A Rat's Mass by Adrienne Kennedy

First produced: 1966, by the Theatre Company of Boston, Boston, Massachusetts

First published: 1968

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Surrealistic

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: The rat’s house

Principal Characters:

• Brother Rat, also known as Blake, a character with a human body but a rat’s head and tail
• Sister Rat, also known as Kay, Brother Rat’s sister, who has a human head but a rat’s belly and tail
• Rosemary, a white girl who claims to be the heir to both the Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Empire
• Jesus,
• Joseph,
• Mary,
• Two Wise Men, and
• A Shepherd, symbolic religious figures who form a procession

The Play

A Rat’s Mass is a one-act play that poetically combines a wealth of linguistic and theatrical images. The brevity of the piece intensifies its already jarring style of presentation, which features characters who are part human and part animal, superficially nonsensical dialogue, and highly charged spectacle and sound effects. The style of this play is surrealistic, expressionistic, and absurdist; the plot of the play should not, therefore, be regarded as a credible or realistic story, nor should readers attempt to make literal sense of the dialogue or visual effects.

Because the play makes most sense on a symbolic level, readers should first try to imagine how the playwright intends the fully staged work to be seen and heard by an audience. The appearance of the stage itself, the use of movement on the stage, and the use of nonlinguistic sound are key to an understanding of A Rat’s Mass.

The visual dimension of a production of this play would perhaps be the most immediate aspect of A Rat’s Mass that a theater audience would be able to relate to meaningfully. The dreamlike set, deliberately stark, quickly seems to acquire significance: Although the scene is described as the rat’s house, the setting consists of a red carpet runner and candles and thus suggests a church with a long, narrow aisle and votive candles. The lighting, which is to imitate the light at the end of a summer’s day, is waning, implying a finality or an ending.

Movement through this stage space also acquires added importance. From the beginning of the play, the characters’ positions on stage are clearly and specifically noted; Brother Rat is placed directly facing the audience, while Sister Rat stands at the far end of the long red aisle defined by the carpet runner. The procession of religious figures, Jesus, Joseph, Mary, two wise men, and a shepherd, are placed to the far left of the “rat’s house” area on stage. As the play progresses, characters move about the stage with carefully choreographed directions. For example, the procession of religious figures marches across the stage, then goes to center stage, then comes all the way down to the edge of the stage, close to the audience, then goes back to the center of the stage, and exits, only to return and exit once more. Similarly, Brother Rat and Sister Rat, throughout the play, are given specific actions to perform (kneeling and rising, marching, and saluting) that accompany their dialogue. Because the play seems to lack traditional action—there is no standard use of plot or story, and whatever it is that “happens” during the course of the play remains obscure—these smaller actions (movements, gestures) stand out as significant.

Just as there appears to be no real plot, what the characters have to say may strike readers as bizarre or even as utterly meaningless. However, the playwright seems to emphasize sound apart from spoken language. Early in the play, the sound of rats may be heard as the processional characters march across the stage, and later, when the procession exits, a gnawing sound is heard. Toward the end of the play, gnawing sounds are accompanied by battlefield sounds, and just before the curtain falls, the procession returns with guns and the sound of shots rings out. At the same time, the playwright indicates moments throughout the play when there is no sound at all, when the absence of sound—silence—is reserved for effect.

If readers can keep these aspects of the script in mind, A Rat’s Mass becomes easier to follow and perhaps to understand. The opening of the play, with its long interchange between Brother Rat and Sister Rat, sets up a tone of ambiguity that the dialogue maintains. Just as Brother Rat and Sister Rat look as if they are part rat and part human (he has a human body but a rat’s head, she a human head but a rat’s stomach), their speeches referring to their lives are similarly mixed: Like rats, they have lived in a holy chapel, eaten sunflower petals, and are afraid of cats, but in a very human way, they speak of Sister Rat being sent to the state psychiatric hospital, remember Rosemary taking them on a picnic, and fear being caught by the Nazis. Quite intentionally, the playwright mixes ideas and linguistic images so that they do not make sense in a logical or predictable way. As Brother Rat and Sister Rat speak of their lives, of their childhood in a neighborhood that was ethnically and religiously mixed, of their baby or babies, of Sister Rat’s mental illness and her time in the state hospital, of Brother Rat’s infatuation with Rosemary, the contradictions and confusions in what they say are of less importance than the suffering and feelings of oppression that they convey. Their emotional cries proceed in an orderly, almost ritualistic pattern, like the mass that they say that they are performing.

Amid the rats’ expression of their sad lives, the procession of religious figures intrudes only at particular moments. When they march across the stage, they are sometimes oblivious to the rats’ sadness; at other times, they seem all too aware that they have entered the rats’ lives. Their final entrance, just before the curtain, turns them from the benevolent Christian icons they represent (the holy family and characters from traditional Christmas nativity pageants) into a line of gun-carrying soldiers.

