The Good Fight (Original)

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Patrick McEvoy-Halston 1

ENG 5733HF

Professor Redekop

21 August 2006

The Good Fight, in George WalkersLove and Anger

George WalkersLove and Angeris a play which celebrates the virtues of a good fight, of

a good war, and the rewards it offers its participants. Though fights are a kind of embrace, they

cannot be engaged between true loversthey require good guys and bad guys, who hate one

another. Walker understands this, and communicates this understanding primarily by cuing us to

appreciate that all the ostensibly good characters involved in the plays cosmic battle between

good and evil have similar seeming, ostensibly evil counterparts. That is, he cues us to see

everyone involved in the fray as somewhat interchangeable, the same. So if war is being praised,

if construing the world as vice filled and some of its denizens as evil, is made to seem a

necessary step towards advancing one along own spiritual/emotional journey, is there anything

or anyone in the play subjected to unmitigated critique? Yes, someone isand it is tempting

(but not accurate) to say that it is the satiric voice itself which is under satiric attack, for it is

Eleanorthe voice of (humourless) judgmentwho is the foremost subject of criticism in the

play.

I understand that many will read or see the play and judge it one which makes a satiric

attack on vices such as power lust and greed. They will see it one which clearly establishes two

charactersSean Harris and John Connoras those most attracted to these particular vices. Yet

much would have to be ignored in order to construe the play in this way. One would have to

ignore much of how the play begins, for instance, for the play begins with both of these vices

being indulged in by the plays ostensible foremost good and enlightened characterPeter


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been like for him by showing us how Harriss new clientConnorreacts when he believes

Harris is not adequately serving him. When confused and confounded by Sarahs behavior

towards him, Connor reacts by turning to Harris and exclaiming: Look, youre my lawyer and I

want some answers from you right now! (51).

Gail, Maxwells new client, shows some dismay with her lawyerMaxwelltoo, but is

much more readily made quiescent, for she is vastly more dependent on her lawyer than Connor

is on his. Connor can always hire a different lawyer, an option not available to the relatively

impoverished Sarah. Nor is there any chance that even if she could find some other help that this

help could count him/herself as one the countrys best lawyerly mindssomething, we are told,

Maxwell once was and may yet still be. Her dependency upon Maxwell, we note, is made clear

both to her and to us at the beginning of the plays first scene. Maxwell seems to have taken

advantage of the fact that he knows Gail really has no one else to turn to, by speaking in ways to

her he likely wouldnt dare with a less pliant and vulnerable clientwith someone who really

could afford to turn down his services. He has talked to her, or, more accurately, ather for a half

an hour, concerning things which clearly interest him but are of little interest to Gail. When Gail

complains about his apparent lack of interest in her concerns, Maxwell responds by first

reminding her that she is marginal (Maxwell tells her, Youre marginal. Your cause is

marginal. Outside the corridor, so to speak [13]), then of how lucky she is to have found him

(Maxwell tells her, I believe you when obviously no one else does [14]), and moves her to

understand that her desire to see her husband and herself at some point enjoying a shiny new

future (15) will depend on her allowing him to behave exactly as he wishes to behave

(Maxwell tells her, youll have to allow me to proceed in my own way [14]). That is, in

response to her assertiveness, Maxwell masterfully manages her into a more complaint pose.

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Gail will not being paying Maxwell in cashthere is something else he wants from her.

This something isnt sex, but the play guides us to appreciate that if he had been a slightly

different man, this is what he might have expected from her as a form of payment. For with Gail

the play presents us with a childishwith her ball cap and jeansyoung woman whose

readiness to be servile is suggested in that she is there in his office in response to the middle aged

Maxwells beckoning (i.e., his call [14]). She has a husband; but his return to her seems to rest

entirely with her managing to get this middle aged man to agree to take on her cause. This he

agrees to, but only if she agrees to trust (15) him, and submit to his unusual behavior and

requests. He hints that the thing she most has to offer is love, a willingness and an ability to

service the needs of all those in need [of] love (15). She shows this willingness, but also some

fear: she suspects he might be crooked. In sum, though I thinkespecially with his move to

assuage her fears, to get her to trust him, and his assurance that if she does so her reward will be

a shiny new futurethere is more than a hint in the nature of their relationship, especially as it

is introduced to us at the beginning of the play, of the stereotypical pedophilic relationship

between the candy laden pedophile and his child prey, very likely, we more strongly sense in his

interaction with her, the middle aged man who seeks revitalization through associating with

young women: that is, someone who is undergoing a midlife crisis.

