Little fears

Concerned with the frictions and fears which build up between men and women in their lives together, the play juxtaposes two couples of varying temperament. In the case of the first couple, the husband is suave, articulate, and merciless in his castigation of his wife. He rarely raises his voice, but the venom is there and the seething contempt it conveys leaves the wife helpless and vulnerable. She can only protect herself with feigned indifference, covering the inadequacy she feels, the failure she doesn’t understand. In rapid alternation the other couple is presented; she is a compulsive duster and polisher who calls herself “Mommy;” and he a sleek younger man who leaves her each evening for activities elsewhere while she assumes a guise of casualness about his assignations. The scenes between the two couples continue to alternate, and gradually we are aware of growing changes in both of them. The bullied wife moves from despair to defiance—eventually summoning the courage to ignore her husband’s cruel ragging and go off on her own. The neglected wife grows more open in her pathetic hints on the need for love and companionship, her obsessive neatness giving way to mounting carelessness—until she becomes a slattern. In the end the mysteries deepen—but in their disturbing statement the author captures our imagination and turns our thoughts to an informed examination of the “little fears” that are in all of us.