A WEEKEND NEAR MADISON
The play is a prolonged argument about feminism. Jim, an underachiever who dabbles in art and gets by doing menial jobs, hitchhikes from Philadelphia to his brother’s house near Madison, Wisconsin.
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Poor old Jim doesn’t know what to think. The nude paintings he did of Vanessa may be gathering mold in his basement, but his love for her remains fresh. He admires her and genuinely wishes her well, but he just can’t come to terms with what radical feminism demands of him. In his longest speech, Jim recalls an afternoon years earlier when he and David were chopping firewood on a cold winter day while Doe and Vanessa cooked dinner. “I felt like a man,” he says with embarrassment. “A man. In some ancient sense. . . . It felt like we were continuing something . . . the men outside, splitting wood for the long winter, the women in the kitchen cooking dinner.” He recognizes that such primal notions of masculinity are hopelessly out of fashion, but he feels them anyway, and can’t cope with the outrageous demand that Vanessa makes on his masculinity later in the play.
