''Home Free!'' is a
one-act play
A one-act play is a play that has only one act, as distinct from plays that occur over several acts. One-act plays may consist of one or more scenes. The 20-40 minute play has emerged as a popular subgenre of the one-act play, especially in writi ...
by American playwright
Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937March 24, 2011) was an American playwright. His work, as described by ''The New York Times'', was "earthy, realist, greatly admired ndwidely performed."Margalit Fox, Fox, Margalit"Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer Prize-Wi ...
. The play is among Wilson's earlier works, and was first produced
off-off-Broadway
Off-off-Broadway theaters are smaller New York City theaters than Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, and usually have fewer than 100 seats. The off-off-Broadway movement began in 1958 as part of a response to perceived commercialism of the prof ...
at the
Caffe Cino
Caffe Cino was an Off-Off-Broadway theater founded in 1958 by Joe Cino. The West Village coffeehouse, located at 31 Cornelia Street, was initially conceived as a venue for poetry, folk music, and visual art exhibitions. The plays produced at th ...
in 1964.
Production history
The play premiered at
Joe Cino
Joseph Cino (November 16, 1931 – April 2, 1967), was an Italian-American theatre producer. The Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement is generally credited to have begun at Cino's Caffe Cino in the West Village of Manhattan.
Caffe Cino and off-off ...
's Caffe Cino in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
in January 1964 and was revived there in August 1964. The production was directed by William Archibald.
In 1965, the play was produced alongside Wilson's ''No Trespassing'' for the
La MaMa
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (La MaMa E.T.C.) is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the ...
Repertory Troupe's first European tour. It was produced alongside ''
The Madness of Lady Bright'' on tour in
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
in 1968.
''Home Free!'' was produced
off-Broadway
An off-Broadway theatre is any professional theatre venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, inclusive. These theatres are smaller than Broadway theatres, but larger than off-off-Broadway theatres, which seat fewer tha ...
in February 1965 at the New Playwrights series at the
Cherry Lane Theatre
The Cherry Lane Theatre is the oldest continuously running off-Broadway theater in New York City. The theater is located at 38 Commerce Street between Barrow and Bedford Streets in the West Village neighborhood of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, N ...
. The play was presented in a production of three plays. The other two plays in the production were
Sam Shepard
Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was an American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose career spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any write ...
's ''Up to Thursday'' and
Paul Foster's ''Balls''. The series was headed by
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III ( ; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as ''The Zoo Story'' (1958), '' The Sandbox'' (1959), ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1962), '' A Delicate Balance'' (1966) ...
, Richard Barr, and Clinton Wilder. Wilson's play featured
Michael Warren Powell
Michael Warren Powell (January 22, 1937 – July 17, 2016) was an American artistic director, director, actor and designer involved in the Off-Off-Broadway movement, Off-Broadway and in the development of new American plays.
Early career
Origina ...
.
Characters
Lawrence and Joanna are the play's two major characters. The additional characters Edna and Claypone are mentioned by Lawrence and Joanna, but have no lines and are not mentioned in the
Dramatis personae
Dramatis personae (Latin: 'persons of the drama') are the main characters in a dramatic work written in a list. Such lists are commonly employed in various forms of theatre, and also on screen. Typically, off-stage characters are not considered ...
or the
stage directions
In theatre, blocking is the precise staging of actors to facilitate the performance of a play, ballet, film or opera. Historically, the expectations of staging/blocking have changed substantially over time in Western theater. Prior to the movemen ...
. This implies that they are
fictional characters
In fiction, a character (or speaker, in poetry) is a person or other being in a narrative (such as a novel, Play (theatre), play, Radio series, radio or television series, music, film, or video game). The character may be entirely fictional or b ...
in the minds of Lawrence and Joanna. Lawrence and Joanna are brother and sister. However, the play strongly implies that they are having an
incestuous relationship
Incest ( ) is human sexual activity between family members or close kinship, relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by Affinity (law), affinity (marriage ...
, which has resulted in Joanna's
pregnancy
Pregnancy is the time during which one or more offspring develops ( gestates) inside a woman's uterus (womb). A multiple pregnancy involves more than one offspring, such as with twins.
Pregnancy usually occurs by sexual intercourse, but ca ...
.
Lawrence (and, to a lesser degree, Joanna) is characterized by extreme
agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is a mental and behavioral disorder, specifically an anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape. These situations can in ...
. He is suspicious of everything that Joanna tells him about the outside world. At the end of the play, Lawrence refuses to go out, even to save Joanna's life. Lawrence believes totally in Edna and Claypone's existence, and Joanna mostly seems to share this belief. However, when Lawrence sends Edna to fetch the doctor, Joanna screams, "No, Lawrence, you go! You go!!!' This implies that Joanna knows that Edna doesn't exist and can't fetch the doctor, and that she has merely been pretending for Lawrence's sake.
Plot summary
![Lee Taylor-Allen & Kenneth Boys](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Lee_Taylor-Allen_%26_Kenneth_Boys.jpg)
Lawrence opens the play by delivering a lesson on
astronomy
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...
, focusing on the
Pleiades
The Pleiades (), also known as The Seven Sisters, Messier 45 and other names by different cultures, is an asterism and an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the north-west of the constellation Taurus. At a distance of ...
. While describing the effects of
universal expansion, he becomes excited and jumps around the room, imitating the stars being flung in every direction. He eventually gets tired and starts muttering to himself about Joanna's return from the grocery store and what she has in the "Surprise Box", a brightly colored box that they use to give surprise gifts to each other.
Joanna enters in a panic, having been seen by some frightening entity called either Pruneface or Wienerface, or both. She is pregnant. They engage in a number of strange, playful, seemingly random conversations. Joanna tells Lawrence about an encounter she had on the subway with a college-aged boy, and Lawrence accuses her of having sex with him. They play games, including one where Joanna is a
queen
Queen or QUEEN may refer to:
Monarchy
* Queen regnant, a female monarch of a Kingdom
** List of queens regnant
* Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king
* Queen dowager, the widow of a king
* Queen mother, a queen dowager who is the mother ...
and Lawrence commands Edna and Claypone to fetch her various things. All of a sudden, however, he halts the game with the line: "You're not a queen, you're a whore."
Eventually Joanna collapses, seemingly unable to walk. She screams at Lawrence to get a doctor, but he is afraid of the outside world and refuses to go outside, preferring to send Edna instead. Joanna's pains, possibly the result of
pre-eclampsia
Pre-eclampsia is a disorder of pregnancy characterized by the onset of high blood pressure and often a significant amount of protein in the urine. When it arises, the condition begins after 20 weeks of pregnancy. In severe cases of the disease ...
, persist. She eventually falls, unmoving, onto the bed. Lawrence leans over her and begs her to return, falling into a
stutter
Stuttering, also known as stammering, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the ...
as the play ends.
References
External links
* Notes and drafts for ''Home Free!'' are held in th
Lanford Wilson Collectionat the University of Missouri Libraries
{{Lanford Wilson
1964 plays
Plays by Lanford Wilson
One-act plays
Incest in plays