Stu and Joy: Problems of Communication

Alienation is a major theme of human condition in the contemporary world.

Naturally, a phenomenon like alienation left a permanent impact upon the
contemporary literature. The theme of alientation has been dealt differently in
modern literature. The alienated protagonist is a recurrent character in the 20 th
century American and European literature. Alienation as a term has been dealt
within existentialistic literature. Alienation is a result of lost identity. People fail to
percieve today the very purpose behind life and the importance of their existence in
a hostile contemporary world. Edmund Fuller states that in modern age “man
suffers not only from war, persecution, famine and ruin, but from inner problems --
----- a conviction of isolation, randomness, meaninglessness in his way of
existence.”

The 1960s were a decade of revolution and change in politics, music and society
around the world. It first appeared in the United States and the United Kingdom,
and then spread to continental Europe and other parts of the world. The 1960s were
an era of protest. In the civil rights movement blacks and whites protested against
the unfair treatment of races. More and more Americans protested against the war
in Vietnam. Many people thought that Americans had no reason to fight in war that
was so far from their home. Female activists demanded more rights for women,
whose role in society began to change. The birth control pill and other
contraceptives were introduced, making it possible for women to plan their careers
and have babies when they wanted them. The 1960s shattered American politics
with the assassination of famous leaders (John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy,
Martin Luther King). Popular culture was overspread and people uncritically
accepted it without seeing emptiness of it.

Certainly cultures change, and the needs of a people for particular types of legends
and myths change also. But Shepard observes that, in our essentially material and
profane culture, we have desacralized the past and seem unable to replace our old
legends with any viable new ones. (Patraka, Siegel 6)

In majority of his dramas Shepard explored the possibility of new myths for
contemporary life, most frequently he returned to the roots of American myths, the
Old West. Shepard's plays, deal with modern images of the American West and the
mythic qualities found in them.
Characters in Shepard`s plays often seem borderline psychotics. Occasionally they
have already crossed the border. Their insanity lies in the fact that they are
obsessive. Isolated in a radically short moment, they reach back into memory and
project possible future tracks which become part of that moment. Sam Shepard is a
performer and so are his characters. His characters perform their lives as though
they are minor figures in a national drama of decline. His characters, like
Tennessee Williams’s, are seekers after a truth in which they can no longer believe.
Men and women meet across a great divide of experience. Shepard once stated that
the sadness of American country music derives from the fact that it speaks ‘of the
true relationship between the American male and the American female’ which is
‘terrible and impossible’. Characters are hollowed out in these plays as men and
women similar fight to deny the past and inhabit a present empty of symbolic
content. There is no consistency. Language that characters speak is itself second-
hand, consisting of cliches, powerful emotions, finessed into words already
processed through myth and media.

It would be difficult to imagine a better description of the world of Shepard’s plays.

His characters are alienated from one another and from themselves. The space
between them seems unbridgeable. Emotions are intense but unbearable. But
beneath this drama of alienation is a unifying repetition. This is certainly a
recognizable American world.

There is something of Tennessee Williams in Sam Shepard. His characters also

inhabit a broken world. They hold to one another with the same desperation,
damage one another with the same inevitability. Both have created plays in which
heroes inhabit a world empty of the mythic context which gave such lives meaning.
Both acknowledge the force of sexuality but insist on the unbridgeable break
between men and women who perceive reality differently.

The Shephard character has not simply a self, but several selves which are
continually changing. - Richard Schechner

Shepard explained Chicago as ‘The stuff would just come out, and I wasn’t really
trying to shape it or make it into any big thing. I would have a picture and just start
from there. A picture of a guy in a bathtub, or two guys on stage with a sign
blinking, you know, things like that.’
As the play opens, Stu is babbling in a bathtub: “And ya’ look all around through
the town fer yer dog. Your dog Brown. He’s yellow but ya’ call him Brown
anyhow.” He is playing a sort of word game with himself. Joy is about to leave Stu
for a job in another city. They are both in the apartment, and Joy is calling him to
eat some biscuits. Although Stu is not alone he is babbling to himself and Joy
instead of starting a conversation with him she bakes biscuits and offers him. By an
essay by Lynda Hart, and the study of the play, it is clear that Sheppard is showing
Stu who is so internally focused and self-involved that his ability or inclination to
communicate is seriously damaged. Soon after Stu throws the towel over his head
and begins acting like an old woman. It is clear that Stu will only talk directly to
Joy about his feelings through the character of an old woman. Even when he does
speak to her, what he says is expressed in obscure references that are hostile and
perhaps even misogynistic in nature. Hart points out that Stu is giving voice to his
repressed emotions toward Joy through the character of the old woman. Stu is
hiding between the mask of an old lady. When Joy wanted to get close to Stu by
entering the tub, Stu reacted loudly and rejecting her try to get closer to him: “You
can’t get in here!”

