Goodbye Stranger
But as the play goes on, you begin to see that there’s something refreshingly singular and knightly about Glad: in this dreary milieu, his Panglossian innocence borders on the heroic, which in Luft’s world of vapid, fearful misfits has nothing to do with slaying mysterious knights or searching for the Holy Grail. It means offering an umbrella to a deranged soul crouching in a gutter. It means believing the story a homeless mother tells you and giving her every penny you can. It means offering a cigarette to a stranger, providing comfort to a troubled friend, feeding a squirrel, giving your hat to someone who’s freezing.
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All the rest of Luft’s characters occupy familiar states of alienation and detachment, but Glad is a walking exemplar of the bumper-sticker slogan Practice Random Acts of Kindness. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before the misery of Glad’s surroundings brings him down as well. Any time you run across a character named Glad or Happy or Hope, you know the play’s going to be a downer. To Luft’s credit, however, the play’s demoralizing impact isn’t felt until well into the second act, when no amount of puckish wit can disguise it.
The seeming triviality of Glad’s plodding, episodic existence, however, also creates a profound sense of detachment in the viewer comparable to that found in Luft’s characters. An eerie desperation pervades the play, an oppressive grayness consistent to a fault. Despite the unadorned poetry and wit of Luft’s writing, particularly when she skewers vacuous bar conversations between people who have absolutely nothing to say to each other, the laughs are bitter–the same sort of sardonically amused reaction one might have to a witty Kurt Cobain lyric or clever line in a Beckett play.
