The Well-Appointed Room
The first piece, “Nostalgia,” reminds me of a classic George Booth cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in 1970. A writer sits at his Royal manual; his wife stands by, holding a sandwich on a plate, and says, “I’ve got an idea for a story: Gus and Ethel live on Long Island, on the North Shore. He works sixteen hours a day writing fiction. Ethel never goes out, never does anything except fix Gus sandwiches, and in the end she becomes a nympho-lesbo-killer-whore. Here’s your sandwich.” Greenberg’s author, Stewart, writes plays, not fiction, and his wife, Natalie, probably doesn’t fix him sandwiches–in fact, as “Nostalgia” opens Stewart’s making a very big deal out of cooking an omelet for their Sunday breakfast. But the sense of a woman pissed to the point of pure, acid loathing is precisely the same. Really, “Nostalgia” could be the sequel to the cartoon: way past ready to walk out, Natalie doesn’t care who gets the cool furniture or the Jonathan Adler ceramics or even the chichi apartment itself; she just wants to be holding Stewart’s quivering, bloody, and of course detached balls in her tight fist when she goes.
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Inasmuch as Mark advises us at the start that his story ends happily, there’s nothing lost in telling you that Gretchen has a healthy baby and comes out of her proleptic fantasy. It seems that her waking dream was a response to the trauma of 9/11–a way to beat the uncertainties of the world by having a complete and satisfying life in her head. But here’s where “Nostalgia” casts its retrospective shadow. Both Mark and Stewart are presented as men with strong dream lives of their own, around which they try to mold their flesh-and-blood relationships. But Natalie has the luxury of walking out on Stewart’s dream. Did the destruction of the towers foreclose that possibility for Gretchen? Or did she walk out by going crazy? Is little Jack the cure for what ails her or the permanent tie that guarantees the syndrome will turn chronic? What’s the happy ending here, and to whom does it belong? The best thing about Greenberg’s play is how it sneaks up on you with questions like these, offering implications.
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre Company, downstairs theater, 1650 N. Halsted
