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Overview
Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.
Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman — his wife of years past — who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.
It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.
Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.
Synopsis
Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.
Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman — his wife of years past — who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.
It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.
Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.
Library Journal
It can be difficult to appreciate a play without seeing it staged, but not in the case of DeLillo's third dramatic effort (after The Day Room and Valparaiso). Land artist Alex appears to be in a persistent vegetative state after a second massive stroke. Ex-wife Toinette and son Sean have come to Alex's isolated southwestern desert home to persuade present wife Lia to join them in helping Alex die, but Lia refuses, insisting that Alex's mind remains undamaged. In poignant and darkly humorous dialog, Toinette, Sean, and Lia argue their respective positions and attempt to define themselves in relation to and independent of Alex, who, except for three flashback scenes, remains silent, albeit on stage. DeLillo does not, however, concentrate solely on personal themes-some of his best scenes dramatize to brilliant tragicomic effect the quotidian details of assisted suicide. Although known chiefly for his experimental novels (Libra; Mao II), DeLillo has become increasingly confident as a dramatist, and we can only hope that he continues his endeavors in this genre. For all collections.-M.C. Duhig, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.