Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs:
He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. Friedrich Nietzsche

Claire likes puzzles. She clings to her search-a-word game, pouncing on fruit words like "kumquat" and "banana" that give her a sense of order while chaos rages around her. She follows the instructions in the book Richard has put together for her and puts on her slippers to start her day. "This is so clever, "she delights. "It's like a little scavenger hunt." And it's a lucky thing that puzzles challenge and amuse her. Her own life is, to her, a complete puzzle, an almost blank with just a few tiny clues that pop up unbidden in her speech or her mind. Claire, who is cheery, curious and fearless, will spend her day pursuing her past, as she apparently spends every day pursuing her past and the answer to that shocked question "Who is that pathetically sad-looking woman?" How could that frightened, sad person be Claire? What could have made her that way and how did she come to forget?

Claire seems to be in pursuit of her life, but she's actually running away from it. Indeed, just about all the major characters—Gertie excepted—in this wickedly funny screwball play are fleeing from the very real horrors of their lives into some absurd place that they just barely find manageable. Escape from prison is a metaphor that applies to all, not just to the Limping Man, Millet, and Heidi. Everyone runs from the "real selves" that lurk in the past. Kenny into academic failure and pot. Richard into a rigorous, self-righteous normalcy that leads him to coerce Claire into a micro-managed marriage, Millet into a bizarre bi-polarism shared with a foul-mouthed puppet, Limping Man into a criminal fantasy of kidnapping and reformation. Heidi is an out-and-out impersonator. And Claire, of course, has psychogenic amnesia. Every night she simply forgets the whole thing and begins anew in the morning. They are all stuck, doomed to repeat the pattern of flight, puzzlement, and the thwarted desire for going forward.

All the images of who these people may be are "twisted reflections" as in the "funny mirrors" of the local fair. They see themselves askew and present distorted images to the other characters and to the audience. The only character who consistently sees clearly and knows what's going on is Claire's mother, Gertie, and poor Gertie has had a stroke that affects her speech. Cassandra-like, she is doomed to try to explain the situation, to try to warn her daughter, to try to call the police--and to have no one understand what she's saying. Like Claire with her find-a-word puzzles, Gertie struggles to say-the-words to calm the chaos raging around her. Distorted communication, of course, is concurrent with the physical deformed images and misshapen memories. Claire has no credible content to her conversations. The Limping Man lisps comically and also refuses to share information about Claire's past or his own deformities. Millet tries to be secretive while Hinky Binky, his alter-ego, blabs.

Fuddy Meers is the first produced play of the theatrical wonderkind, David Lindsey-Abaire (1970? - ). Only in his mid-thirties now, he has gone on to be celebrated for seven other plays, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole (2006), two screenplays and the musical lyrics for Shrek, the Musical. While a graduate student in the play-writing program at the Juilliard School in the late 1990s, he was mentored by Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman. There he began Fuddy Meers, writing an assigned ten pages a week for a play-writing class and trying to "leave a semi-good cliffhanger" every ten pages, "so my classmates would wonder, 'What's he going to bring in next week?' " Indeed, as secret horror is piled on secret horror as this Gothic plot unfolds, the play displays a little of this scene-topping method of creation. Yet the tone also blossomed with some tenderness hidden amidst the brutality, earning Lindsey-Abaire a reputation as a writer who wrote about people, as he says, who are "outsiders in search of clarity."

This is one of those plays that fills me with confusion. How is it that we laryanugh at this? Shouldn't Gertie's aphasia strike us as terribly sad? Isn't it horrendous that Philip's relationship to Claire is so violently abusive that it provokes her to an unthinkable violence in return? Is anything more poignant than Kenny wanting one more moment with his fully cognizant mother before she sleeps the sleep of amnesia? Some tentative answer lies, for me anyway, in this same metaphor of the "funny mirrors." Tragedy and comedy are the mirror image of each other. My own favorite of Shakespeare's comedies is Much Ado About Nothing. When the same situation (the false death of the wrongly-accused beloved woman) occurs in The Winter's Tale, it disturbs me terribly. When Claudius murders his brother the king in Hamlet by pouring poison in his ear, it's shockingly painful. When a version of this happens in Fuddy Meers, it's justified retribution. Tragedy-comedy. Comedy-tragedy. They are the right and left hand, the mirror image of the same ritual situation. In the words of Bill Cosby, a comedian who should really know: "You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything. . . you can survive it."

Can they survive it? Claire has repeated the same day for two years—but could this day be different? All the actors in her play, all the fragments of her lost life, come together in one place at one time. She remembers the details, how much her son weighed at birth, the band-aids on students' skinned knees, playing with her brother, her long-dead father walking the dogs, and the horror of how her marriage to Phillip ended. The tantalizing ambiguity of Fuddy Meers is the fragile sense of hope, articulated by the family at the very end, that when she wakes again "maybe you'll remember everything . . . maybe our lives can go forward . . . maybe . . ."

© 2008 by Eileen Warburton

Further reading?
There isn't any. This playwright is too young and too new to have anything written about him! I suspect this will change in the next ten years.


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.