THE STORY: As the New York Times outlines, “It is done almost as a comedy, yet it isn’t quite. Jack Argue is the 'hero,' the middle-class man from Connecticut who works for Muzeeka, a piped-music company that inflicts its bland tunes on all America. He is the man who has made it, who tries to assuage his conscience through hypocritical verbiage. There is a series of episodes—Argue chanting a hymn to a penny, Argue loving his wife, Argue loving a prostitute, Argue fighting in Vietnam. If he could have been wherever he chose to be, he says, he would have chosen to be an Etruscan, one of those ancient people who came and went 'a million years ago,' 'a whole civilization danced out of the earth.' Mr. Guare has written with thought, craftsmanship and beauty. His allusions are poetic—the traffic lights, for instance, that make the streets go from grass to blood."
Winner of a 1968 Obie Award for Distinguished Play.
This biting, brilliant play, by one of our theatre’s most exciting writers, combines humor, social comment and unique theatricality in its satirical depiction of a modern everyman exterminated by the very system to which he sells out.
“…a play that was at times beautifully poetic and always meaningful.” —The New York Times.
“…has its own mode of humor and point of view, and a nice sense of acceleration, which means it gets better and funnier as it moves along.” —New York Post.
“…it reveals Mr. Guare as a man of honor and of poetry, of imagination and of passion.” —Newsday (NY).
