Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play | Don DeLillo | Mystery play for a secular age

Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play | Don DeLillo | much talking without saying anything

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Love-Lies-Bleeding...

	Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play Don DeLillo Scribner, 2006 - 112 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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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.

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Mystery play for a secular age

Having limned "the force of history," DeLillo has since turned around and gone in the other direction, into "the small anonymous corners of human experience," as he phrased it, with works like The Body Artist and, to some extent, Valparaiso and Cosmopolis.

Lies-Lies-Bleeding continues this trend. Consisting of brief, spare scenes, clipped sentences, and unnerving silences, the play focuses on three characters as they deliberate over and eventually carry out the mercy killing of a stroke victim trapped in a persistent vegitative state. Though the characters debate the decision extensively and even fiercely, DeLillo doesn't make the mistake having them just reiterate the arguments of pundits and philosophers. It is the play's genius to push through the cheap, politicized controversy towards the immediacy of the dilemma faced by these characters and the death-haunted atmosphere that pervades their lives.

The individual who is the subject of the decision, Alex, appears in three flashbacks, once in robust health and twice while his body is failing, just before the stroke. These appearances, though brief, flare poignantly like the last glimpse of a setting sun.

There is also one scene where Alex's widow, Lia, speaks at his memorial service. Her words summarize the themes, mood, and style of the play quite well, and are worth quoting at length:

"I know people tell stories at these gatherings. I don't want to do that. People tell stories, exchange stories. I don't know any stories. You know things about him that I never knew. This means nothing to me. There are no stories. You're here for the wrong reason. If you're here to honor his memory, it's not his memory, it's your memory, and it's false. There are no stories. There are other things, hard to express, so deep and true that I can't share them, and don't want to. In the end it's not what kind of man he was but simply that he's gone. The stark fact. The thing that turns us into children, alone under the sky. When it stops being unbearable, it becomes something worse. It becomes that air we breathe."

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much talking without saying anything

Love-Lies-Bleeding is the third play written by novelist Don DeLillo. This drama has Alex, an old man who after several strokes is in a persistent vegetative state, being cared for by his current wife Lia, a previous wife Toinette and his son Sean. Except in flashbacks Alex is silent throughout the play, but the wives and the son discussing his life and arguing about him and themselves. This is a play about the end of a life and the decisions family has to make regarding it.

The blurb on the back cover of the book concludes with this description:

"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."

This is a very fine description that gets to the heart of what this play is about, but the key word here is "spare". Spare writing is a trademark of Don DeLillo and he leaves a lot unsaid in the gaps between words. Another trademark of DeLillo's spare writing is this bit of dialogue: "The memory ends here. I draw a total blank. This is the subway. He's reading the sports pages." So many times in DeLillo's writing he will give the reader lines of dialogue which no person would say in life but the dialogue fits in the context of the story he is telling. In Love-Lies-Bleeding the characters are speaking, but they are saying less than usual. The format of a play does not allow DeLillo to truly focus his writing because all of the motion is from the words of the characters rather than description and described action and here DeLillo is less successful. There are questions about the value of life, but I am not sure Don DeLillo addresses those questions.

-Joe Sherry

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A few deep, moving lines, not much else

Love-Lies-Bleeding seems like a continuation, or alternate telling of the novel The Body Artist. A (much) younger woman marries an older man who has had a long, eventful life before her, and now he's dying (or in The Body Artist, he's dead) and she sits and thinks and talks and nothing much happens.

While DeLillo is clearly a talented writer, I think that his talents don't transfer to novels, and definitely not to plays, as well as other reviewers seem to think they do. Maybe he should write some poems, or some philosophical ponderings. This is the third work of DeLillo's that I've read, and what I've noticed is that there is always a point in the story when you get to a monologue by one character that really captures the meaning of the whole story. I just wish DeLillo would write a bunch of those and put them out together, instead of writing an extra 100 pages to wrap around these little gems.

In Love-Lies-Bleeding, an old man (70s) is in a vegetative state after a stroke. His present wife (30s), ex-wife (50s), and son (30s) are all gathered to take care of him and contemplate euthanasia. I simply can't imagine this show actually being performed on a stage and not boring audiences to... well, death. Besides the lack of a real driving force in the plot, there are three acts, and probably around 15 total scenes, maybe more. Each scene is short and stilted, and while reading you can see that time has passed and maybe gather the meaning of the scene... on stage this seems like it would be far too distracting. And I know I wouldn't want to sit there through wooden deliveries of these stylistic lines.

Sometimes artistic creative work is really moving. And sometimes it's just self-indulgent and bland. I feel like this play is closer to the latter. There's a line in here where one of the stroke-victim's ex-wives remarks "I'm not sure how it works but men who don't know themselves have a power over others, those who try miserably to understand." I think Don DeLillo has a power over others for the same reason.

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