Lydie Breeze by John Guare

First published: 1982

First produced: 1982, at the American Place Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Dark comedy

Time of work: 1895

Locale: Nantucket Island

Principal Characters:

• Joshua Hickman, the widower of Lydie Breeze
• Lydie Hickman, his daughter, age fifteen
• Beaty, an Irish serving girl in her early thirties
• Gussie Hickman, Lydie’s twenty-two-year-old sister
• Jeremiah Grady, the son of Joshua’s deceased friend Dan Grady

The Play

Lydie Breeze opens at dawn at the Hickman house, on Nantucket. The “very sparsely furnished” parlor and stairs leading to a landing are visible; there is also a porch and a beach with an upended rowboat buried in the sand. Lydie enters, carrying a candle, and kneels in prayer, followed by Beaty, who leads her through a strange ritual that tells of the suicide of Lydie’s mother, Lydie Breeze. The two invoke the dead woman’s spirit to “keep her alive.” It becomes clear that Beaty has been in charge of the girl’s spotty education. She is attempting to inculcate in the girl a hatred of men and a fear of her own sexuality. Lydie has been injured in the eye, wears a pair of dark glasses, and frequently refers to herself as blind, though it is clear that the injury is minor.

Some references are made in this scene to Aipotu (Utopia backward), a tiny community founded by Lydie Breeze and three Civil War veterans: her husband, Joshua Hickman; Dan Grady; and Amos Mason. Young Lydie and Joshua are all that remain of Aipotu. Lydie Breeze and Dan Grady are dead, and Amos Mason is now a senator running for the presidency with the backing of William Randolph Hearst.

In scene 2, Lydie’s older sister, Gussie, sweeps into the house, full of modern talk and attitudes. She is Amos’s secretary—his “whore,” as Beaty immediately surmises—and has persuaded Amos and Hearst to pay a visit to Joshua. Joshua reacts with typical sarcasm to her attempts to draw him into the spirit of Amos’s visit:“’The Senator from Wall Street’ sails back to Old Nantucket to light up a corn cob pipe with an old scarecrow from the old, old past. ’Why, look at him! Amos Mason is a man of the people. He gets my vote!’” Gussie, hurt but undaunted, regales Lydie with stories of her new life, their father’s killing of Dan Grady, his time in prison, and their mother’s suicide “because she was still in love with the other man.”

When a young bird-bander turns up with some eyedrops for Lydie, Joshua confuses them with Gussie’s nose drops, which he puts into Lydie’s eye instead, causing a considerable amount of pain and recrimination. The scene ends with the sudden, mysterious appearance of Jeremiah Grady, Dan’s son, asking for Lydie Breeze.

Act 2 opens with Jeremiah first comforting, then passionately embracing young Lydie. Beaty, when she enters to protect Lydie, tells of having been seduced on this very beach and infected with syphilis. Scene 2 is a dramatic confrontation between Joshua and Jeremiah, who has had a great success on the London stage as the monster in Frankenstein and has returned to avenge his father and himself. Joshua tells the full story of his accidental killing of Dan, which evolved from a fight over Joshua’s rough treatment of Jeremiah but which was also motivated by Joshua’s jealousy of his wife’s infidelity with Dan. Jeremiah tells how Lydie seduced him and infected him with syphilis, which she caught from his father, and Joshua realizes that Lydie’s suicide note was an apology to Jeremiah, not to him. Jeremiah’s attempt at forgiveness is met with searing anger and bitterness from Joshua: “I could kill you all over again.” The stage goes black.

In act 3, the past violently invades the present, as Gussie and the young bird-bander tell Joshua of disaster on Hearst’s yacht. Lydie has delivered an accusation against Amos from Beaty, who believes that Amos seduced, infected, and abandoned her. Hearst has read the account, Amos is ruined, and Gussie has been fired. In a haunting scene, Jeremiah reveals to Beaty that it was he, not Amos, who infected her, although Beaty is unable any longer to understand the difference. They disappear into the dark, to be discovered drowned the next morning, tied together at the wrists.

Act 4 begins with Jude comforting Lydie over Beaty’s death, then shifts to Gussie and Joshua, who finally express their fondness for each other. At this moment Lucian Rock, an inventor traveling through town, arrives and announces in a long, comic speech that he is in love with and wishes to marry Lydie, whom he saw when she was injured in the eye. Gussie, thinking quickly, appears wearing a bandage over one eye and goes off with Lucian. The closing scene shows a misty, gray next day, with Joshua again treating Lydie’s eye, this time successfully. Lydie tells her father, “I don’t know anything about you,” and Joshua wistfully answers, “I was a man who ached for a utopia.” He then produces Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) from an old trunk and starts to teach Lydie her mother’s favorite poem, beginning “On the beach at night alone,” as the lights fade into dark around them.

Dramatic Devices

Lydie Breeze employs an eclectic array of theatrical devices and dramatic modes. Visual symbols are given depth through verbal references. For example, the upended rowboat, symbolizing Aipotu’s running aground, is given resonance by references to Hearst’s yacht, culminating in Gussie’s hilarious verbal slip in front of a campaign audience, “America is a yacht,” and Joshua’s characterizations of Gussie and himself as “a glorious battleship” and the Marie-Celeste, respectively.

