AN EXCESS OF JOY
The plot alone, which covers three days in the lives of a depression-era Chicago family, is incriminating enough. Phillip Loy (Marc Silvia) is a former vaudevillian, now an unctuous Chicago minister. Convinced that the kingdom of God is at hand and that his life lacks risk and excitement, Phillip decides to move his family into a run-down Gold Coast mansion, which he intends to convert into a fashionable theater.
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Phillip’s faithful but neglected wife, Ethelda (Lee Guthrie), applauds her husband’s “charitable” obsession but prefers to dwell on the one magic moment of her family’s life, the day Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget airport. Indeed this incident seems to have great meaning for all members of the Loy family. It’s made daughter Annabel (Lynn Baber) desperate to fly: she collects dead birds to learn their secrets and regularly jumps from heights in the hope that she’ll soar. (Annabel believes that an “excess of joy”–that is, love of the world–keeps her rooted to the earth. But if she ever loses that excess . . .) The last Loy is Annabel’s simpleminded 17-year-old brother, Isaac (Jeff Hughes), who always manages to overhear exactly what he shouldn’t.
Even setting aside the playwright’s ignorant belief that there were sex changes before the 50s, An Excess of Joy is still implausible, from its suspiciously buoyant start to its trashy ending. Despite Payne’s efforts, Phillip comes off as so relentlessly ordinary that the skeletons in his closet can’t possibly matter. This is no arrogant, swaggering hypocrite who creates his own comeuppance; he’s just a petty, self-important Chicago showman who wants to have it all–happy family, willing mistress, and secret homosexual past. The schmuck lacks even the slightest hint of a tragic flaw. Pretending he’s got one is as dumb as trying to turn Jimmy Swaggart into a Wagnerian hero.
