Summary:
The play opens in darkness, with Samuel screaming at Loureen. She yells back, "DAMN YOU TO HELL, SAMUEL!" (1) and then the stage directions describe a bright flash, and the lights rising to reveal a big pile of ashes in the middle of the kitchen floor. On top of the pile of ashes rests a pair of glasses. Loureen looks around, confused, calling out to Samuel. She thinks he's playing a joke on her, thinks he'll appear any second. She asks him not to be angry with her, says dinner is waiting, says she'll wash another shirt for him since she forgot to pick up the one he wanted to wear tomorrow. When there is still no answer, she calls Florence, her best friend and upstairs neighbor, and asks her to come downstairs.
Loureen considers sweeping up the pile of ashes, then gets down on her hands and knees to examine it. Looking at it up close, a huge grin comes over her face. Florence knocks on the door, and Loureen answers in a fugue state, like she might be possessed. Florence says something smells burned. When her eyes land on the pile of ashes, she asks incredulously what she's looking at. Loureen, still unsure, says she thinks it's Samuel, which Florence takes to mean that Samuel has somehow caused the mess. Loureen, nodding repeatedly, has a moment of acceptance: "It's him. It's him" (3), she says.
Florence is confused. She asks Loureen what's wrong with her, if Samuel finally drove her mad. Loureen tells Florence to dial 911. Florence, freaked out and stressed, picks up the phone and dials, but hangs up immediately when Loureen says that she thinks she killed him. Florence asks her to repeat herself, and Loureen whimpers, "I killed him! I killed Samuel!" Florence doesn't believe her; she says she doesn't have time for this game, and that she's going to go home before Samuel finds her there.
Before leaving, there is a momentary pause while Florence looks deep into Loureen's eyes. She asks if she really did it this time, and Loureen, quietly, says that she doesn't know how it happened. Florence asks where the body is and Loureen points to the pile of ash. Florence thinks Loureen has burned him, but Loureen exclaims that she doesn't know if she did. Florence is agitated; she says she either murdered him or she didn't. Florence goes on to say that they have laughed and talked about all the ways they could get rid of him so many times and that she's never actually gone through with it.
At that point, Loureen lifts the pair of glasses off the table and points out that those are the only things left, and that Florence knows how much she's always hated them. Loureen, exasperated, says that he counted to four and then disappeared. Florence pours them each a glass of sherry and tells her to take her time explaining what happened. Loureen says he was standing there and then he exploded. Florence asks if he hit her again. Loureen says no, he exploded: he was shouting like usual, he raised up his hand to strike her, and then "poof, he was gone" (pg. 4).
Florence sits back, and pours another glass of sherry for each of them. She says that Loureen is giving Edgar, "the story king," a run for his money, telling a brief story about how he came early Sunday morning spinning a line about a car accident and police chase, when really he was just gambling away his paycheck. Loureen asks if Florence thinks she's lying, and she says she hopes so. Loureen recalls how Samuel always said that something bad would happen if she ever raised her voice; now she thinks she is a witch or devil spawn.
Florence says she's been watching too much television, but Loureen says she's never seen anything like this on TV. She says there's no question she's a witch, and Florence asks if she's been "messing with those mojo women again" (6) even though she's told her to stop. Loureen isn't really listening; she's talking about how all that's missing are her bleeding palms for her to be "eternally remembered as Saint Loureen, the patron of battered wives." She imagines women all over the country making pilgrimages to her to ask for their husbands to be turned to dust.
Analysis:
In a play as short as this one, every moment—every choice—counts. Here, we are reading the script as Nottage wrote it, but to consider the play without giving thought to its production would be making it simpler than it is. Imagine: an audience sitting in a theatre, the curtain rises, and all we see are faint outlines of two characters in darkness, a man yelling, cruelly, at a woman. Immediately, we have a sense of the dynamic, of the world that these characters inhabit. This formal choice—to open the play in darkness, and to begin right at the incident, with no lead-up—allows Nottage to tell a complete story within such a small timeframe. The background of Samuel and Loureen's relationship unfolds as the play goes on, but even from the beginning, without being explicitly told anything, we are brought into the tension. Furthermore, it is significant that the first words Loureen speaks is the curse she puts on Samuel. She discovers that her voice is her power; she has used it and now she is at the start of a new life, one where is she is not living in fear, one without Samuel. As such, there is a kind of mirroring at play here: the play begins with her words, as does the rest of her life.
The fact that Loureen's first reaction after Samuel has combusted is to apologize for not picking up his shirt and say she'll get started on dinner shows how deep she is in her submissive role. Her husband was just screaming at her, about to physically harm her, and she is trying to bargain with him to get him to come back. Furthermore, the fact that she assumes Samuel must be playing some kind of trick on her only adds to the image of him as a cruel man—what kind of trick is that to pretend you've died? To disappear at the apex of a frightening fight? Obviously that's not what happened, but the very fact that Loureen goes there—that that's what would make sense to her—shows that she is used to that kind of manipulation.
The phone call to Florence is a crucial moment. Without Nottage stating it explicitly, the audience can infer a closeness between the two woman just from the vulnerability of making this call; Loureen has just "murdered" her husband and still she doesn't think twice about calling her friend. Florence is a vital character not only as a friend to Loureen who has kept her safe and sane throughout her marriage, but also in a technical sense, as the person who makes Loureen reveal her own sense of what happened. You can imagine this as a largely one-woman show, where Loureen "kills" Samuel and then she is left on her own to deal with the consequences, but it would be a shame. We would lose so much nuance that Nottage manages to work into the conversation between the two women. Additionally, it's interesting that Loureen's final realization—or really, acceptance—that the pile of ash is indeed Samuel comes only when Florence is there in the kitchen with her. It nods to a kind of bravery-inducing spirit running through their friendship; with Florence by her side, Loureen can face the truth.
Notably, Florence isn't immediately on board with the pile of ash on the floor being the remains of Samuel. She asks Loureen if Samuel has finally driven her mad, and compares her outlandish storytelling to that of her husband. In this way, there is an interesting blend of the real and the surreal. The spontaneous combustion, obviously, is an insertion of the surreal, and that sets the tone for, possibly, a slightly warped reality. However, when Florence enters the scene, we realize that the terms of reality in the play are actually consistent with reality as we know it (i.e., while it may have seemed like the world of the play was a world where things like spontaneous combustion were normal, we see that that is in fact not the case). This is important, because it means Florence will have to go that much further to believe Loureen, like a person who saw a ghost having to first convince their confidant that ghosts are real at all.
The suddenness with which Florence goes from dialing 911 to hanging up the phone indicates the uneven, unsure ground the two women stand upon when it comes to the wider system. Once again, we see the importance of their bond underscored: no one else can come into this space, anyone else could be against them. When Loureen says she thinks she killed Samuel, Florence doesn't spook, doesn't turn on her, doesn't run out of the house. Instead, she immediately hangs up the phone, protecting their safety. Killing Samuel has been up for discussion before, but we can assume that that was mostly discussed in jest—Florence asks Loureen how it could be true this time, when there were so many other instances where she didn't kill him. Of course, this is a logical fallacy. But it reveals a deeper belief, or perhaps a way of being, in Florence: things can't just suddenly change.
The glasses are the primary object in the play. It seems noteworthy that Loureen has always hated those glasses, and yet there they are, lording over at her. It's a menacing image not just because they are the only remaining part of a man turned to dust, but because they are quite literally a symbol of Sam's eyes, of his sight. He is gone, but there is a sense that he is still watching Loureen; that, if he has it his way, she will continue to live in his gaze. Thinking through the metaphor, it makes sense why Loureen would have hated them so much.