It should be difficult to notstrongly consider understanding Maxwell as someone who is

undergoing a midlife crisis. He is in his early fifties, and has been reminded of his mortality by

just having suffered a stroke. His mind is clearly on death: when he surveys his life, he

imagines it one where Death was surrounding [him] [. . .] like a demon inevitability (17). He

suddenly understands the way he had been living as unfulfillingthe standard assessment

someone who is undergoing a midlife crisis makes of his/her life. We should note that his

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complaint about life no longer being fulfilling is also aired by his former partner, Harris. And

when Harris visits them, we are offered numerous cues to imagine them both as still being in

some way conjoined, as still, in their new directions, pursuing essentially the same goal.

With Harris and Maxwell we have two men of about the same age (specifically, Maxwell

is 50 and Harris is in his early 50s [12]), who pursued the same career pathlaw, and who

both seek rejuvenation: Maxwell seeks rebirth (31); Harris seeks new challenges (27).

Maxwell prefers to understand himself as someone who has taken a fundamentally different turn

than the one Harris has taken. And they might indeed seem far more opposite than they do

similar to one another. Maxwell has stripped himself of his earthly goods; Harris new pursuit is

built on all that he had accumulated: he will use the friends and reputation he garnered from

being an established lawyer to launch a career as a politician. Maxwell locates himself in the

gutters and associates with the destitute; Harris seeks new mountain (tops) and takes on

increasingly affluent and powerful clients (i.e., Connor). But unless we are determined to see

them as opposites, they could very easily be understood as two who have chosen paths which

both work equally well to help satisfy the very same needs and assuage the exact same fears.

The (stereo)typical midlife fear is fear of death. Both paths Maxwell and Harris are on would

help alleviate these fears. Obviously Maxwell believes that in with his new life he has in some

sense become a child again. He prefers now to be called Petie because it better suits who he

has become: namely, [y]ounger, more unfinished (30). He believes he has become the

person he once was before law school corrupted himthe young Maxwell who once had

principles, who followed his parents code of honor. Rather than someone who will soon face

death, he believes his miraculous re-invention of himself amounts to a re-birth, to starting again,

once more from the beginning. He will help create a new era, one he imagines he will help

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shepherd along: Phase two will amount to [t]he amazing rebirth of Petie Maxwell and the new

era to which he is dedicated (31). But though Maxwell will be reborn, Harriss new path will in

a sense mean he will never die: for though no matter how successful a lawyer becomes, it is only

the lawyer who moves on to becoming a politician who has any chance of becoming a

historically relevant figure, i.e., of becoming immortalized. The politician can become an epic

figure, someone who might potentially be seen as superhumanbeyond the merely mortal, who

is looked to satisfy needs no one person could possibly satisfy.

In short, the play offers us very good reasons for believing that Maxwell and Harris are

not as different as they would prefer to imagine themselves to be. Maxwell evidently believes

that Harris used him. He wants Harris to believe Harris theft of his wife and kids made him feel

like one of Gods lowest creatures (32). But we should not be so quick to believe him in this,

for the play hints that Harris theft may well have been an especially fortuitous development for

Maxwell. In pursuit of a new life path, Maxwell seeks to shorn himself of all that ties him to a

former one he associates with death. He gleefully gives away all that he had acquired during his

twenty years as a lawyer; but had he had to distance himself from his wife and kids as well, he

might not have been able to do so without feeling guilty for having done so. Middle aged men

who in their mid-life crisis act childishly and hang out with young women, often experience a

crippling hangover: they must deal with the anger and disappointment they inevitably receive

from wives and children theyve abandoned and humiliated. Thanks to Harris theft (for

though Maxwell chides Harris for thinking of his wife as a possession, it seems clear that

Maxwell thinks of her as one as well: He exclaims, Youd been screwing my wife [32;

emphasis added]), Maxwell can more easily imagine his rebirth as righteous.

