The Indian Wants the Bronx by Israel Horovitz

First published: 1968

First produced: 1968, at the Astor Place Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Absurdist; Theater of Cruelty

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: A Fifth Avenue bus stop in New York City

Principal Characters:

• Gupta, an East Indian, in his early fifties
• Murph, a young city “tough” in his early twenties
• Joey, a young city “tough” in his early twenties

The Play

The Indian Wants the Bronx is a one-act play that opens with a bewildered East Indian, who speaks no English, attempting to negotiate the complexities of an American urban setting. As he attempts to decode the unfamiliar landscape and find his way to his son’s Bronx apartment, two young street toughs, who epitomize self-absorbed ignorance, arrive on the scene and begin to taunt him. They enter singing a song that depicts the world as a lonely and indifferent place. As the play progresses, it becomes clear that they come from unstable families and have a social worker who is attempting to rehabilitate them. Israel Horovitz makes it clear, however, that the institutions that are supposed to be assisting them have failed to reach them and that they are, accordingly, loose cannons with no real direction in life. They seem to wander the streets because they lack better alternatives.

From their first appearance onstage, Murph and Joey engage in juvenile banter that makes them appear even younger than they are. Despite their ostensible friendship, they communicate on a relatively elementary level and punctuate their conversations with crude sexual innuendo and street slang. Their reactions to Gupta highlight their stereotypic thought patterns and their provincial perspectives. Both their words and their actions leave the audience with the impression that the boys are bored and frustrated and are randomly venting their rage, which is fueled by their own insignificance and conflicted sexual identities. They appear to have fallen through the proverbial cracks, lack role models, and have values that are situational at best.

Throughout the play, their violence escalates, advancing from playful “noogies” and feigned knife play to the sadistic spinning game, which literally makes Murph ill, and the stabbing of Gupta. Horovitz does not, however, characterize the boys as malicious; he portrays them as lost. They seem caught up in the moment and one senseless action leads to another, even more senseless action. A moment of hope comes while Murph is offstage and Joey and Gupta engage in an ambiguous set of interactions, but what little hope this scene inspires is quickly dashed when Murph returns. Despite his compassion for Gupta, Joey lacks the nerve or skill to transcend the language barrier and lacks the will to subject himself to Murph’s ridicule. Accordingly, he tacitly sanctions Murph’s cruelty, tackling Gupta to prevent him from interfering with Murph’s verbal assault on Gupta’s son. Ultimately, Murph’s severing of the telephone cord and cutting of Gupta’s hand negate any possibility for communication or cross-cultural understanding. Significantly, Joey leaves before Murph actually impales Gupta’s hand with the knife.

The play’s conclusion parallels the opening vignette with significant differences. While the audience again hears the boys singing after they leave the stage, the stage directions describe the second rendition of the song as choruslike, suggesting that Murph and Joey represent the veritable isolation and hopelessness of all marginal individuals in this society. Horovitz underscores the universal nature of the boys’ plight by leaving Gupta alone onstage, with his confidence diminished, his hand cut, and a ringing phone that offers false hope. The play ends ironically with Gupta offering the phone to the audience as he speaks the only English words he remembers and thanks the audience.

Dramatic Devices

To bring his message home, Horovitz blends humor with violence. In the first part of the play he uses countless plays on words and oblique metaphors. The language is jocular and the atmosphere is nonthreatening. Midway through the play, however, Horovitz warns the audience that the tone is about to shift. Suddenly the action assumes a new significance and the audience becomes uncomfortable with the level of violence. This is Horovitz’s intent. He is attempting to jolt the audience out of its lassitude. More important, he transforms humor into a vehicle for social criticism by forcing the audience to participate vicariously in the violence and disallows them any alternatives, much as he disallows Gupta alternatives.

The Indian Wants the Bronx blends techniques from the Theater of the Absurd with the Theatre of Cruelty to achieve its effect. Because of the language barrier, much of the dialogue and action borders on the surreal. By having Gupta speak virtually all of his lines in Hindi, Horovitz puts the audience at the same disadvantage with regard to understanding Gupta as Murph and Joey. This device reinforces the theme of the outsider that Horovitz introduces in the epigraph to the play.

However, Horovitz is not content to allow the play to focus on social displacement. Instead, he introduces a more sinister element that transforms the play into a vehicle for indicting the ways in which language skills (or the lack of them) can produce near-tragic results. To accomplish this end, he introduces an unspoken language of violence. Even when the words are nonviolent, the actions are provocative and, in many cases, chilling.

The use of mise en scène, or the physical staging of the scene, augments the effects he achieves when Gupta speaks Hindi. Because the scenery is sparse and the dialogue fractured, the audience must focus on the nonverbal interactions of the characters. By minimizing distractions, Horovitz involves the audience in the action and makes the members virtual participants who are powerless to stop the violence. He also involves the audience by having Murph address “Pussyface” at the beginning of the play by calling into the audience.

In addition to the boys’ actions, Horovitz uses language to reveal character. Just as the language used to abuse Gupta is startling, so too are the references to the social worker, the mothers, and other unseen characters. The boys’ graphic depictions of others speak to the character of the boys and their grasp of the larger context. For them, life is a competition on the basest terms. For Gupta, life revolves around family. The boys, however, having known no stable family, seem to discount the importance of family and view their call to Gupta’s son as a prank rather than a provocative act of terrorism.

Critical Context

Critics applauded The Indian Wants the Bronx for a variety of reasons. Some compared Horovitz’s play to the work of fellow absurdists Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett because it negates rational assumptions about human interaction and emphasizes the inherent alienation of modern life. Others saw the play as conforming to Antonin Artaud’s concept of Theater of Cruelty, which inverts the traditional importance of words and action, elevating gesture and sound so as to shock the audience. Given the inspiration for the play, both of these assessments have merit. The idea for the play, according to Horovitz, traces back to an incident he observed while studying at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in the early 1960’s.

One morning while Horovitz was waiting in line for breakfast at the Commonwealth Institute, he noticed a young Hindu dressed in Indian garb, also waiting in line. The Indian’s attire set him apart from the others, and when a car full of “teddy boys” drove by, they unleashed a virulent stream of epithets toward the Hindu. To the amazement of the others, the Hindu, who spoke no English, simply laughed and seemed to encourage his attackers. After the incident ended, Horovitz approached the victim and realized that the Hindu was a lonely newcomer who was pleased by any overtures, however cruel or absurd.

This theme of social dislocation intrigued Horovitz and led him to write The Indian Wants the Bronx, which earned him his first Obie Award in 1968. He was struck by both the comedy and tragedy of the scene and used these competing elements to fuel many of his subsequent works, including The Primary English Class (pr. 1975, pb. 1976) and Morning (pr. 1968, pb. 1969). While these plays used different dramatic contexts, they continued to explore the social dislocation and random social violence of contemporary society. For this reason, many have applauded Horovitz as a master student of “the psychology of terrorism,” a theme that seems even more relevant in the early twenty-first century than when he wrote these works.

Sources for Further Study

DiGaetani, John L. A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Horovitz, Israel. Sixteen Short Plays. Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1994.

Kane, Leslie, ed. Israel Horovitz: A Collection of Critical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Lahr, John, ed. Showcase 1: Plays from the Eugene O’Neill Foundation. New York: Grove Press, 1970.

Marowitz, Charles. Off-Broadway Plays. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Press, 1970.

Wetzsteon, Ross, ed. The Obie Winners: The Best of Off-Broadway. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980.