TRAVELER IN THE DARK
The precipitating context for the play is the death of a lifelong family friend. The central character is Sam, the father of said family and the doctor who operated on, yet failed to save, Mavis, the family friend. Glory is Sam’s long-suffering wife. Their son, Stephen, is a preadolescent bookworm and parental shuttlecock.
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Act one is consumed by the backyard version of feather dusting. We hear about Mavis–how she grew up with Sam, loved him, received no love in return, and worked as his nurse for years. Sam feels guilty for having used Mavis and wasted her life. He fears he’s doing the same to Glory and demands a divorce. But Glory doesn’t want a divorce. And Sam doesn’t want Stephen reading fairy tales. And Everett, who takes issue with Sam instructing Stephen in the basic tenets of atheism, attempts to defend God’s mysterious ways, particularly the unfairness of death. In this manner, Sam, knee deep in weltschmerz, manages to irritate the hell out of evervbody. Meanwhile, Stephen runs in and out the back door like a librarian, fetching problematic reference works including Mother Goose and the Bible. Then everyone scampers off to Mavis’s funeral.
Norman balances the heaviness of her comprehensive assault on the dilemma of existence with some lighthearted comic relief. One-liners abound, and Norman uses them with such formulaic frequency that you can practically predict when she’ll slice the angst with a wisecrack. Still, it doesn’t matter how much lame humor Norman uses to grease the wheels since there’s no tension to relieve in the first place. ‘Night, Mother, pretentious and manipulative though it was, at least had the tension of Jessie’s impending suicide. It was effective melodrama. Traveler in the Dark, on the other hand, has as much tension as white bread soaked in milk. There’s no compelling crisis, so the audience just hangs out, waiting for Sam to unravel.
Realism is out of the question anyway. Norman’s style is sententious realism, wherein life is shrunk to fit the stage, and a slew of complex problems are resolved in a single, schmaltzy image. Because in the end, when the title is finally explained, we discover that the “traveler in the dark” comes from a largely forgotten verse from the nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” This is our ray of hope, our reason to go on living. Now doesn’t that little bit of night-light psychology make everything better?