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having spread outrageous, bullheaded, unsupportable, inflaming crap about Connor, and given

what we see of Maxwell, we do not doubt that Harriss characterization of Maxwells efforts are

on the nose.)

Maxwell and Connor also seem similar in that both are making claim to the very same

territoryboth are ostensibly about serving the needs of the lower classes: Maxwell would be

their legal and moral crusader; Connor would be their guide to all they need know of the world

they live in. In fact, at the beginning of scene three, when Sarah is telling her story of an

invasion to Eleanor and Gail, given all we had by then heard of Connor and Maxwell, as we hear

her story and think of its protagonists we might be thinking as much of Maxwell as we are

Connor. Her story is about invasive men who are looking for a place to take over, that are

[l]ooking for adventure (33). These men have sold (33) all their goods, have prostitute[d]

their wives, and have set up for themselves a headquarters in this alien territory (33-4).

They believe themselves indestructible, are intent on being free to be themselves, have

voices inside them talking to them, and have a proprietary, expansive desire to get their word

[. . .] out (34). Maxwell is looking for adventure (he will identify his activities as an

adventure [42]), has given away all his goods, has a wife who is now sleeping with another

man, believes he is immune (32) to persecution, has entered an unfamiliar part of town and set

up headquarters there, has argued that his turn to the dark side in law school resulted from a

force taking him over, believes himself finally back (26) to being the man he once was, and

has made the whole city aware of his opinion of Connor and has his mind on the reorganization

of an entire culture (29). So even though Sarahs story is about white crusaders who hate those

who arent white, and even though Maxwell and others repeatedly call Connor a Nazi, it is a

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story which hints that its main protagonists are more readily comparable to Maxwell than they

are to Connor.

So given that the play would have us question just how different villains actually are

from heroes, it might seem this play is a satire on the supposed virtues of would-be progressive

crusaders. Though I have focused on the plays first act, the plays ending could even more

readily be looked to for evidence to buttress such a thesis. Most particularly, the trial which

terminates the play evidences an outrageously greedy and unfair Maxwell. Though he

acknowledges that you can repent just by say[ing] to yourself I repent (70), he wont allow

that Harris can do the same to exonerate himself from damnation. Me!Me! [, Maxwell

exclaims]. The demigod. The former greedy prick. The man with a hole in his brain. The

angry man. The reborn man. The avenger! (71), is the only one who gets to repent. One

cannot but sense here that to Maxwell, Harris amounts to means by which to satisfy his own

enormous need to feel purposeful and grandiose. The trial also evidences a greedy and unfair

Sarah as the presiding judge. Sarah believes she is a fair not a prejudicial judge (79), but she too

is shown to be interested in using the trial to satisfy her need to humiliate Connor and Harris

the same need she satisfied earlier in the play when she pretended to be Maxwells lawyer (Well

that just shows how stupid you are. Im a mental patient. Youve been tricked by a person with

a shattered mind [51]). Her verdict that Harris and Connor are to be brutally humiliated and

killed (drowned in washroom toilets) is a verdict evidently influenced by whim, not evidence.

And since this verdict follows a long series of humiliations (which include brutal physical assault

and extensive name calling) inflicted upon the two (on Connor, especially), it is no surprise that

many reviewers of the play assess it indulgent, ineffective.

