The Maiden's Prayer: Nicky Silver's Chekhovian Play.

When Nicky Silver's The Maiden's Prayer premiered in 1998, it received tepid reviews from two reviewers who usually enjoy the playwright's work. For Ben Brantley, the play is not fully developed: "But the evening often feels like an ectoplasmic version of the full-bodied comic works that have so solidly established Mr. Silver's name over the past five years, plays like Pterodactyls and Raised in Captivity" (9). For Michael Feingold, the play lacks a focus, although he is aware that a character, Andrew, remains at the play's center "long after he's lost any connection to the others." Asking "What, for instance, does the title of The Maiden's Prayer mean?" (132), Feingold points out that the playing of the piano piece with that title figures in Chekhov's The Three Sisters, but he does not develop a connection.

This essay will develop the connection and will explain why Andrew remains at the center and why the play is not an interlude between Silver's full-bodied dramas but is a testimony to his continued experimentation with dramatic form. To accomplish all of this, however, I must analyze those elements in Chekhov's play that account for the contemporary American play's title. Act 4 of The Three Sisters takes place outside the Prozorov house in the provincial town where the two unmarried sisters, Olga and Irina, lived with their brother, Andrey, before he married and brought home his bride, Natasha Ivanovna.

As Irina converses with the army doctor, Chebutykin, and her brother-in-law, Kulygin, they hear a piano piece being played inside the house. Irina, who expects to marry and leave the following day, addresses the sound: "And tomorrow night I won't have to listen to that 'Maiden's Prayer' anymore, and I won't have to meet Protopopov [Natasha's lover] ... (Pause.) And Protopopov keeps sitting there in the drawing room. He came today too..." (147). In a textual note, editor Bristow assumes that the "person who is playing this song ... is Natasha" (147).

In her study of Chekhov's treatment of female sexuality in his plays. Cynthia Marsh observes that the playwright parallels characters to afford audiences insights into their attitudes and behavior. Although she sees Natasha "juxtaposed with Masha," the married sister, in that they discover the power of their sexuality, she also sees the possibility that the sister-in-law is juxtaposed "with Olga and Irina" (220-21). While I agree with Marsh's primary pairing of the women in the scene in which the piano piece is played, the juxtaposition is clearly with Irina. Olga lives at the school where she is headmistress, and Masha, who is outside the house but in the garden, does not respond to the sound. Neither is the latter a maiden, whereas Irina is, if the term means an unmarried woman. If the term means a virgin, she quite likely is that too.

Actually the juxtaposition of Natasha and Irina begins at the same time as does that of Natasha and Masha: in act l's closing scene. The play's lights come up not on juxtaposition but on complementarity. Olga sets the mood. Reminded that one year ago their father died, she reminisces about Moscow, where the girls spent their childhood and adolescence, contrasting the cosmopolitan city with the provincial town where they have lived for eleven years. Since the reality of the dull, dreary town so oppresses her that she suffers "headaches constantly," she takes relief in a dream: "And just one dream keeps growing stronger and stronger, one dream. . .." Irina completes the thought: "To leave for Moscow" (104). When Vershinin, the new battery commander, arrives with recollections of Moscow, Olga shares their dream with him, "We are going to move there, you see," and once again Irina completes the thought, "We're hoping to be there by this coming fall" (109). The two sisters continue to complement each other on what would make them happy. Olga would love being "married and sitting at home all day" (105) rather than being a teacher; Irma would find "meaning ... purpose ... happiness ... ecstasy" (106) in work.

I can expedite the analysis of The Three Sisters by asking about it the question Eric Bentley asks about Chekhov's Uncle Vanya: "What effect has the visit [of the Professor and his wife] upon the visited?" (346) Modified, the question is: What effect have the tour of duty and the marriage upon the characters we must understand to appreciate the contemporary American drama? The tour of duty refers to Vershinin's stay in the town; the marriage refers to Natasha's union with Andrey. These two characters enter in act 1, and they represent opposing forces in the action. Known as the "'lovesick major'" (109) when he was a young officer, Vershinin is the embodiment of idealized need; he has an affair with Masha. Natasha is the embodiment of realistic need; she marries Andrey, has an affair with Protopopov, and displaces the sisters from their home.

