“Boundaries are for countries on a map, not people” (1.2.29), proclaims Hilary from
Nicky Silver’s hybrid family drama dark comedy of manners Raised in Captivity. Hilary, like all of Silver’s characters, operates in a world that refuses to be defined by classical forms of genre but lives either within or outcast from the family structure. In his introduction to an interview with Nicky Silver, writer David Savran writes of Silver’s aesthetic that he while he tends to focus on family unit he throws all sorts of ingredients into the mix: “Medea, Helter Skelter, the Bible, and thirties musical comedies” (Savran 214). Like the late
Arthur Miller, Nicky Silver has found that his most powerful pieces rely on the institution of the American family and the experience of tragedy upon the common man. However, while Miller made famous the notion that even the common Salesman was able to experience the same kind of heightened tragedy as Kings, Silver takes it a step farther and gives entire casts of characters, including female characters, a tragic flaw and updates the modern American kitchen sink drama for new audiences.
Even in the most extreme circumstances and darkest moments Silver’s characters never cease to feel all too human. While characters may commit incest, murder, or eat their dead family members Silver makes the choice that they are plain spoken and as common as any Salesman or withering southern belle. Nicky Silver’s plays pick up where the greats of modern American theatre left off. Silver, an award-winning playwright with a penchant for the absurd injects his homemade idiosyncratic quirks into the established American family
kitchen sink drama of Arthur Miller, and by doing so creates families and characters that are extraordinary and frighteningly relatable.
Arthur Miller’s families are the idealized saviors of American tragedy, while Silver’s are the tragedy of American life. In Arthur Miller’s immortal
Death of a Salesman Willy Loman and his family are torn apart by an unforgiving society and cling desperately to each other in an attempt to survive. Even after Willy’s suicide his family gathers in show of unity and mourns together. In golden years of Arthur Miller and
Clifford Odets, the family was always written to be the fall out shelter of tragedy. In other words, the world may be falling apart but a character could always find the strength to forge on through the family which was entirely linked to the culture of containment if the 1950s. However, Silver’s reinvention and update of surrealistic comedy turns the conventional and stalwart American family into a repressive and maniacal institution. “Rather than being a source of stability, the family is imagined as a socializing machine that never quite works the way it is supposed to and so produces all different varieties of perverse desires” (Sarvan 215).
Fig.2.Vertigo Theatre’s Production of Pterodactyls. (2008)
Not only is the family unit destructive but it is entirely isolating. Like Miller, Silver’s characters are defined by their relationship to a family unit, but they are also defined by their outsider status. In Silver’s Pterodactyls, the classic family drama takes a horrible turn. The play depicts the Duncan family whose members react to stress and tragedy by various denial mechanisms such as memory loss, alcoholism, and absurd behavior and three of the characters kill themselves as opposed to living with each anymore. Instead of trying to find comfort together like the Loman family, the Duncan’s are destroyed by their internal loneliness and their inherent and very human selfishness. The play takes aim at the main-streamed, moneyed, conventional American family and buries it under one satiric jibe after another. The set is the Duncan home, realistically furnished except for the huge dinosaurs that are ignored entirely (see Fig 2). The dinosaur figures act as symbol that the American family, like the dinosaurs, will become extinct and die out.
Nicky Silver focuses on the family dramas; however, his plays can not be considered classic kitchen sink dramas. The kitchen sink drama refers to the American adaptation of a British genre that became popular and mainstreamed by Miller in the 1950s that centers on the mundane tragedies of everyday common life. Silver uses the family drama but does not stay true to form throughout his plays. What may begin as a kitchen sink drama, can and will morph into farce, surrealism, and jump between high and low comedy all within a moment. As Silver commented in an interview with David Sarvan in the book The Playwright’s Voice, “I’ve always been specifically aware of genre and juxtaposition of genre and what that does to an audience---How it helps the audience into the world of the play, how it upsets them once they’re there” (qtd. in Sarvan 219). Silver clearly understands an audience’s connection to a family drama, but he also has a deep understanding of an audience’s response to turning the drama and convention on its head. Depending on the action of the play Silver will utilize whatever genre or form that would be most useful to him within that particular play.
As the characters of Silver plays all have very specific and personal story arcs, a the Characters enter his worlds indiscriminately appearing and disappearing on a whim, unlike the classical drama’s of Miller when the audience knows for sure whose story the play belongs to i.e. Death of a Salesman. The Audience can never be entirely sure of a Silver character’s motives until the curtain drops. He delights not only in throwing different and seemingly unrelated genres at the audience but also goes out of his way to challenge audience perceptions of a character. Just as the audience is lead to believe they are supposed to be cheering for one character, that character will go and kill another character so that the audience never really knows what is going to happen or who they should be watching as even minor characters can take over the plays. For example, the role of Phillip in Free Will and Wanton Lust only appears briefly within act one and he easily wins over the audience with his quick wit and good natured appeal. That entire façade falls to pieces later in the second act when after a twenty minute monologue about his multiple hilarious failures with women; he quickly pulls the rug out from under the audience and reveals he has killed someone. Silver’s characters, like the plays they are contained within, refuse to be labeled or two dimensional. By Phillip evoking all kinds of different reactions from the audience, Silver has the power to shape the audience’s conventional black and white perceptions of good and evil. Can a self professed murder be lovable and funny, and still be a murderer? In a Silver play, it’s a common occurrence.
