Full Length Plays

The Story

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The scene is a middle-class home in 1967 in Piscataway, New Jersey, where Ozzie Ann and Harry have breakfast with their teenage son Et, while waiting for their older son David to come home from Vietnam. 

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Et has an odd habit of pouring his cereal down his trousers and eating the flakes from inside his underwear.  “Et, dear, there are few things mother likes you to do less than that,” Ozzie Ann says.  “Don’t do that, dear.”  Et ignores her mother; and Harry has trouble speaking up to Et, who scares him.  

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Ozzie Ann gets frustrated and throws a spoon on the floor, which Hazel the maid refuses to pick up.  “People like you are the trouble with America,” says Hazel.  “Every ice cream wrapper that blows along a highway was put there by you.”  Hazel continues to berate her employers as is her daily custom, and storms back to the kitchen.  Ozzie Ann throws the spoon after her, and Hazel comes charging back and pulls the tablecloth and everything on it onto the floor.  “It’s a mess, it’s a mess,” says Ozzie Ann.

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After the morning struggles settle down, the family begins to focus on David’s imminent arrival.

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Shortly, David does arrive home – but he’s blind, and he has a blind Vietnamese wife named Liat with him.  Ozzie Ann and Harry don’t know which bothers them more, his being blind or his having married an Asian person.  

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“She’s got teensy slanted eyes,” says Ozzie Ann.  “He’s brought the enemy into the house,” says Harry.  “She walks funny,” says Et.

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Davey has turned against the war in Vietnam, and instructs his parents to listen to Liat’s story as only she “can forgive us for what our country has done.”

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Ozzie Ann and Harry don’t like this kind of talk, and argue with Davey.  Davey threatens to leave, they try to change their tone.  He then convinces his parents to institute a “reparations plan” for Liat.  First they must “let her vote to unite South and North Vietnam,” as had been promised by the Geneva Conference of 1954.  Then Davey wants his parents to know the terror Liat faced; he turns the lights out while he and Liat shoot guns and break dishes.  (Hazel joins and breaks stuff too.)  At the end of this destruction, Davey declares peace in the house.  

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That’s the first 20 minutes.  From there, it turns out Liat is actually Irish, and takes a shine to sexy Et.  Davey becomes depressed and starts dressing in Buddhist robes.  The action skips to 1974, and the family has fallen on bad economic times during the Ford administration, and must have Campbell’s Chunky Soup for Thanksgiving dinner.

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Then Harry loses his job, the walls of the house are dispossessed, and he kills himself.  Ozzie Ann and her family now live in a tent on the driveway, when Harry’s militaristic brother Larry shows up.  (This character is sort of a parody of David Rabe’s play The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, about the American military.)  

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Larry whips the family into shape, turning their lives into a kind of domestic boot camp.  Et, surprisingly, excels in this macho-strict atmosphere, and beams at Uncle Larry’s frequent compliments.  Larry, though, hates liberal, Buddhist-robed Davey, and picks on him unrelentingly, using endless Army-style obscenities to belittle and break him down.  Ozzie Ann is bothered by the language, and keeps offering polite synonyms to Larry.  Don’t say “asshole,” she begs, say “rectum” instead.  Larry refuses.

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The house degenerates into warfare and barbed wire and bear traps, and Hazel’s comments on the family get darker and darker.   Davey dies at his own hands, and Hazel comforts Ozzie Ann who mutters “it’s a mess, it’s a mess.”

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This play is not among Durang’s better known works, and it’s tied to its time period rather. 

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For instance, Hazel keeps giving jumbled-history “Bicentennial minutes”, which is a reference to a daily occurrence on CBS News during the Bicentennial – every day during the year of 1976 Walter Cronkite of CBS News would end the news with a little history lesson of what Bejamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson or some other famous American had done on that specific date 200 years earlier, and then he’d say “and that’s the way it was 200 years ago today.”  Hazel’s little speeches are a reference to and parody of that.  The specific reference no longer means anything to people under 45 or so, but I think her jumble of American history is still evocative of the mixed up way we have our country’s origins in our head.  

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However, the comedy of the family interactions, and the over-the-top style of the story, may make it fun for colleges or for acting classes.

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Cast size: 5 male, 2 female
Rights: Dramatists Play Service

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