Vershinin enters first. His arrival prompts Masha to change her mind about leaving and stay for lunch. During the interval between his arrival and Natasha's arrival, Tuzenbakh declares his love to Irina, prompting her request that he refrain from such talk. After Natasha enters, Kulygin wishes Irina "a nice fiance" (117) on the occasion of her saint's day--the reason for the gathering at the Prozorov house--while Masha cries out, "Oh, what the hell--why not?" (117), an exclamation that for translator Bristow "is probably related to Masha's emotions pertaining to Vershinin" (xx). The act ends with Natasha running from the ballroom because she feels the others are laughing at her, and Andrey running after her and proposing to her. She does not request that he refrain from such talk.

Although my essay will keep returning to the analysis of The Three Sisters to answer the question just posed, it is time to begin an analysis of The Maiden's Prayer, but not without making a critical distinction. To satisfy her material need, Natasha uses Andrey's idealized need to snare him. To satisfy her sexual need, she takes a lover while adding to her material gain by gaining control of the house and driving out those who are in her way. In act 2, for example, she appropriates Irina's room for the baby, moving Irina in with Olga. This appropriation is part of the sister-in-law's increasing exercise of her power, a power she derives from not only knowing the difference between a basic need and an idealized need such as love, but also knowing how to exploit the difference.

The Maiden's Prayer opens at the wedding reception of Taylor and Cynthia. The bride is happy because she integrates her two needs. As the father of the child she is carrying, the groom satisfies her basic need by providing for her; a loving partner, he satisfies her idealized need. He may satisfy another need too in that he may unwittingly assist his wife in her rivalry with her sister Libby. The latter is enraged that Cynthia walked down the aisle with the man she dated first. "You knew I was in love with Taylor so you seduced him and got knocked up!!" (13) (1) is the bridesmaid's accusation. "But he loves me. I am sorry, but you have to accept that" (17), the bride counters. Libby has to accept the situation since Taylor supports his wife, but accepting does not ameliorate it. Her idealized need is frustrated because she cannot have the man she loves, so too is her sexuality now that she feels rejected.

If we imagine a spectrum with Cynthia in the middle integrating the two needs and Libby at one pole unable to fulfill either of her two disconnected needs, we discover a fourth character at the reception at the opposite pole from Libby. Paul, Taylor's friend from childhood, admits in a signature Silver monologue, standing in a pool of light addressing the audience, that he has loved the groom since their first meeting when he was six. But unlike Libby, he can satisfy his sex drive, even though he cannot satisfy his idealized need. In fact, he satisfies it with a procession of male lovers, many of whom perform during an encounter or two and then disappear. When Libby protests to Cynthia that she dated Taylor for three weeks--"Do you call that brief?"--Paul interjects, "I call it a lifetime" (14). As the opening scene closes with the four characters returning inside to the reception, the question is: Can Libby or Paul become a Natasha who succeeds by separating the two needs or will they be unhappy yearning for Taylor, who is their Moscow--their dream of fulfillment?

The Maiden's Prayer takes up Paul's story first in his encounter with a pickup, Andrew. This character remains at the play's center and does something that each character does: he idealizes his partner and/or his situation. Refusing to leave the apartment, Andrew rhapsodizes about how Paul looks, "right at this moment, with the light from the moon." His reason is transparent: he wants to move into the apartment. When Paul asks why he has overstayed his welcome, his answer is unequivocal. "Sex. Sex is the point. And cable television" (21-22), a creature comfort his other partners lacked.

This scene, the play's second, dissolves into other scenes, unnumbered because the entire scene is constructed like a set of Chinese boxes. With Andrew in the bathroom, supposedly getting dressed preparatory to leaving, but actually--in an allusion to Melville's Bartleby--claiming the room as his subdivision within the apartment, Paul dreams of Taylor, whose picture he keeps on his night table and whom he idealizes. "I wanted, so much, to be the one to save you" (23), he says to his friend as he touches his lips. "You saved me. I love you" (24), Taylor says to Cynthia, the woman he idealizes. The man he idealizes is his father, who idealized his wife, even though she detested him. "He thought she loved him, my mother that is," Taylor confides in Cynthia. "When she was well-behaved and he could still pretend" (25).

The final scene-within-scene 2 brings Libby to Paul's apartment to talk to him, her only friend. Depressed following the loss of Taylor and the job from which she was fired, she allowed a man to pick her up in a bar, take her to his place, and make love to her. She managed by pretending he was Taylor or by going numb and not feeling anything until he put three hundred dollars in her hand. "I was grateful" (31), she confides to a shocked Paul, for the experience resolves two of her problems. By becoming a prostitute, she can satisfy her basic needs for sex and income. She does not address the third problem with Paul, which is what to do about her idealized need. It comes up nonetheless in scene 4 when Taylor offers her a job in his manufacturing firm. Sensing that her sister orchestrated the offer as a way of humiliating her by putting her in daily contact with the man who rejected her, she declines. She has a job, she tells them, as a prostitute. "It's easy," she adds for Taylor's benefit; "I pretend they're you" (44).

