Reckless by Craig Lucas

First published: 1983

First produced: 1983, the Production Company Theater, New York City; revised version 1988, at the Circle Repertory Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Dark comedy; satire

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: A series of towns throughout the United States, each called Springfield

Principal Characters:

• Rachel, a housewife and mother
• Tom, her husband
• Lloyd, a physiotherapist
• Pooty, Lloyd’s wife, a deaf-mute and paraplegic
• Roy, the head of a nonprofit agency called Hands Across America
• Trish, the budget director for Hands Across America
• Doctors One through Six, various psychiatrists Rachel visits for therapy
• Tim Tinko, the host of a game show called Your Mother or Your Wife
• Talk Show Host, the host of the show on which Rachel appears
• Dr. Helen Carrell, a psychiatrist and a guest on a talk show
• Tom Junior, the older son of Rachel and Tom
• Masked assassin, the younger son of Rachel and Tom

The Play

The play begins on a snowy Christmas Eve. Rachel is having a “euphoria attack” as she looks out her bedroom window and anticipates the happiness that Christmas Day will bring to her family. She remembers thinking that as a child she “wanted to live in Alaska because it always snowed and Santa was up there, so it must always be Christmas.” Her husband, Tom, is in bed watching television with the sound turned off and seems preoccupied and conflicted. Suddenly, in a fit of conscience, Tom tells his wife that he has taken a contract out on her life and that a professional killer is about to enter their home and murder her. At first, Rachel thinks Tom is kidding, but once convinced that he is telling the truth, she leaps out their bedroom window clad only in slippers and pajamas.

Rachel trudges to an Arco gas station and is rescued from her precarious predicament by Lloyd, a physiotherapist, who takes her home and introduces her to his wife, Pooty, a deaf-mute paraplegic confined to a wheelchair. The couple welcome Rachel (who tells them her name is Mary Ellen Sissle) and help her get a job at Hands Across America, a nonprofit humanitarian foundation, where Rachel meets Roy, the head of the foundation, and Trish, its budget director. When Rachel returns from her first day at work, she discovers that Pooty is neither a deaf-mute nor a paraplegic. Pooty pretends to be disabled because Lloyd (who escaped a bad marriage and changed his name to keep from paying child support) feels better about himself if he works with physically challenged people. Lloyd will later tell Rachel that in reality he walked out on his wife, who had multiple sclerosis, and his two children—one brain damaged—because he was too drunk to see his boy playing in the snow and he ran over him with a snowblower. He left his family destitute and with no hope for their future. Pooty tells Rachel that she met Tom at work and pretended to be disabled to get his attention and keep his interest. Now Pooty must continue to feign her conditions.

Bizarre events continue to occur, and Rachel is convinced she needs therapy. She seeks the counsel of a number of inept psychiatrists, none of whom does her any good. Eventually, Lloyd confesses to Rachel that he owes his former wife thirty-five thousand dollars, and suddenly Lloyd, Rachel, and Pooty appear on an Oedipal-like game show titled Your Mother or Your Wife (Rachel pretends to be Lloyd’s wife, and Pooty pretends to be Lloyd’s mother), hosted by Tim Tinko. On the show, the three dissemblers win one hundred thousand dollars, and the first act ends in ecstatic celebration.

However, Rachel soon discovers that Trish is embezzling money from the humanitarian organization. Rachel is still seeking therapy: She is trying to deal not only with her husband’s betrayal, her bizarre life with Lloyd and Pooty, and the conflicts with her job, but also with a past that includes her mother being run over by a school bus, when Rachel was six, and her father dying of a heart attack the year that she married Tom.

Tom, the wayward husband, shows up at Lloyd and Pooty’s house the following Christmas bringing Rachel a stuffed dog (rather than the real one she had always wanted) and a bottle of champagne, which he found on their front stoop. Tom was able to discover where Rachel was living after seeing her on the television program. He tells her he has been trying to find her and begs her to forgive him and return home. The audience is not certain if Tom really wants Rachel back or is more interested in getting his hands on some of her game-show winnings. While Rachel is preoccupied with Lloyd, Tom and Pooty drink the champagne and instantly die. Trish had poisoned the champagne and left it on the stoop so that no one would discover she had been embezzling, but the wrong people are killed.

Rachel and Lloyd, wearing a Santa Claus suit, are now fugitives, fleeing from the police, who think they poisoned Tom and Pooty. They begin journeying through the United States, stopping at towns named Springfield from Oregon to the Southeast. Lloyd will only drink champagne, but Rachel cares for him and encourages him to eat. Despite Rachel’s attempts, Lloyd dies choking on a champagne cork in a seedy hotel room in Springfield.

