The Subject Was Roses by Frank D. Gilroy

First published: 1962

First produced: 1964, at the Royale Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Coming of age

Time of work: May, 1946

Locale: Bronx, New York

Principal Characters:

• John Cleary, a businessman
• Nettie Cleary, his wife
• Timmy Cleary, their twenty-one-year-old son

The Play

The Subject Was Roses begins on Saturday morning after a welcome-home party for Timmy Cleary. The year is 1946, and twenty-one-year-old Timmy is home after fighting in World War II.

One by one, the three members of the family appear for breakfast. Though they try to hide their differences, it is clear from their conversation that John and Nettie Cleary are uncomfortable with each other and that Timmy is aware of their problems. They discuss last night’s party, which was a success, although Timmy drank too much and was sick during the night.

Nettie and John exchange accusations over Timmy’s drinking, with references to their ongoing disagreements. Money is part of the continuing argument, and the quest for more money sends John out to a business appointment on this Saturday morning, instead of going to a ball game with his son.

Left alone with his mother, Timmy muses about how his father has aged. He is oblivious to his mother’s attempts to change the subject and turn his attention to his favorite breakfast. When Timmy fails to appreciate the waffles and then recoils from a possessive touch, Nettie is hurt. When the waffles stick in the waffle iron, she breaks down. This long-anticipated homecoming is not turning out as she had planned.

Timmy breaks the mood by turning on the radio and dancing with his mother. He promises to go with her to visit her mother and cousin. They are still dancing when John returns to go to the ball game after all, and the two men leave.

Scene 2 begins that afternoon, after the ball game. John and Timmy enter, drunk, carrying a bouquet of roses. Timmy insists that his father tell Nettie that the roses are from him; then he asks, half jokingly, how much money his father has. When John reacts angrily, Timmy asks to hear the story of how his parents met. John is in the midst of a sentimental memory when Nettie enters and again the tensions emerge.

Nettie sees the roses, accepts them as a gift from John, and tries to express her pleasure. The more grateful she seems, however, the more uncomfortable John becomes. He changes the subject, and to keep the mood light, he proposes dinner and a night on the town; the three prepare to leave.

In scene 3 the family returns after their night out. John and Timmy are drunkenly discussing Timmy’s plans to become a writer. When John looks for more to drink, Nettie follows him into the kitchen, where they reminisce briefly, and touchingly, about their courtship. Alone in the living room, Timmy amuses himself with snippets of various vaudeville acts. His retreat to bed leads Nettie to remonstrate with John for letting him get drunk again.

When her attention turns again to the roses, John attempts a clumsy seduction. Nettie, however, will have none of it: “One nice evening doesn’t make everything different.” They fight, and Nettie smashes the vase of roses on the floor. In his frustration and anger, John closes the scene and the act with the revelation that Timmy, not he, bought the roses.

Act 2 opens, like act 1, with breakfast. It is Sunday morning, and John is complaining about the coffee. When Timmy enters, he becomes the object of John’s irritation. He insists that Timmy come to church with him, but Timmy refuses. John leaves alone, giving mother and son another opportunity to talk. Once again, the talk is of John; with his father gone, Timmy is ready to defend him. He blames Nettie for caring more for her retarded cousin than for her husband. Angry, Nettie gathers up her large store of coins and leaves the house.

As the next scene opens, Nettie has not returned. It is now ten o’clock at night, and John and Timmy are worried. Timmy is, however, hiding his feeling by drinking. The two argue, until Timmy reveals that Nettie had fought with him before leaving. John uses this information to absolve himself of blame, but Timmy keeps the argument going until John hits him. At that moment Nettie enters.

She refuses to give a straight answer when John asks where she has been. She does claim, however, that “in all my life, the past twelve hours are the only real freedom I’ve ever known.” Timmy rushes from the room to be sick, and the scene ends with Nettie’s explanation of the argument that morning. She tells John of Timmy’s admiration for him.

Scene 3 is set in the middle of the night. Timmy enters to find his mother sitting in the dark. He tells her that he has decided to leave home the next day. Then, at his prompting, Nettie reveals that she had been thinking about the time she was hit in the eye with an apple core. Embarrassed by her black eye, she had failed to return to her new job and so lost it. The next job she found led to her meeting with John.

Again prompted by Timmy, she recalls what drew her to John: his energy, his determination, his ability to provide her with a good life. Left alone by Timmy, Nettie descends deeper into memory, recalling her need for love from her much-admired father.

