THE CARROT CARROT AND OTHER PROCLIVITIES
There are only two kinds of people in the world, a friend recently suggested: talkers and listeners. Or to be more exact, those who love to talk and those who have to listen. And a lot of the world’s unhappiness comes from that fact.
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As you might expect, this formula gets old fast. And Kalinoski does nothing to disguise these one-sided conversations the way David Mamet does. Mamet frequently punctuates what is essentially a monologue by having the listener break in every sentence or two with “Yeah?” “What?” or “All right.” But Mamet’s talkers manipulate their listeners, whose characters we know. And Mamet’s near-monologues are fascinating in themselves, little self-contained stories. Kalinoski just allows his talkers to babble on and on about nothing until we could scream.
In Specks, the second play, hausfrau Evie spends the entire time either operating a vacuum–she suffers from a cleaning compulsion–or blathering on about how badly the vacuum cleaner cleans. In either case, she never for a moment listens to her husband. In A Slow Brick on a Still Day daft Dr. Pissanti never allows his student to answer his questions about her paper, chattering on instead about baseball and literature. And in The Carrot Carrot, a powerful executive indulges in a pointless, long, incredibly digressive and vague monologue while her underling (whom she has summoned to the office) is reduced to the sort of lines Zeppo Marx used to deliver: yes, right, uh-huh.
Stoops, structured as a series of vignettes covering the mid-60s to the late 70s, gives us scenes from the adolescence and early adulthood of three African American women. Kelly, Deara, and Corky live in adjoining houses in an unnamed inner city, and over the course of the play we see their fortunes rise and fall. Kelly turns from a shy girl whose mother beats her for every minor infraction to an overly aggressive political activist to a remarkably self-assured magazine editor. Corky grows from the neighborhood bully into a vocal grass-roots activist working to save their row of houses from demolition. Deara changes less–she remains a hapless, sweet young thing throughout. But, boy-crazy herself as a teenager, she does end up castigating her own daughter for the same offense.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Roger Lewin–Jennifer Girard Studio.
