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Having read Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (originally published in 1961) and Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (1955) the first thing that came into my mind was a comparison of life and theatre. All their lives long people act wearing different masks every new day. My life always proves to me that I act differently every time: my roles are much determined by my personal demands and the demands of the society I live in. I believe that the characters of the works under consideration are ordinary people and act in the same way as I do. Yates and Wouk depicted them performing in various plays that their lives presented them with.
Theatricality is a major theme in both Revolutionary Road and Marjorie Morningstar. The main female characters of the two works desperately wanted to become actresses. Yates and Wouk show the reader different stages of these characters’ achieving their goals.
Yates’ novel starts with a depiction of the performance of the community theatre called The Laurel Players. Here one of the main characters of the book, April Wheeler, participates. The members of the community have made all the preparations, “had all put their hearts into their work” and now are ready to present the results of their work to the public opinion (Yates 6). The new play The Petrified Forest (“that was hardy one of the world’s greatest plays”) is to be performed: “The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.” (Yates 6, 3) The epithet “dying” stands here not to simply characterize the sounds, but to admit the condition in which the Wheelers’ appeared to be.
Frank and April performed their own parts in the play of their family: she was a housekeeper dreaming to become a famous actress; he had a rather well-paid but extremely dull office job. The main problem of this family was that the actors were never working in a team. They acted separately one from another and this ruined their marriage one day.
The author’s depiction of the performance failure at the beginning of the novel makes the reader anticipate some failure in the characters’ lives. And the failure really happened: the vain dreams of the Wheelers were ruined as they failed to understand each other.
The opening scene in which April stars describes her failure as an actress and suggests that any attempts of her in this sphere are doomed to failure:
She was working alone, and visibly weakening with every line. Before the end of the first act, the audience could tell as well as the Players that she’d lost her grip, and soon they were all embarrassed for her. She had begun to alternate between false theatrical gestures and white-knuckled immobility; she was carrying her shoulders high and square, and despite her heavy make-up you could see the warmth of humiliation rising in her face and neck (Yates 13).
This scene may also serve as a symbol for the character’s other failures in her life: her marriage and her desire to go to Paris.
Theatricality is also revealed in the way the author builds up his narration. Throughout the novel, Yates resorts to the dialogues that render imaginary communication between the couple. Though they are mostly invented by Frank as a prediction of what might happen, they sound so realistically that they could have worked as a stage play. Here is the similarity of the novel with a theatrical performance.
The author is guided by the principle “show – do not tell” while creating his work. He could have developed his skills up to be called a playwright if only he desired.
In Wouk’s work, the seventeen years old girl named Marjorie though pursues a sensible degree in education, strives to become an actress: “She was going to be an actress! This pretty girl in the mirror was destined to be an actress, nothing else.” (Wouk 5) The author depicts her starring in the college musical. There she finds a friend, the costume designer, Marsha, who is much more experienced in various life areas than she is. Together with Marsha, Marjorie participates in the commune-style theater “camp” where principles are different from those supported by her family reign.
It is worth admitting that the very idea of becoming an actress contradicts the views on woman’s roles that were common for the American society of the 1950s. Women were expected to get married and to raise children, whereas their strivings for independence, as the job of an actress presupposed, were absolutely unacceptable.
Through the dimension of the character’s search for the desired career, the author managed to depict other aspects of her rebellion against society: Marjorie never hesitated to break the rules which prevented her from living the life she wanted. I suppose that this is glorious, colorful world of theatrical invention gave Marjorie the power to face the difficulties her life was full of.
When I consider the quality of both actresses’ performances I am inclined to believe that it is Life that was a spectator of the plays. Only Life could give marks to the performances. Coming back to the idea of masks we wear I want to admit that April has lost her personal identity because of them. The masks prevented her from being a “real” person: she could not realize herself as a personality as she could not understand who she was: “It’s just that I don’t know who you are…. And even if I did… I’m afraid it wouldn’t help because you see I don’t know who I am, either.” (Yates 360).
In the case of Yates’s work the performance was utterly failed, in the case of the Wouk’s actress, I believe that she never succeeded in a spectacular life marked by romance she once chose.
This way or another, everyone is free to choose a role to play. The laws of theatre are as severe as the laws of life: act good and you will hear a storm of applause, work in a slipshod manner and you will certainly fail. Both on the stage and in your life.
Works Cited
Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. Vintage, 2000.
Wouk, Herman. Marjorie Morningstar. Back Bay Books, 1992.
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