Miller’s characters are completely unaware that they are being watched within their family trials, while Silver’s families are all too aware that they are being watched and address the audience as they see fit. In his plays Nicky Silver explores this narcissism that is painfully matched with an equally grandiose sense-of-self loathing that is written to be entirely relatable. Silver is quick to point out that this charming feature is indicative of his own personality that has seeped into his characters. “I once told a therapist of mine that if I ever won an Oscar for writing a movie, I would never go for fear the entire country would look at me and think , look at that fat gay mess up there” (qtd. in Collins 218). While this idea is seemingly very self-deprecating, it is also marvelously narcissistic to assume the entire country would have any interest. All of Silver’s characters have these moments which profess their absolute hatred for themselves and then the next scenes are exploding in self-love. The characters are aware of their tragic circumstances; but instead of recoiling, they all vie for the audience’s undivided attention as all “the Characters always think it’s a play about them” (qtd. in Sarvan 227). This obsession with the self is one of the most unique elements to Silver’s plays and especially as it does not distract the audience into dislike. The audience recognizes the obsession; however, more importantly, it recognizes it as entirely human, and the characters are not lost to melodrama. Silver writes his characters so that the audience feels that any one of them could play the roles.
Silver relies heavily upon tragedy and the affects on the common man within his plays. However, he takes it a step farther in that tragedy itself is not the marker of the play unlike in Death of a Salesman and Oedipus Rex where the demise is the entire build of the play. Arthur Miller wrote in Tragedy and the Common Man that, “I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” (Miller 1299). This is an opinion that is mainly experienced through Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Silver’s modern take on tragedy retains the rape, incest, cannibalism, murder, and suicide of the classics; but the characters reactions to it are entirely different. The audience laughs not at the horrifying events, but rather, the characters’ gut reactions to the tragic situations they have been placed in. In The Food Chain, a young newly married poet, is walked out on by her husband of two weeks after he informs her he is going for a walk and never comes back. In order to deal with her abandonment, Amanda calls a suicide hotline only for the comfort of talking to someone and proceeds into a nine-page tirade against men, food, and the ‘beauty myth’.
Miller also writes in Tragedy and the Common Man that the quality that gives a character the fatal tragic flaw is his/her inability to remain passive in the face of what the character conceives to be a challenge to his dignity as opposed to the passive characters that accept their lot in life (Miller 1299) a quality Nicky Silver also explores. In The Maiden’s Prayer, Libby meets the love of her life, Taylor, in a support group for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Libby brings Taylor home to meet her family in which he promptly leaves her for her sister, Cynthia, who is the blonde, sweet antithesis to dark, sarcastic Libby. Instead of recoiling and accepting that Taylor does not in fact love her. Libby takes every opportunity, including his wedding to her sister in which she is the maid of honor, to tell everyone that Taylor still loves her and that sweet Cynthia has been trying to murder her in her sleep their entire lives. Libby’s tragic flaw ultimately leads to her emotional demise.
The women of the families are entirely different within a Silver play than they are in Miller’s. Linda Loman of Death of Salesman is a beautiful, poetic character, but she is only defined by her relationship to Willy, and more importantly, Linda is devoid of any flaws. She is a prefect human being who lives for her husband. One of Silver’s most progressive and vital attributes within his plays is the relationship between tragedy and his fully formed female characters within the family drama. First, it should be said that Silver’s female characters are so complete they are reminiscent of the women of Tennessee Williams. They are flawed, they are not idealized, and they are constantly fighting against their circumstances. Silver does not write quiet women who mourn sweetly, Silver writes almost visceral and forceful women. The tragedies that Silver’s women find themselves in are either self inflicted or if they are affected by outside forces, Silver gives them the power to use their own neurosis in order to escape it. He does not force anything upon them; therefore, they are never portrayed as weak victims. This is very contradictory to the female characters of Arthur Miller in his tragic form. Even in Pterodactyls where the tragedy is forced upon the character of Emma, Silver gives her the ability to escape it. After her estranged brother, Todd, returns home and sleeps with her fiancé giving him aids, and in turn infecting Emma and her unborn baby, she kills herself with a gun her brother gives her as a wedding present on her wedding day. However, throughout the play it is established that Emma has no memory of anything and is therefore unable to feel direct pain by any of these circumstances. She does not even recognize her brother. It is not until she kills herself that she has the ability to remember. In a speech from the grave, Emma recounts everything that has happened to her but is not sad; she is happy to be able to remember.
