Keely and Du by Jane Martin

First published: 1993

First produced: 1993, at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1993

Locale: Providence, Rhode Island

Principal Characters:

• Keely, a pregnant, divorced woman in her early thirties
• Du, a sixty-five year old registered nurse, female guard of Keely
• Walter, a sanctimonious, self-righteous fanatical pastor
• Cole, Keely’s alcoholic ex-husband

The Play

Written as a one-act play but with a possible intermission after the climactic thirteenth scene, Jane Martin’s emotional Keely and Du chronicles the fate of Keely from the last preparations for her imprisonment through her eventual release. Set almost exclusively in a sparsely furnished basement that has been converted into a prison, the play focuses on Keely’s developing and changing relationship with her adversary Du, the fundamentalist Christian who guards her to prevent her from terminating her unwanted pregnancy.

In the beginning, Du waits for two male orderlies to bring in the body of the unconscious, kidnapped Keely. She prepares the bed on which Keely will lie, handcuffed to its iron bedstead, and greets Walter, the organizer of the kidnapping. Walter is a sanctimonious pastor of fifty, who acts with the single-mindedness of a well-programmed robot. Du, on the other hand, betrays her underlying humanity through small acts of kindness toward their kidnap victim.

With Walter gone for four days, Du tends to Keely. At first, Keely fights with Du, throwing her breakfast on the floor. Du responds in a befuddled way, almost like a disoriented grandmother, telling of her own children and marriage, when all Keely cares about is to leave her prison. Du reveals her religious beliefs to Keely and tells her that she will not be released until it is too late to have an abortion.

Walter appears and begins his lectures to Keely. Self-righteously, he justifies his actions with his extreme religious beliefs and tells Keely that she will come to love her child once it is born. Keely rejects this attack on her liberty and freedom of choice. Du eventually pulls back Walter when he becomes too overbearing. Against the biblical passages quoted by Walter, Keely reveals that she was raped by her ex-husband and does not want his child, nor can she afford to raise it. Walter presents her with graphic antiabortion pamphlets, and Du gives her baby shoes, all in an effort to manipulate her soul.

Keely and Du develop a personal relationship. Du tells Keely of her own uneventful marriage to a man whom she found dull, and with whom she has three boys, while her baby girl had died. Du confesses that once her husband, who is seventy now, discovered religion, he set their marriage bed on fire. Keely responds with the story of how she met her husband, Cole. A working-class alcoholic with a nasty temperament, Keely married Cole to anger her policeman father. After she left him, Cole stalked her and used what Keely wanted to be their final meeting as an occasion to rape and impregnate her. Very upset, Keely tells Du that she must have an abortion.

Walter and Keely fight again, and Du joins Keely in laughing at Walter’s monotonous, robotic speeches. After he is gone, Du brings Keely her birthday gifts: a dress to wear and a sixpack of beer. Keely is unshackled, and the two women bond over shared beers. Keely tells Du of the satisfaction she found in rock climbing, remembering a night spent alone in a sleeping bag off a sheer cliff. She yearns to be alone and free.

The next day, Walter reappears and Du confesses the birthday party. Walter produces a surprise visitor, Cole. The man argues that he has found God and has mended his errant ways. Cole slides over to Keely, who is handcuffed to the bed again, and asks her to forgive him and raise their child. When he puts his hand in Keely’s mouth, begging her to come back to him, she bites him. Cole slaps her hard and leaves with Walter. Keely uses the wire hanger of her birthday dress to perform an abortion.

With Keely unconscious and covered in blood, Walter runs away while Du calls an ambulance. The last scene shows Keely visiting Du in jail. Du still disagrees with Keely’s choice but appreciates her visit. Keely tells her that she is going out with a married man, hoping for his divorce and a better future.

Dramatic Devices

Strong dramatic unity of space is created by confining the action of all but the last scene to the basement room that functions as Keely’s jail. With its sparse props, the stage fully conveys a sense of imprisonment. Immobilized by the handcuffs to her left wrist, Keely is literally tied to her bed and limited in her range of actions. Her quest to get rid of her shackles, even for a moment, and to be able to stand up again, lends urgency to her verbal pleading with Du.

Walter is the one character who freely moves on and off stage, passing through the stage’s world of the basement jail and the free world outside the theater. His mobility is related to his leadership role. He is instrumental in organizing Keely’s imprisonment, and he stays in touch with outside events.

Du has voluntarily confined herself to share the prison space with Keely. Whenever the lights go on to illuminate the next scene of the play, she is already onstage with Keely. The one moment when Du does leave Keely alone is when she follows Walter and Cole to minister to Cole’s bitten hand. Without Du’s presence, Keely performs the drastic act of abortion.

To give this climactic act great symbolic power, the playwright lets Keely use the prop of the wire hanger that came with her birthday dress. When the audience sees Keely pulling the wire hanger from under the mattress where she has hidden it and move it under her blanket, the spectators understand what action is theatrically implied here. When the lights come back on for scene seventeen, Keely’s bed is drenched in stage blood, and the actress lies as if unconscious. This sight drives Walter into a panicked flight, revealing his ultimate loss of control over the situation. Du stays behind to call an ambulance. Her concern for Keely overrides her impulse to save herself.

With the last scene taking place in a proper jail, where Du is visited by Keely, the audience never escapes the atmosphere of prison. It is almost as if the contentious philosophical and moral debate about abortion threatens to imprison all those who wish to tackle this difficult ethical subject. Now Keely and Du’s roles are reversed. However, no matter who is imprisoned and who is free, the friendship of the two women has endured.

Critical Context

Keely and Du has been hailed as a major achievement signaling Jane Martin’s dramatic development and portrayal of a challenging subject. It is the eleventh play of the dramatist, who, by 2002, had nearly two dozen plays to her credit. It is also her most well-known play. In 1993, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, and, in 1994, it won the American Theatre Critics Association Award for Best New Play. Because of its topical subject, it is frequently performed at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

The identity of the playwright is shrouded in mystery. Jane Martin has never made a public appearance or spoken about her work in any medium. Instead, she is represented by Jon Jory, the former director of the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky, who also directed the premiere of Keely and Du. Jory’s wife, Marcia Dixcy Jory, has also written the introduction to the first collection of Martin’s plays. This situation has many critics and insiders speculate that “Jane Martin” is really the pseudonym of either Jon Jory alone, or the team of Jon and Marcia Dixcy Jory. The Jories have denied these speculations, stating instead that Martin prefers to work in private. However, because all of Martin’s plays are written so clearly from a woman’s perspective and, like Keely and Du, focus on issues vital to American women, critics have argued that maybe the male playwright Jon Jory is hiding behind a female pseudonym to avoid the unjustified but possible backlash by people who would not grant a man the moral right to write a play from a woman’s viewpoint.

Sources for Further Study

Gussow, Mel. “Plays by Women, for Anyone and Mostly About Violence.” New York Times, March 24, 1993, p. C15.

Henry, George. “Is Kidnapping for Jesus a Moral Right?” Time 142 (November 29, 1993): 71.

Kintz, Linda. “Chained to the Bed: Violence and Abortion in Keely and Du.” In Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, edited by Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Klein, Alvin. “Keely and Du: The Battle over Abortion.” New York Times, October 16, 1994, p. NJ17.

Martin, Jane. Jane Martin: Collected Plays, 1980-1995. Manchester, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1996.

Solinger, Rickie, ed. Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Stearns, David Patrick. “Keely and Du: When the Body Politic Is a Woman’s.” USA Today, February 11, 1994, p. D3.