The final scene occurs once again at the breakfast table. Nettie tells John that Timmy will leave, and John prepares to argue him out of it. Faced with Timmy’s obstinate insistence, he promises concessions. He even answers the earlier question of how much money he has. Finally he reverts to his usual posture of anger, to which Timmy responds by telling of a dream: “Someone would stop me and ask me why I was crying and I’d say, ‘My father’s dead and he never said he loved me.’” He then speaks the words himself to his father, telling him that he loves him. They embrace.

When Nettie enters, Timmy announces that he has changed his mind and will stay. His father intervenes, however, to tell Timmy that he must leave. Then he turns his attention to his coffee, complaining about it as the curtain falls.

Dramatic Devices

The Subject Was Roses is a realistic play, thoroughgoing and consistent in its use of the devices of realism. It takes place in a Bronx apartment, and the stage set is meant to be completely functional. The toaster and waffle iron must work; the radio must play; the kitchen cabinets must be fully stocked. The play is probably more successful in an arena theater than on a proscenium stage, where the intimacy of the apartment is harder to achieve.

Within the realistic set, Frank Gilroy provides realistic characters, plot, and dialogue. The three characters are very ordinary, so much so that John Chapman, reviewing the Broadway opening for The Daily News, found them “uninteresting.” There is nothing exceptional about the Clearys; their conflicts, ambitions, and disappointments are all very normal. In them, audiences see people whom they know very well.

The plot is similarly low-keyed: small, ordinary, familiar. The dialogue is realistic. Chapman complained of the “naturalistic exchanges,” citing lines such as “I couldn’t sleep last night.” “Neither could I.” However, it is Gilroy’s ear for real speech, along with his refusal to write artificially “dramatic” scenes, that gives the play its strength. The Subject Was Roses stands as a model of realism, combining all the techniques of realism in a single play.

Significantly, this realistic play includes a substantial element of symbolism. The apple core that Nettie remembers in act 2, scene 3, comes to stand for the accidents that led her to her present condition. The waffles that stick during Timmy’s first breakfast at home symbolize the failure of all Nettie’s plans for their new life together. The “Welcome Home” banner sags. Nettie hoards coins, and she cannot make good coffee for her husband, a coffee salesman. Objects, actions, and words take on significance beyond themselves, yet they acquire this significance naturally and realistically, as they do in everyday life.

Even the roses do not become an obtrusive symbol. Like any object that carries emotional significance because of past associations, the roses are valued. As a gift to Nettie from John, they may stand for a renewal of their relationship. When John violates that new relationship with a crude pass, the roses, the symbol of her hopes, must be destroyed. Then with the revelation that it was Timmy who bought them, they again take on value. Nettie’s relationship with Timmy still seems possible. She forgets that the flowers will fade.

Critical Context

The Subject Was Roses was Frank Gilroy’s only major success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. Gilroy attracted considerable attention with his first Off-Broadway play, Who’ll Save the Plowboy?, in 1962. He followed The Subject Was Roses with plays such as That Summer—That Fall (pr., pb. 1967) and The Only Game in Town (pr., pb. 1968).

Gilroy came to the theater from television, where he had written for early dramatic series such as Playhouse 90, U.S. Steel Hour, and Kraft Theatre. Some reviewers of The Subject Was Roses commented on the author’s connection with television, as though that fact needed noting. It may be, in fact, that Gilroy’s experience writing dramas for the small screen gave him the skill and confidence to concentrate on the small details of an ordinary family’s life.

In so doing, Gilroy placed himself within the tradition of the classic realistic dramatists. The revolution from nineteenth century spectacle and melodrama was achieved through attention to the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Nora and Torvald Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880) and the Ranevskaya family in Anton Chekhov’s Vishnyovy sad (pr., pb. 1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908) are such ordinary people whose lives are examined in careful detail. Still, the plot events of the early masterpieces of realism could be extraordinary—for example, Nora’s revolutionary departure, the loss of the Ranevskaya estate, or the suicides in Vildanden (pb. 1884; The Wild Duck, 1891) and Hedda Gabler (pb. 1890; English translation, 1891). It was for later realists, such as William Inge in Come Back, Little Sheba (pr., pb. 1950), to bring the ordinary to the plot structure of a play. It is from within this “slice of life” tradition that Gilroy wrote The Subject Was Roses, and it is this tradition that the play exemplifies.

Sources for Further Study

Adler, Thomas P. “‘Over There’ and Over Here.” In Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1987.

Gilroy, Frank. About Those Roses: Or, How Not to Do a Play and Succeed. New York: Random House, 1965.

Laufe, Abe. Anatomy of a Hit: Long Run Plays on Broadway from 1900 to the Present Day. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966.

Weales, Gerald. The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960’s. New York: Macmillan, 1969.