At midpoint by the end of act 1, The Maiden's Prayer appears to be moving in one direction. Taylor and Cynthia have integrated their basic and idealized needs. The other three characters have not, but they are able to satisfy their basic needs while hoping to fulfill, or pretending they are fulfilling, their idealized needs. Libby pretends that her clients are the man she loves; Paul tells his pickups his name is Taylor (20); and Andrew is ecstatic wearing a pair of Paul's chinos. "I love them. I love the way they feel and smell and fit. I love everything about them. I may never take them off" (33). Silver's play does not have a character who at midpoint intentionally separates the needs and pursues each independently of the other.

At midpoint by the end of act 2, The Three Sisters moves in diverging directions because the play has two characters who react differently to the pressures in their lives. Natasha and Irma provide preliminary answers to the question posed earlier on the effect of the tour of duty and the marriage upon the characters whose behavior and attitudes form a basis of comparison with behavior and attitudes in Silver's play. Natasha has to contend with an ineffectual husband and with sisters-in-law who control the house into which she married. As these realities become oppressive, she grows aggressive, appropriating Irina's room and taking a lover. Act 2 ends with her leaving the house for an evening troika ride with Protopopov the District Council chairman. Irma has to contend with both a stultifying job and an aggressive suitor. Tuzenbakh is not aggressive; on the contrary, he idealizes her, a "fine and beautiful" woman (116). However, in act 2, Solyony declares his passion for Irina in a proposal that is direct and urgent. Since these realities are oppressive and frightening, she retreats into her dream. The act ends with her anguished cry of longing: "To Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!" (133)

The above statement about The Maiden's Prayer being at midpoint is misleading, for there is a scene before the act ends that though brief is typical of Silver's dramaturgy. "I experiment with style quite wildly, careening from farce to Brecht to something else without a pause," Silver writes in the introduction to a volume of his plays. The result is "funny in parts and then jarring, using shifts of theatrical genre to disturb" (Etiquette xiv). In the scene a devastated Cynthia relives the baby's stillborn delivery. Resisting Taylor's attempt to console her, she collapses to her knees, where she remains while Libby wraps her arms around her and holds her.

Presenting Cynthia wracked by grief alters the audience's perception of her. Rather than being the manipulator in Libby's act 1 perception, she is pitiful--but only for that scene. In the dramaturgy of "hairpin turns in a mix of genres and styles" (Casillo 4), she takes still another turn to the woman she was before her marriage. With their child stillborn, there is nothing to hold the couple together. She cannot have sex with her husband, who no longer fulfills either her basic or idealized needs so that the strain in the marriage that was apparent in act 1 ruptures in act 2. Like Andrey, who retires to his room to play his violin while the fire rages in the third act of The Three Sisters, Taylor retires to his house to resume drinking knowing he is "killing" himself (63), and if the drinking does not accomplish that end, he has a gun that will. When she is next seen, Cynthia is getting ready to go out with her obstetrician, whom she is dating. "He is," she gushes, "the sweetest man!" (58)

Yet Cynthia is not Natasha, the "most malevolent figure Chekhov ever created" (Brustein 157). She is not cheating on Taylor; she has left him. Since later scenes show him living in his house, she apparently has no interest in the property either. Her interest is the obstetrician, with whom she will travel to Italy. Beginning life anew, she joins her sister, who has already joined Paul, on the spectrum's pole where one can satisfy basic needs while hoping to fulfill, or pretending to fulfill, idealized needs. These characters are not like Natasha, who separates her needs. They are more like Irina, whose prayer integrates them.

