A Review of The Elements that Feature in Terrence Mcnally's Play - The Perfect Ganesh

Analysis of the play elements

Terrence Mcnally s career began in the New York off-off-Broadway boom of the late 1960s. Most of his 60 s plays are not really relevant although some are funny. However, during the 70 s his plays began to get recognition. Nowadays, his plays are performed in off-Broadway theaters and he is known as the author of tragicomic plays, filled with breadth and depth. He still lives in New York and is one of the America best playwrights.

He is the author of numerous plays, including Master Class and Love! Valour! Compassion! (both winners of the Tony Award for best play), The Ritz, and Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, which became a movie starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the books for the musicals The Rink and Kiss of the Spider Woman, which won the Tony Award for the best book of musical. Other successes include Lips Together, Teeth Apart and The Lisbon Traviata. Other plays by Terrence McNally are: Andre s Mother; Corpus Christi: a play; It s only a Play; !Cuba si! Bringing it all back home, last gasps; and Where has Tommy Flowers Gone.

McNally has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also serves as vice president for the Dramatists Guild, the American organization of playwrights, composers, and lyricists. His plays have been adapted to many languages, and performed in different countries.

The plot

The play concerns a two-week travel to India by two rich middle-aged women, who seem to be empty and frivolous. They both have indifferent and painful memories of the deaths of their sons. Although being friends for many years, it is only in this trip that they get to know each other (and also themselves) by experiencing the humanity of India.

Katharine Brynne, one of them, is a mother who lost a homosexual son, killed by homophobics, and is haunted by the fact she rejected him. Katharine is also a woman who must deal with her racism, fueled by the fact that the men who killed her son were black. She is also an exuberant and open-minded woman who is willing to take risks and to accept the reality she sees about herself.

In contrast to Katharine, there is Margaret Civil, who is more reserved, conventional, and motherly. Margaret deals not only with a lump on her breast, which seems not to go away, and also with the secret - that is not shared with her best friend Katharine, neither with her children of the death of her four-year-old son, over twenty years ago, but even more, the betrayal of her husband.

They embark on this inner travel, guided by Ganesha, the smiling Indian God. Ganesha is the narrator, commentator and a God who is working enigmatically for the possible best for all. He is also other characters, witness and stage magician, but mainly their spiritual guide.

Apart from these three characters, we have minor parts of Margaret husband, tourists, Gabriel s ghost (Margaret s son), Walter s ghost (Katharine s son) and other characters that are all played by the same actor, called man in the play.

The story starts lightly comic. These two women, stereotypes at this point, inserted in a totally foreign setting, makes the play funny by their ignorance and Americanism. However, as each of their dark secrets is revealed, the plot becomes very emotional, with an intense tone.

Title

Ganesh, or Ganesha, is part of Hindu mythology and a very important God in India. As the play also explains, he was the son of Shiva and Parvarti. Ganesha prevented his father Shiva to enter the bathroom where his mother was taking a bath. Shiva, furious, cut off Ganesha s head and Parvarti, devasted, begged Shiva to help Ganesha. So Shiva cut an elephant head off and put it as the head of the boy. Ganesha s image has an elephant head and also four arms. In one of his hand, he holds a conch shell, in another a discus, in a third a club and in the fourth a lotus blossom. He is the destroyer of obstacles, god of knowledge, wisdom, literature, fine arts and good luck.

Inserted in the play, Ganesh is also the image of Ganesha that is found in every home, big or small, and sold as souvenir. Katharine searches for a perfect one, buying a dozen of them, and never finding, but always sure that such a perfect Ganesh exists.

The objects Ganesha s image holds in his hands symbolize, in the play, motherhood such as protection (seen through the shell), repression (through the club), amusement (through the discus) and love (through the lotus blossom).

As Ganesha represents mostly the love between mother and son, we can say that Katharine was looking for a perfect son, one that she could accept, or a perfect relationship between the two of them. Margaret does not need to find a perfect one, since her dead boy would have grown up to be a prince among men with gorgeous blond curls (McNally; 1993, pg 197). Her son was already perfect for her.

And it is through the memories of the women s sons that they are taken to solve their obstacles and get wisdom and knowledge.

Themes

The main theme of the play is Margaret and Katharine s spiritual journey and the healing of their souls, seen through their process of revealing secrets and killing the demons inside them. Traveling to India, is for them a way of being alone, away of the responsibilities. However, alone in a totally foreign setting is where they will find themselves, know each other, and face their ghosts.

Katharine has started her healing before, through non-reliable methods as self-help audio books in which she must repeat the she chose to be happy, healthy and good. Furthermore, it is known that she had been to lectures on Nurturing Your Inner Child , but it is only by dialoguing with her dead son, shouting out her taboo words (faggot, queer, nigger), being forced to remember her son even more than she already can not forget and asking for forgiveness is that the process of erasing the death of her son brings results. It is always with the help of Ganesha - being him a puppeteer or an Indian child - or the man by singing her son s favorite song, is that her process of healing exists as psychoanalysis. She must go back to her past, interact with the past, tell the past and hear herself telling the past to solve this inner lump.

