Rebecca Gilman's The Glory of Living Is a Flawlessly Directed Play About Consciencelessness

There's a scene toward the end of the first act of Rebecca Gilman's challenging new play, The Glory of Living, in which the central character, Lisa (Anna Paquin), is trying to explain to her furious husband Clint (Jeffrey Donovan) why she wasn't able to bring back what he sent her out to get. She says that all the pubescent girls she ran across that day knew something was up when she approached them and they refused to get into the car with her. Lisa has to be careful: she can't come out and say that the girls knew it would be dangerous or stupid to go with her. That would suggest there was something wrong with what Clint does with the girls, which would enrage him further, and after all, it's just a matter of a little rough sex, rougher sometimes than others, but nothing he didn't do with her back when she was 15, when they were first married.

Clint tells Lisa that the girls won't go with her because she's acting funny when she approaches them. Lisa says that isn't true, that she acts normal with the girls, whereupon Clint grabs her by the throat, pushes her down on the bed and screams in her face: "You don't know what normal looks like!"

Clint is right: Lisa doesn't know what "normal" looks like. On the other hand, Clint is a psychopath and the main reason for Lisa's skewed vision of the world, so it's a complicated moment dramatically.

It's interesting theatrically, too. A psychopath does know what "normal" looks like. In fact, a psychopath is arguably someone who knows how to imitate a normal human being but who lacks some basic human characteristic?conscience, say, or an ability to feel for others. Psychopaths and sociopaths are essentially brilliant actors, people who go through life fooling us into thinking they're something they're not, which is one reason movies and plays about them can be so compelling. We're intermittently forced to confront the fact that we're watching an actor imitating someone imitating a human being, so we're intermittently forced to ask ourselves what humanity looks like.

The Glory of Living, which Manhattan Class Company is presenting in a production flawlessly directed by the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, is very much a play about what humanity looks like. I disagreed with Ben Brantley's review of it in the Times a couple of Fridays back?at any rate, I read the play differently. I have great admiration for Brantley, both as a stylist and critic. He seems to me to have perfected the form of review invented by the paper's last powerhouse critic, Frank Rich, which combines exhaustive knowledge with an ability to juggle subordinate clauses in such a way that every opinion or piece of information is accorded a precise rhetorical weight. A fact or a judgment can be defused even as it is acknowledged on the way to some fact or judgment the reviewer wants to pack with a higher charge. There's an art to this almost surgical kind of writing, but it can be bullying. Brantley, though, seems largely to practice it in the interests of justice, where Rich used it to enhance his own power and authority. Also, Brantley's literary persona is engaging rather than pedantic. He doesn't write as though he'd just come down from Mt. Sinai and is still in a bit of a state.

His review of The Glory of Living was characteristically elegant and engaging, but it was subtly derisive of the play. He was solicitous in lauding the professional stage debut of Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar before she was 12 for her performance in Jane Campion's godawful The Piano and here plays Lisa. He was conscientious in praising the quality of "carefully modulated debate" in Gilman's earlier work. But Brantley took The Glory of Living to be a play about a serial killer, "a disaffected girl who goes directly from middle school to marriage and murder," and I don't think it is. It's a play about consciencelessness, yes, but not the kind one is born with. Gilman is writing about a kind of moral disability that we're not used to regarding as tragic and that we're strongly disinclined to view that way. We're in Manson country here. This is absence of conscience brought about by powerlessness of a very profound and particular kind.

Gilman has written about pathology before. Boy Gets Girl was about a woman being menaced by a stalker, but everything we learned from it about the phenomenon of harassment was derived from what its journalist-heroine said about herself, which we were expected to take at face value. Similarly with Spinning into Butter, we learned what we learned about racism from the protagonist, a self-critical college dean. These were characters of tremendous insight and self-awareness, and the plays that encased them were the less interesting for it. The Glory of Living is more sophisticated dramatically. It's also a departure for Gilman, partly for being set in the landscape of dirt-poor, redneck-belt Alabama, and being about unimportant people?trash, scum, the lowest of the low, what Christ calls in the parable, "the least of these my brethren."

We first encounter Lisa in the trailer where her mother turns tricks. She is 15 and trying to watch television, sharing the couch with an unprepossessing drifter whose friend is being flamboyantly serviced behind a flimsy partition. It's an ambiguous scene, played mostly for comedy, a seduction?as much of the audience as of Lisa herself. Because the drifter is attuned to Lisa's discomfort (he's shocked by a hooker who would entertain clients with her daughter in the room) we make an assumption about him. When the lights come up on the second scene, we think we're looking at the afterglow of a first sexual encounter. We're surprised to learn that two years have passed, that Lisa and Clint are married and surprised again when Clint flies violently off the handle. Again, we make an assumption?that Lisa is a conventional battered wife. But the more we learn, the worse it gets. Clint not only abuses Lisa but other girls as well. Moreover, he makes Lisa his pimp. Moreover, she goes along with it. She could get away from Clint, but she doesn't. The more complete a picture we get of Lisa's life, the more incomprehensible Lisa's actions seem. Midway through Act I, Lisa begins making anonymous calls to the police, which is the first we hear of bodies. Act I ends with state troopers busting in and interrupting Clint's rape of an unwilling victim.

Act II finds Lisa in custody, confessing to the murders of Clint's victims. At first we think she's lying, protecting him. We're shocked to discover that she isn't and horrified by her explanation?that she killed people because Clint told her to. In fact, we still don't know the extent of Lisa's complicity and guilt. It's as though Gilman had wanted to see how indefensible she could make someone's actions and still make them human to us on some level.

Late in the play, there's a scene in which Lisa's bewildered court-appointed lawyer (David Aaron Baker), trying valiantly to understand her, is asking all the tough questions: why she didn't run away from her husband or help rather than kill the girls, why she killed even in cases where Clint wasn't actually there to physically compel her. None of her answers are adequate or acceptable, and the lawyer keeps at it. What finally bursts from her, with a kind of exasperated weariness?that she killed people who were doomed anyway?is neither a justification nor an attempt to diminish the girls' lives but a clinical assessment of what someone with a certain personality makeup has to look forward to in this life. It's the only moment of self-analysis in the play, and tragic because it's true and false at the same time. Lisa's instinct about the relationship between character and fate, her assertion that the girls who went with her were born victims?like herself?is probably accurate; what's erroneous is the moral conviction that she derives from her observation.

That Gilman manages to make all this as compelling as she does is partly due to the skill with which she controls information?parceling it out and deploying it in ways that always keep us a little off-base?and partly due to the sensibility of her director. Hoffman brings the same subtlety and intelligence to Gilman's play that informed his performance as Konstantin in Mike Nichols' production of The Seagull in Central Park this summer. This is tough stuff to direct. There has to be shock, so that we go through the moral reversals Gilman wants us to experience, but not of an order to render the play itself an exercise in sadism. Hoffman steers a true course between judgment and pity, eliciting beautifully understated performances from a huge (for off-off-Broadway) ensemble cast. With the exception of one writing lapse (a bogus line from a police stenographer that ought to have been cut) there isn't a false note in the production.

It's interesting, in a way, that Brantley took The Glory of Living as a play about someone predisposed to murder. I think the whole point was to show how someone not a sociopath could be led into sociopathic behavior. We're never asked to sympathize with Lisa or excuse her, but it's possible to be moved by her explanation. Ultimately as both Paquin's performance and the play make clear, The Glory of Living isn't about lack of affect, but the depth of rage behind it.

The Glory of Living, through Dec. 22 at MCC, 120 W. 28th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 206-1515.