Georgy Tovstonogov sees the fire in act 3 of Chekhov's play as an image of the fire in the souls of the Prozorovs: the "smoldering ruin of dreams and hopes and ambitions" (331). Yet Irma recovers, for the act ends as the second act ended: with her impassioned yearning for Moscow and the dream's fulfillment. During the course of the act, she admits to Olga that she always expected they would move to Moscow, where she would meet the "right man," the man she "dreamed about," the one she has "come to love" (141). When she consents to marry Tuzenbakh, she changes the dream but does not stop the dreaming, as evidenced by her lines that close the act. And though she consents, she gets Tuzenbakh to understand that he should not expect her to fulfill his dream. "I shall be your wife, faithful and obedient, but there is no love, none. ... Oh, I have dreamed of love, dreamed for a long, long time, day and night, but my soul is like a beautiful piano that has been locked up and the key is lost" (151). After he is killed in the duel, she switches her dream to fulfillment in "work" (157), surely an ironic dream for someone who hated working in the telegraph office and for the District Council. If "The Maiden's Prayer" applies to anyone in The Three Sisters, it is Irma, particularly in the image of the piano that cannot play the soul's song because the key is lost.

Just as Natasha and Irma provide preliminary answers to the question posed about Chekhov's play, so do the four characters at the wedding reception provide preliminary answers to the question posed about Silver's play: Can his characters separate their needs, or do they yearn for someone to fulfill all of them? The title applies to everyone of the four in that each is searching for the one person who will play her or his soul's song. Cynthia tries marriage with Taylor, and when it encounters an obstacle, as terrible as the death of a baby, she runs. At the opening of act 2, he suggests seeking professional help or getting away temporarily from the painful site, but she refuses. Not long thereafter she finds someone else who seems to be the one who can integrate her needs.

When he learns that Cynthia has left Taylor, Paul shows up at his friend's house and offers to stay "for a little while" (65), an offer the husband declines. Not to be deterred, Paul tells him that his wife is living with Libby. His motive is not friendship; he wants the man he fell in love with when he was six. And he gets him. The final scene has the two of them in Taylor's house, where Paul is staying, reminiscing about their first meeting. The implications are that Paul will realize his dream, that he will integrate his needs, and that Taylor, the weakest of the characters, will acquiesce in whatever kind of relationship the other establishes.

In a monologue Libby relates that while thinking about Taylor and her inability to help him, she would cry even when she was with clients. One night Jack, her first and most regular client, asked her what was wrong, and, so as not to hurt his feelings, she said that she wished they had a different kind of relationship. Touched, he proposed marriage. She defers an answer because when in bed with him, she is realizing her dream of being with Taylor. If she declines, she risks losing a gentle, generous client who idealizes her. If she accepts and in the interaction of marriage relates to Jack's reality, she risks losing the dream.

The Three Sisters has a character whose realistic behavior is juxtaposed with Irina's idealistic dream, and her presence yields a conclusive answer to the question about the Russian play. Knowing herself, Natasha knows the difference between her basic and idealistic needs and therefore gets what she wants. Although Irina's desire to integrate her needs is commendable, by not knowing herself--and not wanting to know herself if the knowledge includes her sexuality--she does not get what she wants. Moreover, she will never realize her dream because its fulfillment is always in someone else's hands in the future: in the right man in Moscow or in work. Hence Natasha's playing "The Maiden's Prayer" can be interpreted as an ironic counterpoint to Irina's prayer or dream, a counterpoint the sister recognizes subliminally when she expresses her relief in finally being free of Natasha and her lover. The sister-in-law does not forgo the real present for an ideal future, and she does not wait for Prince Charming to unloc k her piano and play her song. Secure in her marriage, Natasha rakes control of her destiny and goes riding with Protopopov. Whether an ideal lover or not, he serves her purpose. Of course, as theatre critics are wont to state, the power and beauty of a Chekhov drama are that the unsympathetic Natasha and the sympathetic Irma command the stage equally as embodiments of modes of living in the modern age.

Silver's characters reveal themselves through interaction and monologue. After Cynthia rejects Taylor's suggestions for trying to deal with their situation, she pauses before entering the house and asks him a question that shocks him and the audience, "Don't you ever want to hit me?" (48) She closes the door before he can answer. After she leaves him, Libby and Paul try to persuade her to see her husband and talk to him. She becomes furious, screaming, "I CANNOT!! I'VE DONE TOO MUCH TO HIM ALREADY!!" (71-72) Since she opens the door of her darkened interior for only a glimpse into her tortured soul before slamming it shut, she does not want to know herself. Paul too has a glimpse into himself that he does not pursue when it occurs to him that what he is about to say in misrepresenting Libby to Taylor "is true of himself as well" (67). When Cynthia does relent, telling him she will see her husband to say good-bye, he lies to the latter, telling him she refuses any meeting. The consolation he offers is the remi nder of the enduring love his friend must feel for his wife. Taylor smiles because he knows that Paul is really speaking about his, Paul's, "feeling for" him (74). Libby keeps Jack "waiting and waiting" (74) for an answer to his marriage proposal. The putting off of an answer is her strategy for nor knowing herself because by keeping him as a client, she keeps alive the pretense that she is with Taylor, a pretense she could not maintain if they were married.

