A few more than fifty

50 Words, by Michael Weller: Jan and Adam's night of total marital explosion.

There are some plays I've read that just make me feel naïve. When I start reading, I go along with the plot, thinking, “What an interesting play. What unhappy characters. Glad it isn’t real.”

After a while, though, if the play is good, there are lines here and there that jump out at you. You hear them like they started in my own head instead of on paper. Then you make excuses: “This is someone else’s life. Someone might have problems like that, but it could never be me.” The same kind of excuses I make when I'm watching the news. I see something terrible that’s happened to someone halfway across the country, and I think, “Man, that’s awful,” and keep flipping channels.

If it’s a great play, though, it’s too hard to keep making excuses--there’s nothing left to do except shrug and think, “Oh yeah, I guess that does happen. It could happen to anyone, even maybe someone like me." FIFTY WORDS was a great play. I didn’t want it to be, but I bought into it. I believed it. And it's scary.

Realism here is never a problem. I’ve seen couples just like this, who miss understanding each other by one angry comment or one sarcastic remark every time. They argue, but never actually say anything because neither one is willing to communicate. I’ve been in relationships like that.

Very often, the women are the worst. As a member of the club, I can say honestly that most of us have Jan’s attitude. Women don’t ever want to tell you how they feel; men should already know. We want compliments, just so we can deny them and force men to say them again, all the while asserting our own modesty. Men, on the other hand, should never need compliments. They should simultaneously want to spoil us like children and treat us like intellectual and moral superiors. Even though I know I’ve been guilty of it, it still irks me to see it in print. As bad as Adam is in the play for cheating, I liked him better than Jan. For all my morals and thou-shalt-nots, I liked him better. I’m really annoyed at myself about that.

The tipping point for me was that Jan didn’t expect Adam not to cheat, she just expected him not to let her find out. I can’t understand that attitude. And it's at that point when you stop being sympathetic--when she admits she would rather live in a lie than know the truth she doesn’t want to hear.

Whatever your opinions about marriage are, the universal issue that this play really gets at is one we all struggle to understand: the sometimes invisible and seemingly impossible transition from a good relationship to one that doesn’t work anymore. Don't expect this one to affirm your notions about great, lasting relationships, but expect to gain some perspecitve into what makes good relationships good, and when it's really time to throw in the towel.