Hello everybody. I’m dead. How are you? I’m glad I killed myself. I’m not recommending it for others mind you…But its worked out me…I can’t thank Todd enough for giving me the gun, because for the first time, I’m happy. The pain is gone and I remember everything. (2.2.65)
This speech that is delivered after Emma has killed herself ends of being the most coherent and happiest statements of the entire play. She is aware of what has happened but she is free to remember the life she lived before her brother destroyed her. She is able to experience tragedy on her own terms, unlike the character of Linda Loman who has no option.
As opposed to the family Matriarchs of the past who are victims of outsides forces and are powerless, Silver’s women always take matters into their own hands. In Raised in Captivity, Hilary, a psychiatrist, who was made wealthy after her father died, leaving her a chain of motor homes, is completely trapped within her inability to accept the state of the world. Hilary wants more than anything to be able to take a vow of poverty. Yet, she finds after giving up all her things that she is drawn to appliance stores and can’t stop dreaming about buying microwaves. “I am wretchedness itself. That is why I have decided to put my eyes out with this screwdriver. Excuse me” (2.6.51). Indeed, she does put her eyes out in true Greek fashion. Hilary, very obviously, takes control of what she deems to be an out-of- control life by being able to carry out her own version of the Oedipus tragedy.
Fig 3. Red Stitch’s Hilary prepares to put out her eyes. (2003)
She finds that she is unable to balance her lack of religion and heavy feelings of guilt because of the privilege she was born into, and how the rest of the worlds live mainly in poverty. As tragedy is classically considered the highest form of drama, it says a lot that a female character is able to do such a thing. Unlike the majority of female characters of the American stage, Hilary is able to makes the choice of putting her eyes out with a screwdriver. Instead of being done to, Nicky Silver’s women are constantly doing.
In Nicky Silver’s dramas the fathers and brothers are anything but responsible or reliable and are in sharp contrast to the heavy concern of survival or loyalty to the family made famous by Miller and others. The male characters are entirely willing to turn on their family in order to achieve their objective. While Silver’s female characters are usually trapped within circumstances of their own design, Silver’s male characters are trapped more by their desires and their occasional aggressive pursuit of whatever it is they desire. Male character are always in pursuit of women, or depending on character, men, and they will always follow their carnal desires without concern for anyone else. The men, aware of this phenomenon never falter in continuing to pursue what they may not have. It is when they get what they want, and are knowingly doing something negative by pursuing someone they shouldn’t that things can and will go horribly wrong with the plays.
By Silver’s own admission his plays only work when in the hands of actors who understand their mixed nature. Or as he puts it, naturalistic actors who may have been able to tackle Death of a Salesman, may not work as well in his family dramas. As they will have trouble capturing the highs and lows and will not be able to switch both in the middle of lines in the drop of a hat. Silver writes for smart, versatile actors, who understand that while they can not be naturalistic they do need to be honest human beings. Therefore, they can not ‘act’ natural they must simply be honest in the most extreme of circumstances. “ Because my plays have a lot of style, you need to know how to play various styles and remain emotionally connected and appreciate how the styles rub up against each other” (qtd. in Sarvan 225), confesses Silver. Silver actors need to understand realist acting, but they also need to consider that human behavior in Silver’s play use other means of getting at the truth of a character.
Ultimately, it is Nicky Silver’s blatant disregard for genre and labels that make him an effective, important, and unique voice in American theatre. By abandoning all literary appropriate forms of playwriting, he creates characters that are brutally honest and compelling with all the tragedy of the Greeks and humanity of the Lomans. Nicky Silver still offers the American realist family drama, just with a heavy aftertaste. If Arthur Miller created the American kitchen sink drama then Nicky Silver put it through the garbage disposal. Silver Shreds genre and theatrical style alike in order to create the perfect modern mash up of the new American family drama play in a style clearly relevant to the American theatre.
Works Cited
Evans, Richard. Raised in Captivity. Australia, Melbourne. Red Stitch Actor's Theatre Company. 01 Apr. 2009
Kusnetz, Sam. Pterodactlys. Oregon, Portland. Pterodactlys. TheatreVertigo Company.
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Miller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man." The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. By W. B. Worthen. 5th ed. Boston: Heinle, 2006. 1299-300.
Piepenburg, Erik. "A New Play and Much Else to Worry About." The New York Times 20 Aug. 2008. 01 Apr. .
Silver, Nicky. Etiquette and vitriol The food chain and other plays. New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1996.
Silver, Nicky. In Their Company Portraits of American Playwrights. Comp. Ken Collins. Minneapolis: Umbrage Editions, 2006.
Silver, Nicky. Playwright's voice American dramatists on memory, writing, and the politics of culture. Comp. David Sarvan. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999.
Silver, Nicky. Pterodactyls. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1994.
Silver, Nicky. Raised in captivity. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995.
Silver, Nicky. The Maiden's Prayer. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998.