Silver's play also has a character whose discovery of himself is the ironic counterpoint to these characters' prayers or dreams. His presence yields the conclusive answer to the question about the American play, but to have a context for the discovery, we have to trace the development of the playwright's theatre. Its universe is an irrational one in which species come into existence and become extinct for no reason that anyone knows and, in the closing words of Pterodactyls (1993), with "No tragedy. Or disease. Or God" (150), and in which people act as they do because their nature is, in the closing words of Fat Men in Skirts (1988), "the nature of the monkeys" (300). Characters feel the irrationality primarily in their rejection by a family that should be supportive and the confusion of a sexuality that seeks expression at odds with society's norms. To mitigate the consequent loneliness and unhappiness, they deny so much so that denial is the playwright's declared subject of Pterodactyls. When freed from soc iety's restraints in Fat Men in Skirts, they commit rape, incest, and cannibalism. When forced to confront reality in Pterodactyls, they commit suicide.

Characters who do not commit suicide still have to contend with their needs, which are of two types: basic and idealized. They also deny, but by pretending. By converting a basic need, such as the satisfaction of the sex drive, into the fulfillment of sex in idealized love, they can pretend that they are overcoming the loneliness and unhappiness, and that they are discovering meaning in existence: they are worthy of the love their dysfunctional families denied them. The key to this resolution is integration; they integrate their basic and idealized needs.

Free Will & Wanton Lust (1991) is an excellent example of pretending as a survival mechanism. act 2's opening scene is an extended monologue in which Claire relates her disgust with a world in which spitting has become so commonplace that people do it everywhere, even women and even openly on the pavement where she was walking. When she begins, the image is that of expectorating, but as she goes on and particularly as she equates the act with the "behavior of apes" (199), the image becomes that of rampant, brutish sexuality. (2) Returning to her apartment, she made love with her younger partner, an act that transported her to her childhood and the past when the city was aesthetically pleasing. Idealized sex, or love, enables her to perceive the "beauty of things" (201). Her affair, however, puts her in conflict with her children, who feel ignored. To retaliate, her daughter Amy maneuvers Tony, the younger lover, into a sexual encounter with her brother's fiancee so that when Philip comes upon them, he orders them out of the apartment. Claire is incensed: "I need him. Is that simple enough? BASIC enough?" Stunned by the realization that his mother will take Tony back, Philip tries to get her to see that he does not love her, to which she replies, "SO WHAT IF HE DOESN'T OR NEVER REALLY DID OR NEVER REALLY WILL? SO WHAT?! WHAT DIFFERENCE COULD THAT POSSIBLY MAKE!?" (214) After she leaves to find Tony, Philip feels guilty for what he did and miserable because their mother has always hurt him and his sister by neither loving them nor pretending with them as she pretends with Tony.

Amy has a solution to the problem of being unhappy in an irrational universe: "We can hold them [the ones we pretend to love or idealize into lovers] against ourselves, feel their skin against ours, smell them and taste them, and for a minute or two, we can forget, that we are, afterwards and always, alone." She encourages her brother to try, and the lights come down on the two as "they lunge abruptly into a romantic embrace identical to that of Tony and Claire in Act 1. As they kiss, we hear 'Love Is Good for Anything That Ails You'" (216).

Part of the pretense is that the love will save the beloved from loneliness and unhappiness. Sebastian in Raised in Captivity (1995) has been unable to feel any emotions following the death of his lover from AIDS. His sole contact with life, other than with his therapist, is with a convicted murderer serving a life sentence about whom he read and to whom he writes and sends presents. He professes his love, but the felon ends the correspondence because it is obsessive and destructive. At the same time, Sebastian's selfmutilating therapist wants to save him. "I will give you God and show you beauty," she pleads. "I will bathe you in the powerful, divine, white, erogenic light of God! I will save you!" (66). Compulsive, obese Otto in The Food Chain (1994), who incidentally performed Chekhov while in college (30), puts the salvific nature of love in perspective. Since the person proffering love wants to be saved too, from self-hatred, if the love is "UNREQUITED" (67), there is no reason to live. Otto kills himsel f in the play's alternate ending.