There is no real communication between people in the play. What exists between
characters on stage is tension mostly seen on Stu how his interior comes out
throughout the piece. The only clue you are given as to the tension in the play is a
phone call that Joy receives where she says: ‘Yes. I got the job. Yes, it’s final,’ and
that she’s leaving, ‘The sooner the better;’ as well as fragments of offstage
conversation. Everything else is implied by the action. For instance the four friends
who come over throughout the play to see Joy off all bring suitcases. Everything
else in the play is delivered by Stu.

There is no interaction between characters. It seems as if both Stu and Joy are
leading separate lives while living together. Joy made a big decision accepting job
in Chicago and Stu did not even have a right to say his opinion about it. Instead of
talking about important questions such as her going, staying and returning from
Chicago they talk about biscuits. Stu reveals partially his opinion about her going
away in the voice of an old lady saying: “That don`t shock me, sonny! I been
around. That kind a` smut don`t bother me one nowadays. This the twentieth
century, buddy!” By this he meant everything is normal in the twentieth century,
even women leaving their partners without explanation. The atmosphere between to
characters is very strange, they speak to each other without saying anything
important to each other.
STU: Biscuits. Who needs biscuits at this hour? Who ever needs biscuits? Joy?
JOY(off right): What?
STU: Who needs biscuits?
JOY: Peasants in Mexico.

Other characters such as Myra, Joe, Sally and Jim are the same as their friends.
They too are unable to express their emotions, feelings, thoughts. So the problem of
communication is not just between Stu and Joy but also between their friends.
What Shepard is trying to achieve with these other characters is that problems of
communication is on bigger level it is present in the society and not just between
two people. When they are saying goodbye to Joy, her friend say it in different
ways such as:
MYRA: Have a good time!
SALLY: So long, Joy!
JOE: So long!
JIM: Good luck out there!
MYRA: Say hello for me!
JOE: Don`t forget!
JIM: Have fun!
JOE: Good luck!
Saying goodbye in so many ways does not emphasize close relationship between
Joy and her friends but emptiness of these words. So many synonyms for goodbye
represent a cliché, they actually do not mean anything. Another example of absurd
connected to friends is when all the friends after Joy left sat as the audience does
during the play. After Joy left friends did not have anything more to say. As if both
the play and their lives stopped. This also represents `breaking the fourth wall` as
the actors became the audience.

Stu ends the play by teaching the audience how to breathe. Beside the role of old
lady and man who has been left by his partner in the end he adopts the role of a
kind of a life coach. He teaches the audience how to do a basic thing and that is to
breath, because in this empty world of chasing career people forget the most
essential need and that is to breathe.
Instead of communication between the characters in the play appear images with
different meanings. A bathtub where Stu spends the most time during the play can
represent his consciousness, the limits of his early onstage world. Water can stand
for the unconscious, all living things in it being the dynamism of the unconscious:
dreams, desires, wishes, fears, etc. Boat, sailors, sea songs, nets can refer to people
who live by water (the unconscious). Fishing, fisherman, fish, fishing poles can
represent people who live by water (the unconscious)and barracuda the danger,
people will come for you (eaters become the eaten); fishing poles connect the
conscious to the unconscious, what is above to what is underneath (Joy’s friends
begin entering carrying fishing poles). Stu in the second part of the play, begins to
speak about images that are disgusting, and are usually countered by off stage
conversations between Joy and her friend surrounding the biscuits and how good
and tasty they are. This can represent the contrast between the views of the
characters. Stu adopts the role of an old woman and old women have long been
considered man like, so it is natural that Stu takes this part. One of the strongest
images in the play is the sailors who come off the boats in Stu’s vision and screw
all the young virgins in sight–until there are bald-headed sailors and grey haired
virgins.’ Meanwhile, the boats rot, nothing happens. Possibly this could be a
commentary on the nature of relationships, the dominance of the physicality over
the deeper feelings. Suitcases can have two meanings the first one leaving, and new
life and the second a baggage, or the things we all carry. Air in the and Stu`s
advices how to breathe can stand for freedom or a new beginning. The last image
which also appears in the beginning is the image of policeman knocking. A
policeman can stand as a contrast to the speech heard in the beginning “Gettysburg
Address” ("that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God,
shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."). The policeman can
represent a excessive control of authority.

Stu and Joy can be compared to characters such as George and Martha from the
play Who`s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and also to Rob and Laura from High Fidelity.
All couples fail to really understand each other and give each other their complete
support. These three relationships are unsuccessful because of the lack of
communication.
References:

 C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000, Cambridge UP,

2001
 History.com Staff. “The 1960s.” History.com, A&E Television Networks,
2010, www.history.com/topics/1960s.
 Patraka, Vivian, and Mark Siegel. Sam Shepard, State Univ., 1989.
 Saleem, Abdul. “Theme of Alienation in Modern Literature.” European
Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014,
http://www.eajournals.org/wp-content/uploads/Theme-of-Alienation-in-
Modern-Literature.pdf Accessed 30 December 2017.
 “Chicago- Sam Shepard”, Weebely.com available at
http://www.weebelly.com/search/Sam%20Shepard/