychic conflicts” through mixing

terror with humor (259-260).

For instance, Miss Jepson in A Day for

Surprises pretends to be scared of the stone lion (17).

Her story of the lion is funny and unrealistic. Thomas

Markus says that one critic remarks, “The impossible

is made casual [where] a 28,000 pound stone lion

walks through the Public Library without attracting

attention” (331). Hildegarde in Something I’ll Tell

You Tuesday is also dehumanized and looks graphic-

like for fighting over George’s slight mistakes. Her

ego makes her too proud to ask for attention in a

tactful manner. She looks jealous when she

comments on George buying her daughter a fancy

dress (11); and she appears ungrateful and rude when

George offers her a glass of sugared water and she

says the water tastes different (9).

In The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year, the

young man and lady communicate in an abnormal

way. He harasses her. She hits him, then she likes his

strange speech and accepts his eccentricities. She

tells the audience, “He’s really an odd person—an

odd duck. But he does tell me awfully funny

stories” (23).

Mona Abousenna asserts, “man’s imprisonment

through habit and egoism…prevents him from acting

in any meaningful or purposeful manner” (viii).

Guare, in fact, means to write about the

aspiration of such victimized Americans. Philip

Thomson points out that according to Arthur

Clayborough’s theory of grotesquery a writer

employs grotesquery to express either his conscious

or unconscious mind (17). Frances Locher asserts

that Guare writes consciously about social problems

(260). Locher quotes Guare, “Life is the unconscious,

writing the conscious” (260).

[30]

There is a need to recognize that Guare employs

the grotesque as a technical device to satirize society

in a humorous way. Andrew Stott notes,

“‘Grotesque’….include[s] anything across the arts

that contained elements of the ridiculous, the

horrifying, and the bizarre. The grotesque is a form of

exaggerated and ambivalent social commentary

produced by the violent clash of opposites, especially

those that are comic and terrifying, existing in a state

of unresolved tension” (87). In a sense, Guare is

realistic in referring to real strange events that occur

in society. Robert Brustein remarks, “we should be

grateful that at least one American playwright [like

Guare] is willing to create an [a] historical context for

his work” (209).

It cannot be disputed that Guare reflects the

American citizens’ agonies in one way or another.

Terry Fox argues,

Guare has always defined his plays

as being about the conflict between

dreams and the world. But it strikes

me that Guare at his best is about

much more than that. He is a man

at once furious at the imperfections

of the world…. Guare is not a

social critic standing on the outside

and laughing with slight disdain.

He is inside, and it is from this

particularly painful vantage point

that the laughter comes. It brings

not … righteous anger but a

desperate struggle against despair

(34-35).

In his three plays A Day for Surprises,

Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday and The Loveliest

Afternoon of the Year, Guare investigates the needs

of the American characters. He shows that they yearn

for certain utopias which they cannot attain in the

recent time. Guare illustrates this point to the

interviewer John DiGaetani, “Central concerns in all

drama are certainly the need to be happy, the inability

to face reality, the need not to be humiliated” (109).

For example, Miss Jepson in A Day for Surprises

complains of loneliness. She tells Mr. Falanzano,

“There’s a lot of lonely girls in this town” (19).

Hildegarde in Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday

dreams of marital happiness and George dreams of

peace at home. And in The Loveliest Afternoon of the

Year, the young lady aspires for social

communication. She loves the young man and wants

to stay in his company even when she learns he has a

wife (27-28). Moreover, the young man yearns for a

delicate nice wife. He wishes he could be able to

marry the young lady. He confesses to her he has

fallen in love at first sight once he saw her feeding

the pigeons (25).

To put it in a nutshell, the research tackles the

issue of violence in three of John Guare’s early plays:

A Day for Surprises, Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday

and The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year. Guare

demonstrates that although violence is an external

phenomenon, it has internal reasons which are

frustration, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Hence,

the study offers an interpretation of the characters’

violent attitudes by referring to their psychological

motives. The paper also reveals the fact that Guare

highlights the element of the grotesque in his three

plays to reflect various cases of neuroses and prove

that there is weirdness in the world. As a social

satirist, Guare criticizes the American society for

pressurizing its citizens and consequently causing

some individuals to collapse under pressure.

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