Four of the characters in The Maiden's Prayer are recognizable characters not because they feel rejected, though Libby and Taylor do, and not because they deny, though Cynthia and Paul do. When Paul protests that he does not anesthetize himself "by having anonymous sex continually with a series of nameless, faceless strangers," Libby scoffs, "Oh wake up and smell the coffee" (29). They are recognizable because they convert a basic need such as the satisfaction of the sex drive into idealized love. In other words, their prayer or dream is to find fulfillment of their needs in someone else, someone who will make them feel worthy and therefore give meaning to their existence. They are not as hysterical as Otto in The Food Chain, who implores, "COULD YA LOVE ME!!?" (64), but their need for acceptance is the same, as is their dream or prayer for its realization. By fulfilling the need, the love will validate the character's being.

The fifth character is Andrew, whose discovery of himself is the ironic counterpoint to the others' prayer and the reason he remains at the play's center. The discovery is ironic because when he enters the action, he is the most dependent of the five in attempting to integrate his needs. Since Paul satisfies sexually, has an apartment, and subscribes to cable television, he refuses to leave, forcing Paul to move. Yet he changes, as he reveals in monologues about his relationship with Sven, his current lover, who also satisfies sexually, has an apartment, and subscribes to cable television. Though each professes to love the other, Andrew does not idealize Sven as much as he wanted to idealize Paul. The Swede is a "Nordic God" and a "Scandinavian Adonis," but the beauty is physical. The inner beauty that one attributes to a lover is a quality foreign to Andrew, who "never really thought about it" (58-59).

That Sven considers him beautiful pleases the character so terrified of being alone that he would sleep in someone else's bathroom. That Sven idealizes him to the point of being upset that they will be apart while he is attending his dying mother in Sweden makes Andrew wonder that his partner's "complete devotion...isn't proof that beauty and brains really are mutually exclusive" (67). The idealization begins to jar because it is at odds with the image the monologuist sees when he looks in a mirror, and the discrepancy between the idealization and his sense of reality begins to separate love from need and Andrew not only from Sven, but from the other four characters. If we think of the spectrum metaphor introduced earlier, while Cynthia, Libby, and Paul with a passive, acquiescing Taylor cluster at the pole trying to integrate basic need and idealized love, Andrew is at the other pole trying to understand the different pressures they exert and the different ways of satisfying them. As he says in his closing m onologue after his partner has been unable to return from Sweden because his mother clings to life there:

It occurred to me, this morning, that these weeks, with Sven gone, that this is the very first time I have ever lived alone. I thought I would hate it. I thought the sound of my own voice would drive me insane. But you know I don't talk to myself when I'm alone. And all in all, I think it's good. I love Sven completely. But I think it's good. I'm learning, I think, not to need him. (74)

Like Chekhov's Natasha, Andrew separates his needs, but to understand them and himself Like Chekhov's Irina, the other four characters do not understand themselves. They remain dependent on those who will save them from themselves. Even the most likable of them, Libby, has "no idea" (74) what to do about the marriage proposal so that she continues as she is: a prostitute. Cynthia's comment, that the "one thing" she "can control" (69) is her decision not to see Taylor, is ironic because it is the only thing she tries to control. Discovering himself, Andrew is beginning to know himself: to minimize being dependent on others to fulfill himself and to take as much control of his life as he can.

Andrew's taking control does not mean that the playwright minimizes the irrational universe in which his theatre is set. On the contrary, the play emphasizes it. From the beginning of his career, Silver's plays have been irreverent: pulverizing beliefs and conventions as they careen between broad comedy and utter despair. Other adjectives that characterize his theatre are absurdist, hysterical, and extreme--adjectives that, depending on the critic's taste, can be positive or negative. One that is unequivocally negative, however, is reductive. Prior to The Maiden's Prayer, character after character narrates variations on a tale of emotional damage done to him or her by a dysfunctional family. The rejection is intended to exacerbate the spiritual loneliness that is the condition of existence in an irrational universe, but since the tone is whining, the obligatory revelation forefronts the psychological scarring while relegating to the background the irrational universe. In addition, since the victimized charact er in more than one play is in therapy with a therapist who is himself or herself a victim, the ensuing lunacy exposes the inadequacy of the treatment for healing what is a spiritual condition. Yet the combination of revelation and therapy reduce the action to a psychological frame of reference.

