Wait Until Dark Dramaturgy Packet by Jay Harr harr@oswego.

edu For more information and a Works Cited, please visit waituntildark.weebly.com
About the Playwright
Though his plays have been both popular and critically acclaimed, playwright Frederick Knott only wrote four of them: Dial "M" for Murder (1952), Mr Fox of Venice (1959), Write Me a Murder (1961), and Wait Until Dark (1966). This was because, according to his wife, he accomplished what he did only for the monetary rewards, though his profit for Dial "M" for Murder was less than he felt he deserved. Maybe this cynical attitude contributes to his skill in the dark genre in which he wrote. He was born in China in 1916, to two Quaker missionaries who believed it best to educate him in England, where he attended Cambridge and then served in the Royal Artillery. As a child he took an interest in Gilbert and Sullivan shows, which he and his sister would act out, probably leading to his career in theatre. I was always intrigued with the idea that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn't turn out right. You can plan a murder in great detail and then put the plan into action and invariably something goes wrong and then you have to improvise, and in the improvisation you trip up and make a very big mistake. -Frederick Knott (on Dial "M" for Murder)

About the Play

The play premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in February of 1966, and was directed by Arthur Penn. Lee Remick played the starring role, and was nominated for a Tony for Best Actress in a Play. Stanley Kauffman gave it a cautiously positive review (especially in praise of Penn), appraising its grasp of suspense but criticizing some glaring plot loopholes. He compares it to Dial "M" for Murder and finds it comes up short. Directed by Terence Young and starring Audrey Hepburn, the Wait Until Dark movie premiered in October of 1967. Hepburn's portrayal of blindness in the movie differs from what is written in the Broadway script; she visited a school for the blind and learned Braille basics well enough to appear to be reading and writing it in the movie, instead of using mnemonic tricks like sugar cubes as Susy did originally in the theatrical script. Audrey Hepburn herself picked out her costume. Linda Armstrong, viewing a 1998 Broadway Revival featuring Tarantino as Roat, reported that 1

audiences actively laughed at his more menacing lines as he didn't come off as scary at all. Conover agrees that Tarantino's acting does not translate well from screen to stage. The New York Times reviewer of the production, however, also notes the "flash-bulb" style lighting and sound effects that turn everyday city noises suspenseful, deeming the technical portion of the production a success. A recent production at the John W. Engeman Theater met all expectations of the play as a classic. The reviewer, Aileen Jacobson, only takes issue with the original script, criticizing it for being "strewed with far more plot elements than necessary" and also full of "unlikely situations."

Setting
The play takes place in Greenwich village in New York City, in the present day at its writing in 1966. Greenwich Village has traditionally been a home for artists, bohemians, and NYU students, with whom Sam Hendrix probably would have worked. It is also the location of the Stonewall Inn, where the Stonewall Riots occurred in 1969, beginning the queer rights movement. Susy, Sam, and Gloria would probably have run into many beatniks and queer people in their daily life: Greenwich Village has always been filled with people who lived in tight-knit communities when the rest of the world would not accept them.

Historical Context
Daily Life The sixties was the first time that America engaged in a way of life recognizable as distinctly contemporary. McDonald's was spreading, and with it came the rise of fast food. Color TVs were being adopted by more families. Life was beginning to move faster, to forget about the hardships of the decades before, and to enter the Space Age. Culture was expanding away from the rigid comportment of the 1950s and towards new lifestyles and new opportunities. Art & Media Andy Warhol's art, particularly emblematic of the day-to-day social climate of the early sixties, was just rising into prominence. Authors like Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, and Sylvia Plath were becoming household names, and Elvis experienced a resurgence in popularity as he re-entered civilian life. West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, and the film came out in 1961. Childhood Gloria and/or her classmates probably would have been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy and playing with Barbie dolls, which would have been a new fad of the era, and passing around MAD magazine during class. She would have been raised according to Dr. Spock's ideas. His advice included being loving towards your children instead of severely disciplinary, acting according to the child's actual needs for food and sleep instead of a pre-determined schedule, and questioning the practice of circumcision . However, 2

