Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?: Analysis of Major Characters
"Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?: Analysis of Major Characters" explores the lives of individuals navigating the complexities of personal identity and societal norms in New York City. Central to the narrative is Tommy Flowers, a thirty-year-old dropout and self-declared urban revolutionary, who embodies the spirit of rebellion against conformity. His actions, initially playful pranks, escalate into dangerous territory as he constructs a real bomb, reflecting his deep-seated discontent with society. Alongside him is Nedda Lemon, an aspiring musician who, disillusioned by the harsh realities of city life, seeks solace in Tommy’s chaotic world but ultimately yearns for the stability of her suburban roots. The character of Jack Wonder, or Ben Delight, serves as a poignant reminder of lost potential and the inevitability of aging, further complicating Tommy's sense of abandonment when Ben dies. Lastly, Arnold, Tommy's sheepdog, adds an intriguing perspective, contemplating loyalty and indecision in the face of his master's tumultuous choices. Collectively, these characters highlight themes of rebellion, belonging, and the search for meaningful connections amid urban alienation.
Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Terrence McNally
First published: 1972
Genre: Play
Locale: New York City
Plot: Social satire
Time: 1971
Tommy Flowers, a thirty-year-old dropout from St. Petersburg who has become a self-proclaimed urban revolutionary in New York City. Like his idols James Dean and Holden Caulfield, he sees himself as an outsider, defiant in the face of established authority, a confirmed malcontent who makes terrorist raids on an oppressively corrupt society and its stifling conventions. At first, these attacks on conformity are pranks—shoplifting, defaulting on cab fare or the check for a meal, engaging in sex and drugs at any opportunity, and alarming shoppers by announcing that there is a bomb in Bloomingdale's. The menace becomes less playful after he manufactures a real bomb and carries it around Manhattan with him. He sets up a ménage of misfits with Ben, Nedda, and his dog Arnold, but this surrogate family fails to satisfy his need for a community that allows individual expression. After Ben dies and Nedda flees for the security of the suburbs, Tommy, in a final aggressive (he would say redemptive) act, takes his bomb and wires it to go off in a telephone booth near a policeman.
Nedda Lemon, an aspiring cellist who has fled the suburbs for the promise of a career in New York City. What she finds instead is a mean, cold city that offers, at best, the prospect of being booked to play the Lord's prayer at bar mitzvahs in Brooklyn. Despondent, she meets Tommy in the ladies' room at Bloomingdale's, where he discovers her stowing shop-lifted goods in her cello case. She takes Tommy, Ben, and Arnold into her flat in the Village and for a while is content with this domestic arrangement, until Tommy's continued anarchic campaign to overturn the established order leads her to entertain fantasies of pipe-smoking doctors, station wagons, and the rest of the scenario of suburban stability. Arrested when she returns to pay a check that Tommy has failed to pay, Nedda is incarcerated and must resort to her father for her rescue.
Jack Wonder, known as Ben Delight, an old has-been stage actor and panhandler. Ben and Tommy share a street corner where Ben rants about having spent his career in the shadow of Paul Muni, claiming that Muni got all the parts that rightfully should have been Ben's. He staunchly defends the stage against the screen. He is ignorant of James Dean but has seen Tommy's disastrous stage performance in a minor Off-Broadway play. Ben precipitates one of Tommy's indictments of old age, but they are reconciled and move into Nedda's Village flat, where Ben passes his evenings endlessly reading Variety. He becomes ill and is taken to Belle-vue, where he dies. Tommy regards Ben's death as yet another abandonment.
Arnold, Tommy's sheepdog, whom Tommy abandons to follow a sexy seventeen-year-old Californian to her hotel room. Left on the street alone, Arnold soliloquizes on the indecisiveness of his master while assuring the audience that he is not a talking but a thinking dog.