COOL ONE’S HEELS
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Standing in line is familiar enough to city people. One wouldn’t think there’d be much drama in an experience so everyday, so mundane–especially since nobody seems to know what the characters in Israel Horovitz’s Line, the main play in this collection of short pieces, are waiting for. Flemming, who has been camped in place all night, sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but Stephen, who joins him and thus starts the line, says they’re nowhere near a ball game of any kind. By the time this crowd of two has been increased by Dolan, Molly, and Arnall, all we have is a line of five people, ruthlessly jockeying for position by fair means or foul.
The commentary on interpersonal power plays in Line probably had more political relevance in 1966, when the play was written, than it does now. Stephen, the irreverent youth, is the agitator who disturbs the status quo with his demands to be first in line; he initiates the subsequent scramble for a place in this microcosm of society–a place all the more ephemeral for being completely relative. When the goal is so ambiguous as to be nonexistent, what does it matter who reaches it first? Arnall is presented as an overly cautious corporate man, Flemming as a slow-moving blue-collar type, Molly as a sex-and-power-hungry housewife, and Dolan as a patiently sly opportunist.