many of his ideas were later proved to be unwise advice, including putting babies to sleep on their stomachs, which led to an increase in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Politics and the World Stage The early sixties was very politically active. The tragic assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F Kennedy took place in 1963. Before his death, he was forced to handle the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which was disaster involving a secret US plan to turn Cuban exiles against their home country. The invasion was crushed very quickly by Cuban forces, leaving a stain on the reputation of the Kennedy administration. He was also in office when the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall, a key event in the Cold War. The Vietnam War, closely related to Cold War goals, lasted from 1955 to 1975. By 1962, there were 9,000 American troops in Vietnam, up from no more than 800 throughout the fifties. Combat really picked up in 1965, with the support of the American public. However, support quickly declined, leading to the famed Vietnam protests. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing: it lasted, officially, from the mid-fifties until the late sixties. The Voting Rights act was passed in 1965, limiting restrictions on African American voting. Desegregation and interracial marriage were getting mainstream support. Feminist issues like birth control, abortion, and artificial insemination were entering the legal limelight. Birth control, including the IUD, had just been invented, allowing women greater sexual freedom with a lower risk of pregnancy. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966. The Space Race was also a defining feature of the political climate, in which America and the Soviet Union were in competition for control of the space around the Earth. Though we may now see it as a frivolous venture with only the betterment of science to take into consideration, it was actually nailbitingly urgent to make sure that the other power did not gain the ability to "nuke" you from space. Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, left the atmosphere in 1961. Growing Up in the Thirties and Forties Adults that were in their 20s or 30s in the 60s, like the characters in the play, would have been born in the thirties or forties, and therefore their childhoods would have been hard. The thirties and its Great Depression made life hard on everyone. Farming families in rural areas suffered from an excess of crops that, because of the general poverty, could not be sold for a profit, forcing them to do without many things that we now take for granted. Families in cities could not grow their own food and therefore often went hungry. Work was scarce, though the situation was partially alleviated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. In the forties, many children would have gone without their fathers as they fought overseas in World War II, leading them to have an intense sense of patriotism as they wished for their fathers to come home safe and victorious. Though the economy picked up after Roosevelt's work programs and America's declaration of war, many women and children had to do without because of rations (though most did have enough money to get ice cream from an ice cream truck). For the first time, women were 3

getting jobs, replacing men who had gone off to war in the effort to support their families, and many teenagers quit high school so they could work too. Others were not so lucky; Asian Americans were forced by the government to spend years in internment camps because they were viewed as potential traitors.

Blindness, Hardships, and Stigma

Most cases of blindness in the United States are not sudden occurrences related to "accidents." The four most prominent reasons are age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma. Based on her age (as it has been represented by casting choices) and her health, we can assume that none of these are the causes. Also, she has both her eyes in physically good condition, so her accident could not have been one that directly caused eye injury. Most likely, her accident was one that caused damage to her Occipital Lobe, located at the back of the head. It is unlikely that this would result in sudden and complete blindness; most who suffer from this sort of brain injury end up with stranger and less dramatic symptoms, like partial blindness or a loss of depth perception. Alternatively, retinal detachment can result from a sudden snapping movement of the head, and can cause complete blindness. Adults who become suddenly blind may experience psychological trauma as well. Many go through the entire mourning process, wherein they lament the loss of much of their independence and mobility. We see this when Susy resents Gloria; it may be partially because of her unpleasant personality, but is likely also related to the girl as a symbol of Susy's new dependence. Newly-blind people also find themselves unable to perceive body language or facial expressions, making spoken communication more difficult. And, of course, Susy cannot experience her husband's photography. Blind people, like other disabled people, often encounter prejudice and stigma. For example, many feel that they are defined by others in terms of their disabilities. Some feel that the association of the lack of sight with darkness carries its own group of negative connotations, leading the people around them to feel like the blind person is doomed to a life of darkness, sadness, and the feeling of being lost. By the time the story begins, Susy has managed to work through these mourning stages and fight back against stigma. When she refers to herself as a "champion blind lady," even though she uses the phrase to fight back against her husband's expectations, she is showing that she has come to terms with her new state. Newly-blind people may need to make many adjustments to systems in their home that were designed by the sighted. For example, clutter can be devastating to a blind person's need to find an object or be able to navigate safely. Generically-shaped objects like cans must be labeled in a way that the person can detect, and money will probably be arranged a certain way in a wallet. Even a skill as basic as cooking may need to be entirely re-learned. Different forms of recording information have to be practiced; often Braille and/or a system that the person themselves develops. Blindness is a relatively common disability that is portrayed on film, comprising 13% of all disability roles, mostly male. Victoria Ann Lewis, in her essay The Dramaturgy of Disability, grapples with the way disabled people are represented in the theatre and how it affects both disabled and non-disabled theatre artists. Disability, she notes, is a sign in many works of either taintedness (as in Oedipus Rex) or of angelic innocence (as in Wait Until Dark). Disabled playwrights and artists, since the move for 4