Rachel, now mute, is in a homeless shelter, where she is treated by Doctor Six, who turns out to be the driver of the school bus that killed Rachel’s mother. Doctor Six has free tickets to attend a talk show and she persuades Rachel to accompany her. The talk show guest, Dr. Helen Carrell, singles out Rachel and pulls her onstage. Suddenly, a masked assassin (the audience later learns he is Rachel’s younger son) appears in the audience aiming a gun at Rachel but mortally wounding Dr. Carrell.

It is the Christmas season, sometime later. Rachel is now a psychologist in Alaska, and she is visited by a student from the University of Alaska, Tom Junior, her son. He claims he has just come for sleeping pills, but in truth, he has not been able to deal with his mother’s earlier desertion and his father’s death. Rachel agrees to treat him, and Tom Junior promises to return the next day.

Dramatic Devices

The episodic structure of this play, composed of twenty-eight scenes, necessitates a simplicity in staging. Any attempt to literalize the many locales in the play would be a disaster, producing an excruciatingly slow pace. Since the play is nonrealistic, economy and suggestion are employed in casting and staging. There are multiple characters and multiple locales, but neither needs to be literal.

Although the play calls for a cast of at least twenty-one characters, Lucas suggests that the play can be performed with as few as seven actors. Since there is no need to maintain verisimilitude, actors may and usually do play more than one role. It works very well, for example, if the actor who plays Tom also plays Tom Junior at the end of the play. It also works well if the six doctors are played by the same actor. The actor who plays Roy often plays the Talk Show Host and Tim Tinko, while the actor who plays Trish usually plays Dr. Carrell. This kind of “doubling” reinforces for the audience the fact that this is nonrealistic theater and asks them to make connections among the various characters each actor plays. The various locales are not literally staged either. Blocks, chairs, stools, and lighting suggest Rachel’s home, the Arco gas station, Lloyd and Pooty’s home, the Christmas tree in their home, the Hands Across America organization, the game show, the various hotel rooms, and so on.

Critical Context

Lucas is a prolific writer. In addition to Reckless (which he adapted for film), he wrote several plays, including Missing Persons (pr. 1981, pb. 1995), Stranger (pr. 2000, pb. 2002), Blue Window (pr., pb. 1984), God’s Heart (pr. 1993, pb. 1999), and The Dying Gaul (pr. 1998, pb. 1999). With Norman René he created Marry Me a Little (pr. 1980), a compilation of songs by Stephen Sondheim, and with composer/lyricist Craig Carnelia he wrote the musical play Three Postcards (pr. 1987, pb. 1988). His first motion-picture project was Longtime Companion, which dealt with the sociopolitical aspects of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Reckless is an early work, but it shows Lucas’s promise as a writer with a unique voice. He has been compared to playwrights Christopher Durang and Nicky Silver, who delve into the darker sides of life by employing irony and humor. Like Durang and Silver, Lucas is not content to mirror life as it is but is interested in expanding the boundaries of the traditional play, delving frequently into fantasy and fairy tale. He seeks out new domains and experiments with the imaginary rather than the documentary.

Some critics have argued that Reckless does not have a consistent tone. This mixed-genre play begins as a dark comedy, humorously satirizes a life’s journey, and becomes a rather serious drama toward the end. Reckless creates a microcosm of death and violence in which characters commit a number of sins, yet humor is a tool many of them use for survival. Consistency is not required or necessary in this play. The audience laughs at the beginning and then wonders, by play’s end, what was humorous. The laughter fosters empathy, its purpose to encourage members of the audience to examine their own lives.

Sources for Further Study

DiGaetani, John L., ed. “Craig Lucas.” In A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Gould, Christopher, ed. Anti-Naturalism. New York: Broadway Play Publishers, 1989.

Henry, William A., III. “Beguiling Visions.” Time 132 (October 31, 1988): 85.

Hopkins, Billy. “Craig Lucas.” BOMB 28 (Summer, 1989): 56-59.

Lucas, Craig. “Equality in the Theater.” BOMB 57 (Fall, 1996): 66-70.

Parks, Steve. “Exchanging Kisses and Swapping Souls.” Newsday, March 12, 1993, 76.

Rich, Frank. “A Christmas Fable of People Who Learn to Know Themselves.” New York Times, September 26, 1988, pp. C19, C22.

Spindle, Les. Review of Reckless. Back Stage West, October 29, 1998, 14.

Taitte, Lawson. Review of Reckless. Dallas Morning News, December 15, 1996, p. C1.

Vaughan, Peter. “Don’t Take Lucas’s Plays Too Seriously.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 4, 1995, p. 7E.