Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited has been released as a book, produced as a play, and adapted into a film. Just which what it is really supposed to be remains unclear. After all, the subtitle is “A Novel in Dramatic Form.” And yet, as a novel it is really just the packaging of a stage play into book form. And yet as a stage play, it is almost deliriously lacking in action. In fact, more than one reviewer of a performance as a stage play has even refused to acknowledge it even is a play in any traditional sense, lacking even the theatricality of Samuel Beckett’s more obscure and offbeat works. When you have been accused of pushing the limits of the definition of stagecraft beyond the work of Beckett, you can at least proudly point to having accomplished something, even if that something isn’t an actual play.
In fact, there is much to The Sunset Limited that is accurately described as being Beckett-esque, but it is not a perfect fit. For one thing, the setting is realistically described on page one. It is intended to be representative rather than symbolic or metaphorical or just plain absurdly surreal. A tenement building in in an African-American ghetto in New York City. Once the set description is done with and the dialogue begins, however, things become much more experimental and anti-theatrical and the question of whether this is a play or a novel or what kicks in. It is a two-character drama, neither of which are given a name. There is a character named White and a character named Black. White is a white man and Black is a black man. Black is a Christian and an ex-convict. White is an atheistic professor. While this may sound like racial stereotyping, that is only because it is. However, the stereotyping is engaged for the purpose of juxtaposition: Black is an optimistic fellow while White’s outlook is so bleak he could fit right into the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men without missing a beat. Forget plot, this is a story of philosophical discourse about the meaning of life that poses the question—again, bringing to mind Beckett—“does God exist?”
Anyone who has read the novel or seen the Coen Brothers film version of No Country for Old Men will already know the answer to that question. White gives a long monologue just a few pages from the end that begins with the words, “I don’t believe in God.” This is an assertion certainly open to question, interpretation and person opinion, obviously, but be prepared to fight to the death your right to argue the point: nothing else in the play sounds nearly as authentic and comes across a testimonial to authorial intrusion quite as much as page-long speech which follows in which White asks for evidence of brotherhood, fellowship and just one religion that actually is capable of preparing believers for death.
If The Sunset Limited assuredly asserts that God does not exist, it is far less assuredly an expression of being a novel in dramatic form. It looks like a play. It sounds like a play. The only thing it doesn’t do like a play is perform like one. At least not a traditional mainstream narrative drama. What is it? God only knows. And He’s not around to explain.