disability civil rights in the 1970s, have been attempting to de-stigmatize and de-mythologize disability by making their disabled characters well-rounded, flawed people, who serve more than a metaphorical role for the story. Susy herself deals with something else that Lewis notices about disabled narratives: the idea that the disabled person is temporarily "ill," and the expectation that they will "cure" themselves by conforming as closely as possible to non-disabled society. Susy expresses her frustration with Sam's expectations about her independence repeatedly throughout the play, asserting over and over again her struggle with becoming the "Champion Blind Lady," which seems to have been forced upon her. Cheu further tightens the focus by exploring how blind, female protagonists are narrated on screen. He compares womanhood and disability as similar undesirable afflictions. In many films, people who develop disabilities feel that their own lives are over, leading audiences to dehumanize these characters. He specifically mentions Wait Until Dark, which uses the lack of sight that Susy experiences every day to take away power from the audience and make them feel vicariously helpless, reinforcing that the sighted have power over the blind. He categorizes representations of the disabled as dependent, isolated, and infantilized. Susy is all three. Even at the end of the play, when she has killed Roat and triumphed, she still must be saved by her sighted comrades.

Photographic Technology
In addition to the artistic aspects of photography (like tone, lighting and composition) a photographer of Sam Hendrix's day would have had to engage in a variety of technical processes that today, with our cell phone cameras, we do not need to think about. He would have had to control the shutter speed manually, to load and unload the film very carefully or risk ruining his photographs, and developed them himself in a darkroom. Polaroids had just been invented in this time, so Sam Hendrix, as a professional, would have been in competition with this technology that allowed people to take pictures themselves.

Con Artists & Criminal Culture

The two criminals in the play are confidence artists. Talman and Carlino, as per their own admission, are not murderers. Their skills lie in crime for their own monetary benefit. We are familiar with internet scams, but all scams done in the characters' era would have all been done face-to-face. A famous example is played out thus: one man leaves a beat-up thrift shop violin with another man at a restaurant while he supposedly runs an errand or leaves to do some other task. Someone else, a purported violin expert, tells the man that the violin now in his possession is priceless, offers to buy it, and then leaves. When the first con man comes back, the victim offers to buy the violin from the man, so that he can sell it to the "expert," giving the seemingly reluctant owner more money than the violin's actual worth. The "expert" never comes back, leaving the victim short his money. This exact con game would probably have been well known by this time, meaning that more complicated ones would probably be employed. Making money this way requires a keen sense of observation, the ability to read people, and convincing acting and improvisation.

The play also addresses the "revolving door" problem, in which convicts upon their release often slip back into the prison system post-haste. As the play demonstrates, once a person is immersed in criminal culture, it can be hard to escape, even if one wants to.

Heroin
Heroin is an opiate, meaning that it is derived from the opium poppy. It is a stronger version of morphine and was originally intended to be used as a painkiller, but doctors found that it was too addictive to be practical. In its purest form it is bright white, but it often appears brown. In a powder form, as would be inside the doll, it can be sniffed, or dissolved in a solution so it can be injected. It acts as a depressant, and causes bodily functions (like breathing and digestion) to slow down, giving a feeling of blissful relaxation. A heroin high will last two to four hours. Withdrawal symptoms are the opposite: restlessness, body aches, insomnia, and diarrhea. One danger of heroin lies in the fact that one's tolerance disappears very quickly, so an experienced user who has not used in a few days can give themselves their regular dose and die. Another is that it may be cut, or diluted, with other substances that are not healthy to imbibe.

Glossary
two grand (pg 6): $13960.10 today eight hundred (pg 6): $5584.04 today two-fifty (pg 6): $1745.01 today juice (pg 6): money owed to a loan shark taking me to the dentist (pg 6): in context, can be assumed to mean he will be killed twenty dollar bill (pg 8): $139.60 today In stir (pg 8): in prison put-on (pg 8): a deception candid (pg 9): frank, honest, informal a dollar seventy-five (pg 9): $12.22 today five hundred (pg 11): $3490.03 today fifty grand (pg 12): $349,002.58 today Hammacher Schlemmer (pg 17): founded in 1848 as a hardware store in New York City, now located 6

on East 57th St. The characters would have known it as a place to get new electronics as well, including toasters and electric razors. five thousand (pg 18): $34,900.26 today safe light (pg 20): a light that can be used in a photographic dark room without ruining the product five dollars (pg 21): $34.90 shuttlecock (pg 22): the "birdie" used to play badminton Unguentine (pg 23): an antiseptic ointment like Neosporin Shylock (pg 68): A character in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Implies a moneylender who is willing to take "a pound of flesh" or more.