While Katharine already knows what her problems are, and what is needed now is the solution for them, Margaret s pains seem to be much more inside and solid than Katharine s, probably because of the time gap or because of her own personality that does not allow her to expose her problems. Her way of dealing with the death of her son is to forget about it, not talking it, neither with her husband. And as the play progresses, the only person she talks about ii is Ganesha, dressed as a Japanese woman. However, Margaret succeeds in trespassing some obstacles, she could tell Katharine about the lump in her breast and also about her husband s love affair. She becomes no longer a reserved woman, which is part of the process of learning about her.

Another theme that appears in the play is the ugly Americanism, which fits the play as a purpose of comedy, as it is very exaggerated. It is a minor theme, however. As we see throughout the play, Margaret and Katherine referring to other people, those who are not American, as lepers, Japs or niggers or even asking foreigners to improve their English. Their American guidebook tells them not to drink water, neither as ice, or even eating Indian fruits is dangerous. Katharine thanks the foreigners with a gracias , as everybody who is not American is Caribbean for her.

Another theme that appears is India itself. The play is a window to this mystical world, and even in some theaters where it was performed, the production of the play filled the lobby of the theater with information about the elephant-headed god, statues of Ganesha and even, Indian music was played before, after and during the intermission of the show. We are not only guided through India landscapes but we also learn about The Gate of India, The Towers of Silence, the Ganges River and the Taj Mahal, sometimes narrated by Ganesha, sometimes by the man.

Characters

As it was said before, the personalities of Margaret and Katharine and also their evolutions belong to the main theme of the play. Both of them are rounded characters with much depth and integrity that make them believable and likeable.

Both of them are the same age, both have the same background, their husbands make the same living and both of them are indifferent, both have lost a son and both have prejudice. However, they are very different from one another.

Katherine is an extravagant woman, who speaks loud and is full of prejudices. However, she is concerned about her reality, she knows where her fears are and what are her goals. She tells that she went to India to be healed, found, and also to satisfy a childhood willing to embrace and kiss a leper. She is much more spontaneous than Margaret, and she does not deceive herself. She knows she has prejudice against African-Americans and she wants to overtake it. Her prejudice comes from the killers of her son, who were (for her) all black. But in this trip, she succeeds in healing, when she calls out the taboo words across a river, it brings her some alternation of her hatred for Walter s killers.

Margaret is more reserved, and she tells herself that everyone thinks she is a bossy bitch , but behinds this mask, she is a woman with fears and sadness. She goes to India because she did not want to spend another holiday in the Caribbean islands. She does not have the hatred Katharine s have, and she does not feel guilty as well. She cannot forget her son, either, but it does not bring her such remorse, since she saw the pain in her son s killer, a black woman whose car struck her son, Gabriel. It seems that through the killer s pain she felt comforted. However, she did not work this loss, and her husband and she thought that not mentioning the episode again would make her forget. What she did not know is that people must work on their suffering. However, her pain could not be healed since the play ended and it was not exposed. She could share the discovery of a lump in her breast but we cannot suppose this honesty will allow it to be healed, since in the Hindu cosmology where opposites are eternally paired, it is less the sick or heartsick body that matters than the restless soul. It seems that Margaret s story is more difficult and hurtful than Katherine s, and this is the reason she does not show her real self to anyone, neither to Katherine or husband.

The other two characters, that are actually several characters, are Ganesha and the man. They both take several roles, however, there is a difference between the characters Ganesha plays and the characters that the man plays. Ganesha s characters seem to angels that are in the perfect time, saying the perfect words, while the man s characters are accidentals, regarding their roles in changing the two women s souls. When the man plays the part of a neighbor, Ganesha plays the part of a woman who comes to Margaret in a perfect time, and makes her share her feelings. While the man is a Dutch tourist, Ganesha is an Indian child that makes Katharine exorcise her hatred.

Setting

The setting seems not to be very detailed in this play. It is actually simple but very effective as scenes change occurs very frequently. Terrence McNally probably, let it to the audience s imaginations or to the production of the play. However, some of the settings are symbolic.

The play is set in an airport, inside the airplane, the hotel room, landscapes of India and Katherine and Margaret s own bedrooms.

During the first scene, the action takes place in the airport, which is a busy and realistic place. It helps to convey the character s personalities, as an introduction to play. It also helps to show the comic ignorance of the characters, to contrast with the last scene, in Katharine and Margaret s bedrooms and convey the plot, which is their progression as persons. The airport also means a preparation for a travel.

The airplane represents the travel, the passage from one place to another, and mainly the journey to the unknown. While crossing the seas, they are getting far from land, or from safety.

While in India, they are in the place for discoveries. And it is in this place where the discoveries take place. The production of the play probably did not make India s landscapes as sceneries. The sights are seen through the characters eyes and words.

Conclusion

A Perfect Ganesh is a wonderful play whose overall messages are useful for the present days. Souls cannot be dissected by reason, they must be known by ourselves with the help of gods or not, but mainly by our strengths and friendship, that is essential to humanity. It is a play that brings laugh and tears through the excursion into these two contemporary characters. I, particularly, loved it.