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Mel Gussow, in a review for theNew York Times, argues that the play is self-

defeating[,] for [a]s the lawyer [Maxwell] [. . .] sinks deeper into misanthropy and into

sermonizing, he becomes increasingly tiresome (New York Times, 9 December 1990). Of

course, if the play was construed a satire on the vices of progressive reformers rather than those

of the rich and powerful, the particular nature of Gussows reaction to Maxwell should

encourage us to see it as a rather effective satire. Indeed, those who react to the play as Gussow

did and who are familiar with the history of satire, might see the play as akin to Apuleius

Metamorphoses; for according to Ronald Paulson, just asLove and Angermakes the rich and

poor seem similar to one another, just as it repeatedly emphasizes their intrinsic similarity and

mutual culpability by having them frequently fuse into one another into a mass of punching,

kicking, groaning bodies (52), and just as it seems to use cheese as a metaphor for making some

sort of critique against interchangeability/interrelatedness:

The Metamorphoses shows that in a narrative satire fictions operate through the

interrelatedness of characters: not only the relationship between two people, a fool and a

knave, but between rich and poor fools, [. . .] and so on. They are held close to a theme

or a vice, but they also project a visualizable world of total interrelatedness, like a cheese

completely infiltrated by maggots [. . .] [.] As it is unrolled, this world is monotonously

similar in all its details, and finally static; but a world nevertheless in which Lucius

[principle character of the Metamorphoses] is himself deeply implicated. 57

Or perhaps they would see the play as akin to picaresque satires, to those satires Paulson believes

feature Quixote (heroic) figures akin to Maxwell in that though they aim to be honourable they

easily become [. . .] selfish egoist[s] who tr[y] to make over the world in [their] [. . .] own

image (101). But though in so many waysLove and Angermight seem a play which observes

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and critiques would-be heroes, its intention is ultimately not to show their foolishness. Nor is it a

play whose primary intent is to critiques their counterparts, i.e., the bad guys. For the play is

actually one which would have us attend to the real wisdom not the folly of those who would

enthusiastically involve themselves in brutal, dangerous behavior.

The plays makes this point primarily through what happens to Sarah as she engages with

those she deems evil and beyond redemption. Like Maxwell, the play draws us to understand

Sarah as akin to several other characters frequently found in the masses which inevitably

develops in the plays various melees. She believes that both she and Connor have mean spirited

voices in their heads which speak to them and control them, and she serves as Maxwells new

partnerand thereby draws us to compare her to his former partner, Harris. And she, too, is

someone who seeks revitalization and freedom. And though, while pretending to be his new law

partner, she is the one who voices a loud critique of simple and brutal solutionsshe gets

Connor to admit that killing the poor might be a solution to downtown problems, she actually

demonstrates why brutality may indeed serve to provide solutions to long troubling problems.

After Sarah does the admirable and amazing in persuading a veteran lawyer and a canny

businessman that she is in fact a competent lawyer and holds means by which Maxwell might be

managed, she, Gail, Harris, and Connor enter into a wild melee. Stage instructions tell us that

this melee is followed by a blackout and an intermission: the audience is encouraged to wonder

what might have happened to those involvedto wonder what might have happened to the two

women who took on at least one opponent who wanted to kill (53) them. When the play

resumes, the audience is seemingly offered very good reasons for suspecting things turned out

poorly, for [t]he office is a mess, Gail is sitting on the floor against the desk [,] [. . .] and

Sarah is lying face down near the door (53). But though Sarah says she likely has a broken

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bone, she (and Gail) is doing very well indeed. Sarah found delivering blows very

satisfyingshe thoroughly enjoyed getting in a few really good whacks (53). She guesses

that shed have been better off if shed started hitting earlier in [. . .] life (53)and she may

well be right; for hitting has lead not just to elation but to an ability to make sense (54), to

sanity, and to a willingness to admit she does not in fact believe herself blacka step, perhaps,

to not needing to lie to herself in order to better cope with life.

At the very least, the battle proved therapeuticand in the loving and supportive

sisterhood it helped engender between Gail and Sarah, it seems to promise even more. And we

note that after the fight, neither of them seem to hate those they fought with. There is indeed

little hate in evidence. Instead, there is only love and reflection. Gail explores why her

perception of how the rich ostensibly operate could drive her to hate them, and admits that the

rich might not be the villains she sometimes feels they are. Sarah admits that she imagines

herself black because it helps her feel brave (54)an admission which might soon lead her to

understand that she preferred to conceive of her foes as Nazis (or vampires) because it gave her

reason to feel brave, to act heroically. There is real reason for believing so, for previously Sarah

admitted that though she doesnt take messages from ordinary people, she would rise to action

if such calls came from [p]eople threatening Petie (35).

