“I’m going to die clean. I’m going to school and I’m learning things. You’re stupid. I’m not. When I finish school I’m leaving. You hear that? You can stay in the mud.”
Mae is addressing this to Lloyd. It comes at the end of yet another passionate outburst directed toward him. She had just informed him that his destiny is to die in the mud like a pig. But that’s not going to be her destiny. This is the dichotomy of their entire relationship. There is not really all that big of a difference between them to the outsider. They are about the same age and represent the same economic level. The primary difference is motivation and ambition. What some—including the playwright—define as “spirit.” The stage directions define Mae specifically as a “spirited young woman” while Lloyd is simple, possessed of a goodhearted nature, but ungainly and unkempt. The big question is whether this difference in spirit can translate into changing the course of fate.
“Soon everything will be used only once. We will use things once. We will need to do that as our time will be value and it will not be feasible to spend it caring for things: washing them, mending them, repairing them. We will use a car till it breaks down. Then, we will discard it.”
Into this well-established if strange relationship between Mae and Lloyd arrives Henry. He is about thirty years older and filled with the spirit of philosophical contemplation. Oddly enough, he also suffers from a weird sort of illiteracy in which he can work out the correct pronunciation of words but is at a loss to understand what they mean. Clearly, this places no limitation on his intellectual development. His foretelling of predominantly disposal society in the near future is right on target. Though, of course, this theory could just as well be something he heard which became something on his mind which grew into a point of view.
“There’s nothing I can do and there’s nothing you can do and there is nothing Lloyd can do. He’s always been here, since he was little. My dad brought him in. He said Lloyd was a good boy and that he could keep me company. He said he was old and tired and he didn’t understand what a young person like me was like.”
Mae is addressing this to Henry. The scene comes late in the play, after the audience has already become used to the strange relationship between Mae and Lloyd. This backstory fills in some necessary information that helps to clear things a little. But not entirely. The Mae/Lloyd dynamic is still every bit as strange as before if perhaps a little less mysterious. And it is that context which is the most important thing when trying to understand this play. Something can be a mystery and strange at the same time or something can be strange and not so mysterious or something can be not so strange but still mysterious. The dynamic here is one that moves from the combination toward a lessening of the mystery. Proving only, perhaps, that explication does not always result in clarity.
