“I am that merry wanderer of the night. Curiosity, a strange house, an unfaithful bedfellow drive me. Oh, there are other distractions, too, of course. A dog barking in the distance. Bed springs creaking; perhaps love is being made on the premises. The drip of the toilet on the third floor. Can they not hear it? But it’s mainly the curiosity. I am obsessed with who people really are. They don’t tell us, so I must know their secrets.”
When one thinks of soliloquies, one often ends where they began: Shakespeare. The interior monologue addressed directly to the audience to reveal thoughts, motivations, secrets and psychology fell out of favor somewhere along the line, but the vestiges remains in the form of things like Ferris Bueller talking directly to the camera. McNally resurrects the traditional stage soliloquy throughout the play as a means of given insight into he mind of a character that simply is not going to come out through dialogue. This particular example is preceded by the stage direction (All the men are snoring now.) and features John moving throughout the house, stopping be the beds in which the other men sleep and providing commentary that provides information that the audience might not ever know otherwise.
“That’s five dollars. Anyone who mentions AIDS this summer, it’ll cost them.”
The play features an all-male cast comprising of all-homosexual characters set in the “The Present” of 1994 when it premiered. If the word AIDS was not mentioned, some serious fines would likely have been handed. Somewhat ironically, it was only with the arrival of AIDS that plays featuring a cast entirely or mostly of gay men began to routinely make it into the mainstream. The very title of the play alludes to pervasive threat of AIDS hanging over these characters, but the epidemic itself does not. Buzz almost succeeds in getting his friends not to mention the word, but it will pop up a few times even as many conversations circle the topic without directly referencing it.
"I have twenty-seven years, eight months, six days, three hours, thirty-one minutes, and eleven seconds left. I will be watching Gone with the Wind of all things again on television. Arthur will be in the other room fixing me hot cocoa and arguing with his brother on the phone. He won’t even hear me go.”
In addition to breaking the fourth wall with its soliloquies directly addressing the audience, the theatricality of the drama is explored through a non-linear presentation of time. One effect gained by this structure is the dramatic irony in which the audience is privy to information that the characters are not. The audience is made aware of certain information which will take place in the future which lends the character dynamics a deeper level of meaning when events are played out before that future knowledge becomes known to them. Another example of how time is present in a non-linear fashion takes place toward the end when Perry inform the audience how he will die twenty-seven years give or take in the future. The other characters follow suit, providing a sense of closure to the lives of these men beyond the restricted time they are given on stage.