Though her therapist likely wouldnt let Sarah punch him up in order to help her feel

sane, her doctorsthough they seem to do little more than drug her upmight well appreciate

that what Sarah really needs is to be around those who inspire fear and hatred. For we are told

that they believe Sarah has to have a way, even in her state, to manifest her courage [. . .] [--]

[t]hat her courage is still the most important thing to her (35). It is Eleanor who relates this

information, and it is Eleanor who clearly does not believe it to be true: for her response to

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Sarahs manifestation of tremendous courage is to berate her for it. She sees the results of the

melee and gauges it the result of Sarahs impulsive decision to attack Gail. She goes irate, and

tells her sister to stop scaring [her] [. . .] to death (56). Eleanor would have Sarah remain

pacified, sedated through drugs, because an active and alert Sarah is someone who might do

things which would cause Eleanor considerable distress. We note that Eleanor would have

wished Maxwell had been inhibited from moving to the slums for the same selfish reason. For

even with Maxwell suffering from another stroke, she cant help but berate him (something the

now sane Sarah notices and comments on) about how the move has ended up making her very

uneasy and unable to function (56). Maxwell, however, wants Eleanor to join in with his

group, to join in with his movement. It is a request he makes several times, and we note her

typical response to it is the one she offers to his initial request: Dont involve me in whatever it

is youre up to these days. I have problems of my own (16). Near the plays close, however,

she says she would be grateful (61) to be includedbut this may actually be cause for

Maxwell to curse rather than celebrate, for, arguably, nowhere in the text is there evidence that

her involvement would be anything but a bad thing for Maxwell and his gang.

Eleanor, from the plays beginning to its end, is portrayed as someone who does or very

easily could spoil all the fun others are up to. She is a bummer. Even after she has said she

would honestly be very grateful to be included in Maxwells plans, just her presence causes

Sarah to lose confidence in her performance as the trials judge (we notice her ascent from

cowering patient to competent lawyer to compelling judge), and prompts her to start to cry.

Her active part in the trial proves to be her slapping of Connors face for his blasphemous prayer,

an action which serves to make her seem every bit the same person she was at the beginning of

the play, when she responded defensively to Maxwells lambasting of religion. (A battle follows

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her slapping Connor, but we note that somehow everyone butEleanor ends up form[ing] [the] [.

. .] mass of [tangled] bodies that end up on the coucha development which may in part make

it seem as this melee is a combined effort by everyone involved to exclude Eleanor.) She is the

one who would call in either the police or the hospital in response to any dangerous

development. And we note that if she had called an ambulance after Maxwell suffered his

stroke, he would have been denied the opportunity to die honorably and redemptively in battle.

(Harris and other characters also at times threaten to call the police, but they always pull back,

find reasons for not doing soindeed, their threats to call the police seem akin to those made by

kids who make the threat with no real intention of following through.)

We also note that in scene one, Maxwells sudden need to berate people on the street, to

insist that they [h]ave a little self-respect (19), follows his being schooled by Eleanor on the

proper way to treat people. That is, Eleanor seems to make Maxwell, the would-be crusader of

the downtrodden, to sound, in his demand that the street people [g]et out of the garbage (19),

like herwho is first shown [c]arrying a bag of cleaning supplies (16), and who is identified

by her sister as being brilliant at tidy[ing] up (61). The real threat to Maxwell and Sarahs

rejuvenation, we are told, is clearly not Harris and Connorwho, though they begin by mocking

the trial, not only actively participate in it, but end up showing admirable enthusiasm, emotion,

and belief in its legitimacy (they dance and cheer when they believe the trial has proved their

innocence and virtue)but rather, Eleanor. And we note that after she shows some capacity to

unsettle Maxwell and Sarah, to make them seem less assured, that Eleanor becomes the victim of

some sort of violence.