John Guare strikingly underscores the way the past haunts the present through ritual reenactments of past events, as in the opening scene with Lydie and Beaty re-creating Lydie Breeze’s suicide, Joshua and Jeremiah’s reliving of the day Dan died, and Jeremiah and Beaty’s mysterious reunion in death.

The central metaphor of syphilis, however, is the most disturbing and most unifying of the play’s devices. In Joshua’s climactic diatribe against Jeremiah, the themes of corruption, of the far-reaching consequences of human carelessness and selfishness, and of the collapse of idealism through our “trust in the itch in the pocket” all converge in a shattering image: “After Lydie Breeze died, they cut her open and found all this rot. . . . Forgiveness from another human being? You’ll never get it. Syphilis. That’s all you’ll ever get from another human being. Syphilis and suicide notes.”

Still, for all the play’s mythic and tragic qualities, it is penetrated throughout with ironic and sometimes almost farcical humor, as in Lucian’s memorized courtship speech and Gussie’s instant transformation into her fifteen-year-old sister with the addition of an eye bandage, or in the sudden shift from pseudo-Catholic liturgy to a baking recipe in the opening ritual scene. This continual use of humor not only keeps the audience off balance, never knowing what to expect, but also prevents the melodramatic plot from veering into sentimentality or triteness. Guare’s sustained and controlled mingling of tragic and comic, mythic and realistic, melodramatic and ironic effects succeeds where more straightforward social criticism in contemporary drama does not.

Critical Context

Lydie Breeze was a turning point in John Guare’s career. It was a departure from the mixture of farce and savage satire that characterized his most successful previous works, such as Muzeeka (pr. 1967, pb. 1969) and The House of Blue Leaves (pr., pb. 1971). While Guare had always been concerned with the corruption at the heart of American culture and with the related loss of ideals, he tended to attack these issues through farcical plots, bizarre characters, and fiercely ironic dialogue. The House of Blue Leaves, for example, which remains one of his greatest critical and popular successes, partly as a result of a revival in the 1980’s, concerns a plot to blow up the pope and involves a weird collection of characters, including a zookeeper, three nuns, a film producer, and women named Bananas and Bunny. Guare acknowledges the influence of Georges Feydeau in his plotting of the play, which is a masterpiece of black comedy. Marco Polo Sings a Solo (pr. 1973, pb. 1977) and Landscape of the Body (pr. 1977, pb. 1978) make use of science fiction and the detective story, while many other plays (including Muzeeka and The House of Blue Leaves) make extensive use of song.

With his acclaimed screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Atlantic City (1981), however, Guare began to move further toward realism (though he claims that The House of Blue Leaves is a realistic play) and a tone less sardonic and more elegiac, though no less deeply ironic. The Lydie Breeze tetralogy, beginning with Lydie Breeze itself, is on a larger scale than his earlier work, with something like the epic sweep of a nineteenth century novel (a comparison Guare himself makes). Guare’s use of American history, particularly the Civil War (mentioned in Lydie Breeze but of greater importance in the other plays), gives greater scope to his themes.

Guare’s style and concerns have not undergone abrupt reversals. He is an eclectic writer whose brilliance manifests itself in his audacious mixing of dramatic modes and in the ceaseless whirl of events and characters in his plays. The sad grandeur of Lydie Breeze, however, was a new note in his work for the stage, as was the positive ending of the play. While Guare is a harsh critic of American values, Lydie Breeze indicates that he remains optimistic at least about the human potential for love and hope.

In 2000, Guare revised Lydie Breeze and Gardenia and released the revision under the title Lydie Breeze (pr. 2000, pb. 2001). He gained critical and popular success in 1990 with his release of Six Degrees of Separation, a play which refers to the scientific claim that any given individual on earth is linked genetically with another individual by a mere six steps. The play served as a social commentary on the myriad isolation of contemporary people due to class, race, gender, and sexual orientation, among other factors. Other plays from the 1990’s and early twenty-first century included Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (pr. 1992, pb. 1993), The General of Hot Desire (pr., pb. 1999), Lake Hollywood (pr. 1999, pb. 2000), and Sweet Smell of Success (pr. 2001). Most critics find that Guare has matured significantly in these plays; there is not much doubt that he has lived up to the promise of his early experimental work and is among the very best contemporary American playwrights.

Sources for Further Study

Bigsby, C. W. E. “John Guare.” In Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

DiGaetani, John. “John Guare.” In A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. Edited by John DiGaetani. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Gross, Robert F. “Life Is a Silken Net: Mourning the Beloved Monstrous in Lydie Breeze.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall, 1994, 21-43.

Guare, John.“’Living in That Dark Room’: The Playwright and His Audience.” Interview by John Harrop. New Theatre Quarterly 3 (1987): 155-159.

Harrop, John. “’Ibsen Translated by Lewis Carroll’: The Theatre of John Guare.” New Theatre Quarterly 3 (1987): 150-154.

Harrop, John. “NTQ Checklist No. 3: John Guare.” New Theatre Quarterly 3 (1987): 160-177.

Marranca, Bonnie, and Gautam Dasgupta, eds. American Playwrights: A Critical Survey. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981.

Savran, David. “John Guare.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.

Wetzsteon, R. “The Coming of Age of John Guare.” New York 15 (February 22, 1982): 35-39.