THEATER CHRONICLE
177
feel regret for the infidelity of her husband. The people acquire strange
names, as though they were queer botanical specimens, outside ordinary
classification. Motive, so prominent in Mrs. Craig, has vanished, naturally
enough, in this incoherence of personality; motion replaces it, a kind of
nervous twitching of the will which survives the death of the character :
Mrs. Sykes hatches a series of plots that have no conceivable object;
Mrs. Espenshade energetically gathers evidence for a divorce that she
has no wish to obtain. Curiosity is the only incentive that remains to
these women, their friends, and their servants, curiosity of the kind
called idle, that is, curiosity without motive or concern, a senseless
twitching of the intellect. It fastens as readily on the affairs of strangers
as on the affairs of friends, on an address, a birthplace, a telephone
number, or an item in the morning paper. It shows itself most singularly
in a pointless interest in the clock; there is not a play of George Kelly's
in which the characters do not ask the time of each other, as though
this knowledge were a pressing necessity. The passion for exact and
irrelevant information is not a mere function of leisure here. The hus–
bands, as well as the servants, participate in this acquisitive literalness.
"I've been out in Milwaukee visiting my family," says Mrs. Sykes. "Mil–
waukee, Wisconsin, you mean?" asks a gentleman visitor. "Yes," answers
Mrs. Sykes, "I have a mother and two brothers out there." Mrs. Craig's
pride in possessions reappears as the mental activity of all the Kelly
characters; it is something fierce and prehensile, a purely animal trait.
But it has also developed pathos. It becomes an attempt to possess a void.
In these last plays, the American family is seen as a nomadic integer,
lost in time and space, inquiring, placing, dating, its only impulse a
locative one, its brain an empty map on which, several times a day,
using hearsay or direct information, it marks a point and draws a line
to it. The plots in these late plays falter, a technical failure which,
however, has its own appropriateness, for the plots take on the aspect
of deceptively well-marked roads that trail off ineffectually in the wilder–
ness of chaos.
This sense of the American family as floating placeless in its solid
living-room is intensified by the fact that the Kelly play is set in no
recognizabl<:1 city and yet always in a different city and a city so parti–
cularized that it cannot be every city, so that the spectator's mind as he
watches travels hurriedly from Scarsdale to Cleveland, from Philadelphia
to Rochester, from Chicago to Hartford, searching for the residence
of Mr. Oswald Sykes. In the same way, the class locus of Mr. Kelly's
families is by no means definite. Except in the case of
The Show-Off,
where the family is lower middle class, the stage directions always spe–
cify a "comfortable room suggestive of good circumstance," "gorgeous
gold-colored rugs . . . rich brocaded satins," "a handsome little arm–
chair, upholstered in buff," etcetera; yet the habit-ridden family which