Although the processional figures speak (in unison) to Brother Rat and Sister Rat a few times during the play, the only character who genuinely converses with Brother Rat and Sister Rat is Rosemary. Dressed in a communion dress and sporting worms in her hair, Rosemary is an Italian Catholic girl who has befriended the two rats. She has read to them from her catechism book and claims to be the descendant of Julius Caesar, the Virgin Mary, and the pope; the rats remember Rosemary with enormous affection and revere her quite religiously, and it is even suggested that Brother Rat had sex with Rosemary during the previous spring. However, Rosemary seems distant, recommending repeatedly that the only thing left for the rats to do is to kill themselves.

Given the distance of the religious figures and the ambivalence of Rosemary, Brother Rat and Sister Rat become increasingly frantic as their rat’s mass progresses. They speak of their impending capture by the Nazis, who they fear are pursuing them, and refer to events in their own past, such as Sister Rat’s hospitalization and Brother Rat’s reluctance to visit her. They seem to adore Rosemary, repeating what she has told them and holding her in great esteem, as if they have internalized all the teachings that she has imparted to them. The conclusion of the play, with the religious figures turning into a firing squad and shooting the rats while Rosemary looks on, is a chilling final tableau.

Critical Context

Critics who have studied A Rat’s Mass tend to see in it issues concerning race. The division of minorities into ghetto communities has been noted. Some writers have noted Kennedy’s use of animal imagery, relating it to her use of similar imagery in other plays. The idea that the rats in the play are regarded as vermin is of special importance. Other writers have discussed the premiere of this play, which, unlike most of Kennedy’s other plays, was held not in America but in Europe—in fact, in Rome. In light of the play’s use of the Roman Catholic church and the Roman Empire to represent European civilization, the locale of the premiere seems particularly significant.

Adrienne Kennedy’s work has, from the beginning of her career, attracted much interest. Her plays demonstrate her unique and innovative abilities as a theater artist, and perhaps no Kennedy play more succinctly illustrates her desires to experiment with dramatic form and content than A Rat’s Mass. On the whole, however, critics of Kennedy’s work have tended to overlook A Rat’s Mass, possibly because it is far shorter than most of her other theater pieces. Those commentators who do mention the play find it consistent with her overall vision and technique; perhaps its intensity and its intentional obscurity make it more difficult to write about. In any case, few have attempted to make sense of this challenging work.

Bibliography

Blau, Herbert. “The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy.” Modern Drama 27, no. 4 (December, 1984): 520-539. A crucial piece by a distinguished, insightful critic of the theater. Compares playwrights Shephard and Kennedy, noting why they ought to be considered two of the most important dramatists working on the American stage. Most critics writing on Kennedy since Blau published this article refer back to it.

Bryant-Jackson, Paul K., and Lois More Overbeck, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. An interesting collection of articles. Includes critiques by literary and theater scholars, pieces dealing with the production of Kennedy’s plays, and several extensive interviews with Kennedy. Overbeck’s “The Life of the Work: A Preliminary Sketch” offers important information on the original production and first publication of A Rat’s Mass, as well as on the production and publication of Kennedy’s other plays.

Kennedy, Adrienne. “An Interview with Adrienne Kennedy.” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 4 (1989): 143-157. In this intimate and often revealing interview, Kennedy discusses her career. The experiences she shares with the interviewer illuminate how her personal life has had an impact on her dramatic works.

Kennedy, Adrienne. “A MELUS Interview with Adrienne Kennedy.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 12 (Fall, 1985): 99-108. The playwright talks about issues of race and culture, on a personal and professional level, and discusses how politics and gender have an impact on writing for the modern theater. Kennedy offers a frank discussion of how her private and public lives have fused in the creation of her art.

Kolin, Philip C. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Comprehensive analysis of Kennedy’s literary output, including a chapter on A Rat’s Mass.

Shinn, Thelma. “Living the Answer: The Emergence of African American Feminist Drama.” Studies in the Humanities 17 (December, 1990): 149-159. A view of how Kennedy’s works fit into the broader field of plays by African American women dramatists. The writer suggests how such dramaturgy has evolved from the works of Lorraine Hansberry onward and notes that African American feminist writers tend toward nonrealistic conventions. Shinn also compares the rattraps of A Rat’s Mass to the ghetto setting of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

Sollors, Werner. “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 63 (September, 1991): 507-532. A fascinating study of several of Kennedy’s plays, including A Rat’s Mass. The author discusses imagery found in Kennedy’s work and attempts to synthesize the playwright’s view of America. Helpful in interpreting some of Kennedy’s obscure and nightmarish motifs.