Connor disturbs Eleanor when he handles and moves her because [s]he was in [his] [. . .]

way (20); and in this particular instance violence is set up as praiseworthy, not because it can

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make people feel good, but can make them feel quite terrible. Maxwell gauges Connors

behavior odious: he essentializes Connor as a bully (20), as suggests that it suggests that he

might have beaten his own secretary so badly that she needed to be sent to the hospital (21). But

the play guides us to question just how offended Maxwell is by Connors violence towards

Eleanor, to wonder if at some level if Connorin attacking Eleanoressentially served as

Maxwells proxy. The principle way in which it does this is to suggest that Maxwell understands

Eleanor as his mother, and that henot Connoris actually the person with pressing Oedipal

(or, rather, inversed Oedipalas he is would welcome violence to his mother not his father)

issues. Connors assault on Eleanor follows a contest between Maxwell and Eleanor, which is

very much made to seem one between child and mother. While interacting with Gail, he takes

out and plays with a string of coloured paper clips. Eleanor, wishing him to behave less

childishly, takes them from himan action he follow up by rebelliously taking another paper

clip out from his pocket. But since the contest they have between one another concludes with

her successfully shaming Maxwell into temporarily terminating his unorthodox and childish

behavior and become an advocate of orthodox and adult virtues (cleanliness, self-respect), it is

a contest which is ultimately won by Eleanor. But then she is bullied by Connor, and we note

that Maxwell makes an effort to construe the assault one made by a child upon a mother. He

asks Connor, Whats wrong. Some trouble with mummy? (20). But the play ultimately makes

it very clear that it is Maxwell, not Connor, who is prone to think of Eleanor as his mother: for

his near last words are, Eleanor, you look like my mother (83).

Unlike Maxwell, Sarah wants Eleanor to understand that she (i.e., Eleanor) is not to liken

herself to a (specifically, her) mother. And we note that in the way Sarah characterizes mothers,

that she does not assess them in the standard Freudian way: that is, she understands mothers as

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Freud conceives fathersas formidable beings who would bully and dominate their children.

She portrays Sarah as responding to Eleanors mothering in the same Freud argues children were

want to react to their fathers, that is, by finding means by which to safely air their desire to

retaliate, for revenge, without arousing the attention of the censuring super-ego. She encourages

Eleanor to take pills she knows will leave her in a death-like comatose state. When Eleanor is

espied in this state, she jokes/hints that Eleanor might be dead: Besides, theres no waking her

anyway. She took a couple of my pills. These things are lethal (63). There are other hints in

the play that suggest that Maxwell implicitly wishes for Eleanor to incur harm. We note, for

instance, that despite Maxwells outrage at Connor for his having physically moved Eleanor, that

at one point Maxwell himself tries to do the same: We are told that He tries to push her out the

door (42). We also note that the play commences with his making clear he would war with

institutions such as religion, an institution Eleanor finds comforting (17); and that Maxwell

aims to include Eleanor, who is shown resisting him, in his project when it reaches the

dangerous part (42).

Eleanor is not hurt or slain by plays end, and if we construe the play as holding the same

conception of mothers as many of those living in the twentieth-centurys other extended period

of Darwinian capitalismthe 1920sdid, this development would in fact have been too much to

ask. At one point in the play, Maxwell calls God a she (42), suggesting that rather than a man

and a father, the most powerful entity anywhere is in fact a woman and a mother. Ann Douglas

writes that 1920s New Yorkers essentially believed the same thing: that the most powerful

negative influence over their lives was the lasting influence of the Victorian Titaness.

Specifically, she writes in Terrible Honesty that for its cultural emergence, modern New York

(believed that it) depended upon a collective and ruthless effort to distinguish itself from a

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foreseeable future. Since satires are normally construed as aiming to not just critique but help

bring to an end a vice ridden age, they might be fairly imagined as being glad that the play

which in various ways seems to be a satiremay actually more accurately be deemed, anti-

satiric.

.

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Documents

The Good Fight (Original)