YONDER COME DAY
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Because J.D. is unable to say more than one word at a time–one word per gasp is his limit–the play focuses on his visitors. In the course of the play the visitors become a small society, united by their love for J.D. Marijo comically exaggerates the habits and walks of J.D.’s friends–Frankie, George, Falette, and the apparently autobiographical narrator–and his nurses. Though the caricatures are often hilarious, the jokes come at the expense of vain notions of human decorum–characters’ good intentions are never ridiculed.
On the other hand, unsympathetic characters, those without good intentions, aren’t ridiculed at all. In a scene involving J.D.’s self-righteous, homophobic cousin, Marijo doesn’t strain to condemn her as an actor or writer with an ax to grind might. She simply shows hate for what it is, and there’s nothing funny about it.
In the last scene, Yonder Come Day reconciles death with its comic vision. Using a traditional funeral rite, Marijo shows that an individual’s death, however painful, does not destroy human society. A hilarious holy-rolling preacher delivers an earthy eulogy, one that doesn’t idealize death as a doorway to heaven, or deny worldly concerns for the sake of the hereafter, but accepts the tragedy of death as an undeniable fact. The preacher travels through a funny procession of pop-culture images and makes a call for unselfish self-knowledge to arrive at his–and the play’s–conclusion.
