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Loose Ends In this paper I will try to describe the play Loose Ends by Michael Weller. Why this play is so popular even now? This play was written in 1976 but the topic red in it stil is very urgent. Newspapers definite's this play as "Strongly written, sensitively felt, theatrically effective" (Newsweek) and "Honest...
resonant and haunting, " N. Y. Times. Jeff Hudson states "Loose Ends is a retrospective look at the 1970 s, written at a time when it was too soon for nostalgia. The play enjoyed a seven-month run in New York in 1979, with Kevin Kline as the male lead.
Together with a few other moderately successful scripts, it was enough to propel playwright Michael Weller into the screenplay trade -- though none of his original plays (and hes still writing them) have made the transition to cinema. " (That ' 70 s play) The play starts in 1970 on a beach in Bali where Paul and Susan are introduced to us at first time. They are naked and too absorbed in each other to notice something. Yes, it is the beginning of the famous crazy and inflammatory ' 70 s. Hare Krishna and John Lennon, free love and world peace, the flower's children and "free" settling, disco and drugs.
All this will take part in lives of characters but the main task of the play doesn't lie in showing ' 70 s. The main theme of the play is to show the lives of two people and how they are passing through the time. The main theme is to show how people can change with time. How can their world view and lofty ideals change with time. Michael Weller manage with this task - the atmosphere of ' 70 s doesn't mix with the main theme of the play. It supports it and add colour to the play, accentuates the characters of Paul and Susan.
Their encounter is spontaneous and it is the first hint on future coming ' 70. Paul, coming off a Peace Corps gig, is headed back to the States to teach at an alternative school. Susan is on a globe-trotting trip with a girlfriend shed just as soon ditch. They found each other on that beach and that was a Moment for them.
But Michael Weller is a good author he doesn't stops on their relationships in exactly that period. He moves forward and shows us the same couple through a series of scenes at yearly intervals. It is very interesting move because it helps to show all spectrum of human relationships and not to loose the readers interest in play. Willard Manus writes "Spanning a nine-year period, the relationship has so many ups and downs that it resembles a stock-market chart. Paul and Susan are a post- 60 s couple, part-hippie, part-yuppie, trying to cling to their youthful ideals even as they are dragged by life into the arms of the establishment. The two of them love each other but always in a slightly distanced and conflicted way, as if unbridled passion were distasteful to them. " (Loose Ends In L.
A. ) The number of ups and downs of this couple is endless but still they somehow manage to make their careers but that doesn't solve their problems and just add some new. One of them is to have baby or to have a career. And that is where the main stumbling block lies. They both have a good career - she has become a successful photographer and he a successful film editor but life made them too different. Something change, while time is passing by something ends and something begins and the play is about changeableness. The necessity to choose between career and baby shows it in the best possible way.
Loose Ends is the play of contrasts. Paul wants a child and Susan doesn't. New conflict, new ups and downs but this time everything is much more serious, this time they starts to understand that they are too different to be together. Who is right and who is wrong?
Michael Weller doesn't give a direct answer, he doesn't blame his characters for breaking the relationship. He makes some hints, but the decision is up to reader. Weller lives to much question in his play for it become forgotten. Child or career? A very popular question in present days.
What to choose? Is it possible to combine both? Robin Wiliams states "The worst time for women who pursue careers in academe to have a baby is within five years of earning a Ph. D. , the study found. Women who do have babies then are nearly 30 percent less likely than women without babies ever to snag a tenure-track position. And of those women in the study who had babies early on, only 56 percent earned tenure within 14 years after receiving their Ph.
D. Of men who became fathers early on, 77 percent earned tenure. Of men who never had babies, 71 percent got tenure. " The men who choose job over children later try to have child and form family but the women usually not. The sad thing is that the most busy career-building years are also the most reproductive ones. Fathers manage to combine their fatherhood with career but for women such task is to hard. It is well understandable because the nearly whole process of baby-minding is "women's business." Robin Wiliams cited an interview "Part of the problem, says the woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, is that while she has several female role models, none of them offer advice on how to manage a baby with a tenure-track career. "You get a lot of mentorship about how you negotiate for your salary and for course load reductions, " she says. "But the questions usually aren't: 'If I'm a woman, and I want to have kids, what do I do?' " (How Babies Alter Careers for Academics) As you can see the woman has to choose what does she want to do with her life and such decisions are always hard.
Susan made her choice and I think that was the last thing which did this couple apart. The issue of having a child or career become a turning point of the play "On her thirty third birthday, Paul bitterly denounces her for having, unknown to him, had an abortion six months earlier. One last, brief reunion is attempted but it is too late. " (Serious Comedy) Susan and Paul loved each other but in slightly distanced and conflicted way. There is passion between them, which always throw them together. They split together and then again find themselves back in bed, no mind that one of them has a date with somebody else. They relationships are based on the passion and some secret individual decisions.
They relationships are the one of consumer kind. The moment they understand it will be the end. Nowadays in the light of AIDS' threat this part of play gains uncomfortable underlying reason. Bibliography Jeff Hudson, That ' 70 s play, May 16, 2002.
web Serious Comedy, Advanced groups. web Willard Manus, Loose Ends In L. A. , Ruskin Group Theatre Robin Wiliams, How Babies Alter Careers for Academics, December 3, 2003. web
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