Summary
We are in Mommy and Daddy's living room. As the scene begins, they are seated in armchairs facing towards the audience. Mommy remarks on the fact that some expected visitors are running late. "That's the way things are today, and there's nothing you can do about it," says Daddy, and Mommy agrees. Daddy goes on a rant about the fact that their expected guests were quick to accept their rent and their security deposit when they first moved in to the apartment, but now they are very late and lazy about fixing anything that goes wrong with the apartment. Mommy adds, "People think they can get away with anything these days...and of course they can," before telling a story about the fact that she bought a new hat the previous day.
It seems like Daddy isn't paying attention, but Mommy goes on with her story about purchasing the hat, telling him that she couldn't find one she liked at first, before finally settling on a beige hat. She prompts Daddy at different points in the story to prove that he is paying attention. She continues her story by saying that soon afterward she ran into the chair of her woman's club, who called the hat "wheat-colored." The two women argued about whether the hat was beige or wheat until finally, Mommy reports, the chairwoman left. "She's just a dreadful woman, but she is chairman of our woman's club, so naturally I'm terribly fond of her," Mommy says. She then tells Daddy that she went back to the hat shop and complained about the fact that they told her the hat was beige when it was, in fact, wheat. She describes to Daddy that she made a big scene at the store, and yelled at the salesgirl and screamed. She says, "...finally they admitted that they might have made a mistake; so they took my hat into the back, and then they came out again with a hat that looked exactly like it."
Mommy says that the salespeople still insisted that the hat was beige, even though she knew it was wheat. The salespeople then told her to go outside and observe that the hat was beige in the sunlight. When she went outside, she saw they were right, and so brought it home. Upon hearing this story, Daddy suggests that the second hat was simply the same one as the first, to which Mommy responds, "Well, of course it was!" The couple agrees that it's impossible to get any kind of satisfaction, and complain about the fact that their guests haven't arrived yet. They both say that they are worried less for their own sakes than for "Grandma's sake," saying, "Grandma cries every time she goes to the johnny as it is; but now that it doesn't work it's even worse, it makes Grandma think she's getting feeble-headed."
Just then, Grandma enters carrying some boxes. When she mentions that they should get the toilet fixed, Daddy is rude to her. Grandma tells them both that when one gets old, it is not one's ailments that eventually lead to death, but the fact that people start being rude to you. She says, "That's why old people die, eventually. People talk to them that way." She goes out and gets more boxes.
Daddy feels sorry that he snapped at Grandma, and he and Mommy look at the boxes that Grandma brought, so neatly wrapped. Mommy recalls how Grandma used to wrap up her lunchbox really nicely when she was in school, and she would never open it because it was so nicely wrapped. Her lunch would be Grandma's uneaten leftovers from the night before, which she would then bring home for the next night. At lunch at school, the other kids thought she had no lunch, so they would give her theirs. "They thought I suffered from the sin of pride, and since that made them better than me, they were very generous," Mommy says. We learn that Mommy grew up poor, and Daddy was always rich, and he saved her and her mother from poverty.
Grandma comes in with the rest of the boxes. She scolds Daddy more for his rude remark about the noises she makes in the bathroom. Somehow, she changes the subject to the fact that Daddy should have never married Mommy in the first place, because Mommy was "a tramp and a trollop and a trull to boot." She tells Daddy that he shouldn't have married Mommy, because she always just wanted to marry a rich man. Mommy reminds Grandma that she's her mother and not Daddy's.
Mommy wants to put Grandma to bed, but it isn't even noon. Grandma complains about the fact that she's had to live with them even though she wanted to live on her own. Suddenly the doorbell rings.
Analysis
Mommy and Daddy's dynamic is notable from the start. Mommy is clearly the more domineering half of the couple, and the play begins with her telling a story about a recent purchase. When Daddy tunes out from her story for just a moment, Mommy becomes a maniacal taskmaster, and for the rest of her story checks in at different intervals to make sure he's paying attention. Daddy is evidently afraid of her, and mimics her words back to her to prove to her that he is listening. Thus we see that Mommy is clearly the more controlling member of the couple, while Daddy goes along with what she says unquestioningly.
Indeed, Mommy is a very capricious and complicated character, as revealed in her story about buying the hat. When the chairman doesn't think her hat is beige, she makes a big deal of it at the store, causing a scene, and screaming until the salespeople present her with a new hat. When they go into the backroom and come back with the same hat, she is satisfied, even though the hat is exactly the same. This anecdote proves to us that Mommy is difficult to please, often in arbitrary ways that have little to do with reality, and more to do with her whims and her obsession with social status.
The reason Mommy is so intimidated by the chair of the woman's club is because the chair is her superior, which creates a certain amount of confused antagonism between the two of them. At one point, Mommy describes the chair as a "dreadful woman," but someone she is "terribly fond of." This is clearly a contradiction, but it represents the ways that Mommy is fragmented by her striving to fit in with well-to-do society, and her willingness to go to extreme and irrational lengths to prove her worth. In this way, she serves as a kind of archetypal matriarch within the "American Dream" of the play, a woman who is pushed beyond logic and propriety by her desires to keep up and have the best.
In spite of Mommy's wanting so desperately to fit in with society, Mommy and Daddy are very dissatisfied with the modern world. Indeed they often sadly discuss the fact that "That's the way things are today," referring to some modern reality or another. In their eyes, things were always better in their time, and nothing is quite the same anymore. This represents the ways that certain generations of people can take comfort in thinking that the world has gone downhill. Rather than imagining that things have gotten better for the world, they instead suspect that the world is stupider and less refined than when they were young. This is another delusion of the characters meant to demonstrate some of the absurdities of a particular "American Dream."
In contrast to Mommy and Daddy is Grandma, Mommy's mother, who lives with the couple. She is 86 years old and has lost many of her faculties, but in many ways, she is less deluded than Mommy and Daddy. While they treat her like she is a waste of space, regularly threatening and disrespecting her, she maintains that age has everything to do with the way one is treated. In her mind, she is getting older only because of how she is being treated—as a waste of space. She even suggests that older people go deaf because they grow sick of hearing people talk to them like they are old and useless. Thus we see that Grandma has a rather whimsical wisdom that Mommy and Daddy lack.