The Maiden's Prayer changes the frame of reference, and I think the change can be attributed to the influence of Chekhov's theatre, the universe of which is irrational and the frame of reference of which is more spiritual than psychological. Characters are still emotionally scarred. Andrew, for instance, refers to the damage done to his lover, Sven, by a mother capable of "alienating seven children" (67), but instead of forefronting the revelation, the play mutes it. Furthermore, the play shifts the emphasis from the dysfunctional family to the cultural environment as the cause of the psychological state. In Pterodactyls the daughter Emma, who killed herself, tells of shades reading Emily Bronte's poems in the kingdom of the dead (140). The cast of The Maiden's Prayer do not have to wait until death to discover Romantic literature. Libby tells Paul that she learned of love "from novels, from Bronte novels and teenaged songs" (30). Before the stillborn delivery that separates them, Taylor and Cynthia review th e men they know whom they could introduce to Paul, but they disagree because his choices reflect a relationship different from the one she has in mind. "We're talking about romantic love" (37), she corrects her husband.

Despite all the differences between the two plays, two exchanges mark the similarity between the universe of The Maiden's Prayer and that of The Three Sisters and the shift from the psychological frame of reference in Silver's earlier plays to the spiritual frame of reference. Unable to conceal her hostility, Cynthia interprets her sister's behavior psychologically: "You drink too much because you're afraid of people--and being alone. Ending up alone" (61). The explanation is similar to the one Chekhov's Chebutykin advances for marriage; the alternative is "loneliness." But just as the army doctor undercuts the explanation with, "Of course, it doesn't matter at all!" (Chekhov 130), Libby cuts her sister off. She has admitted as much to Paul, and the explanation does not touch what she feels inside herself. In an early scene, Taylor narrates a tale of his dysfunctional family in which his mother rejected his father's love, reducing him to insignificance. A revelation that would have been an extended monologue in an earlier play is over almost as soon as it starts. And when Cynthia asks, "Why did she marry him?" she invokes a brooding Andrey in act 3 of the Russian play, speaking his thoughts aloud: "When I married, I thought we were going to be happy. . ." (Chekhov 143). Taylor's reply to Cynthia's question sums up the Russian and American plays: "Well, there's the mystery. . ." (25). He then changes the subject. There are no pat answers to the mystery of existence.

I am nor arguing that The Maiden's Prayer is a great play. Andrew's taking control of his life is related to the audience; it is nor dramatized. Nevertheless, the play is better than the reviews give it credit for being, and it is a necessary play in Silver's development. His theatre has always been experimental. Free Will & Wanton Lust, for example, is a "conflict of theatrical styles" with the mother, Claire, a character from a Noel Coward play and her son, Philip, a Brechrian character. The final scene therefore is a "battle between these two aesthetics (as well as between characters)" (154). Yet once a character in these earlier plays delivers the obligatory tale of emotional scarring, the end is so predictable that The Food Chain contains the only two possibilities for the victim. He can continue to beg for love, or he can kill himself. The Chekhovian influence gives the contemporary American theatre a subtlety and ambiguity without diminishing the comedy. Allowing the characters introspection without hi strionics, it offers them another possibility, dramatized in a play that premiered two years after The Maiden's Prayer.

The Altruists (2000) demonstrates that Silver can write a play in the new style of The Maiden's Prayer without forfeiting the claim to his theatre's territory--dependence on alcohol and drugs, sex and love for one's sense of well-being--or sacrificing the hairpin turns that harrow that field. The farcical element has to do with the identification not only of a dead body but of sexual orientation. Sydney, the woman who pumps three bullets into the body sleeping under her bed covers, thinks she killed Ethan, her philandering lover, although beneath her pill-induced high the previous night she was struck by the body's excessively masculine traits. The body is that of Audrey, a bone-crunching lesbian from whom Audrey's partner, Cybil, wants to free herself because although she is a self-avowed lesbian, she desires Ethan, who spent the night with her.

The satirical element excoriates a group of altruists dedicated to changing the world who steal, exploit, and forget the causes for the rallies they attend. When Cybil takes the position that the group should nor try to save Sydney from a jail sentence, Ethan argues that they "need her! We need her house and her car and her stuff. That armoire brought three grand! And firebombs don't grow on trees. Leaflets don't print themselves! We need her money!" (53)

For broad comedy the play has scenes of visually inflated lovemaking with heads and bodies bobbing up and down behind beds and scenes of verbally deflating dialogue. After Ronald, Sydney's brother, declares his feelings for Lance, the street hustler whom he took to bed in his apartment, the latter hesitates about extending his stay. "You hafta pay me for last night first" (15), he explains. Learning that the rally that day cannot be for the jailed South African dissident, Cybil explodes; "Jesus Christ! You turn your back for a minute, one flicking minute, and they free Nelson Mandela!" (20) When Sydney details how the body not only resisted her amorous overtures but tried to smother her, Ronald seizes self-defense as her courtroom strategy. She demurs: "I shot him some time later" (32).

In the three areas that this study has singled out, The Altruists continues the breakthrough effects of The Maiden's Prayer. The ending is not predictable. To save Sydney from arrest, the others frame Lance for the murder, yet he is the one character who is able to free himself from his dependence on street hustling and the pimp who controlled his life. The play inverts the earlier plays' psychological frame of reference. An informal counseling session is ongoing, but it is an interaction in which Ronald persuades Lance that he does not have to be a victim but can free himself from the street environment and come live with him. That Ronald concurs in the betrayal laces the closing scene with irony, especially since he leaves with the group to participate in a rally on behalf of a Santo Domingan falsely accused of murder. The play dispenses with the obligatory victim's tale of emotional scarring. Characters allude to monstrous parents, but the allusions are not expanded. For example, when Ethan addresses the a udience with the beginning of what would be an extended monologue in an early play.-- "I grew up in a house as big as a hospital"--Sydney silences him: "We don't have time for that!" (47) The monologue light goes out, and the scene changes.

There is, however, one revelatory tale, yet it is nor whining. As the play progresses, Lance develops until he too can address the audience. In five sentences he tells of growing up with a single, hard-working mother. But since she always had a boyfriend and the last one he remembers "hated kids," he makes the sixth sentence his final one: "I hit the road" (58). Silver's theatre is structured on monologues. With the set a trio of apartments designed so that the lighting and the action shift from one to another until the characters pass through the imaginary walls separating the apartments to surround the reforming hustler, The Altruists dramatizes the possibility of a life for which one takes responsibility and the betrayal of that life, only this time not by derelict parents, but by characters who have no one but themselves to blame for their unhappiness.

The monologues that open the play actualize the comic tone while Lance's brief monologue, spoken toward play's end, actualizes another tone. It is not the despair of the earlier plays. In its understated simplicity, it is real and moving and revelatory of the humanity that informs the black comedy. I think the day will come when critics acknowledge The Maiden's Prayer with its Chekhovian influence as a pivotal work in this theatre artist's career.

NOTES

(1.) Since Silver frequently uses more than one mark of end punctuation for emphasis, I have retained the punctuation in the text.

(2.) Silver can cite a precedent in Falstaff's use of "spit" in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, 1.2.218-19, which Eric Patridge interprets as referring to "seminal emission" (187).

WORKS CITED

Bentley, Eric. "Craftsmanship in Uncle Vanya." In Search of Theater. New York: Knopf, 1953. 342-64.

Brantley, Ben. "Thwarted Hearts Tempered by Bons Mats." New York Times 23 Feb. 1998: E9.

Bristow, Eugene K. "Introduction: On Translating Chekhov." Anton Chekhov's Plays. xv-xxxii.

Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.

Casillo, Charles. "Nicky Silver in Extremity, As Usual." New York Times 26 Feb. 1995, sec. 2: 4.

Chekhov, Anton. The Three Sisters. Anton Chekhov's Play;. Trans. and ed. Eugene K. Bristow. New York: Norton, 1977.

Feingold, Michael. "Unfocal Points." Village Voice 3 Mar. 1998: 132.

Marsh, Cynthia. "The Stage Representation of Chekhov's Women." The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. Ed. Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 216-27.

Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare's Bawdy. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 1996.

Silver, Nicky. The Altruists. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2001.

-----. Fat Men in Skirt;. Etiquette and Vitriol: The Food Chain and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996.

-----. Free Will & Wanton Lust. Etiquette and Vitriol. 151-216.

-----. The Food Chain. Etiquette and Vitriol. 1-68.

-----. The Maiden's Prayer. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1999.

-----. Pterodactyl;. Etiquette and Vitriol. 69-150.

-----. Raised in Captivity. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995.

Tovstonogov, Georgy. "Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Gorky Theatre." Anton Chekhov's Plays. 326-39.

ROBERT J. ANDREACH is a New York University Ph.D. and a former university professor. His latest book, Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre, is a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for the year 2000.