Product Description

Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.

Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.

It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.

Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #836644 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Act One

ALEX: a man, seventy

TOINETTE: a woman, late fifties

SEAN: a man, thirty-five

LIA: a woman, early thirties

Two actors appear as Alex. One plays the character in three episodes that precede the main action. The other plays Alex in extremis, a helpless figure attached to a feeding tube.

A spacious room in an old house, remotely located. The set is spare and semi-abstract, with subdued lighting and a few pieces of well-worn furniture, including a sofa. There is also a metal stand equipped with an intravenous feeding setup.

In several scenes a limited sector of the stage functions as playing area.

Act One

Scene 1

Alex and Lia, one year before the main action of the play.

He is haggard, after a stroke, seated in a wheelchair, stage right, isolated from the room set, which is in near darkness. His speech is labored. Lia sits in close proximity, a food bowl within reach.

Across the stage, in scant light, barely visible, there is the sitting figure of a man.

ALEX

I saw a dead man on the subway once. I was ten or eleven, riding with my father. The man was in a corner seat, across the aisle. Only a few people in the car. A dead man sits there. This is the subway. You don't know about this. Nobody looks at anybody else. He sits there, and I'm the only one that sees him. I see him so clearly now I could almost tell you things about his life. My father was reading the newspaper. He liked to follow the horses. He analyzed the charts. He studied the race results. There weren't too many things he followed, my father. Horse races and prizefights. There was a column he always read. If I thought about it long enough, I could tell you the columnist's name.

LIA

And the man. Across the aisle.

ALEX

Nobody paid him the slightest mind. Another sleeping rider, by their dim lights. I watched him steadily. I examined him. I was fixated. When the train rocked. (Pause.) I'm thinking how he sat. He sat against the bulkhead, partly, at the end of the car. When the train rocked, he got bounced around a little and I thought he might topple to the floor. His mouth was open. His face, I swear, it was gray. There wasn't any question in my mind. Dead. All life drained out of him. But in a way I can't explain, it didn't seem strange or forbidding. It seemed forbidding but not in a way that threatened me personally. I accepted what I saw. A rider on the train, going breakneck through the tunnel. It scared me to think he might topple to the floor. That was forbidding. He could have been riding all day. Gray like an animal. He belonged to a different order of nature. The first dead man I'd ever seen and there's never been anyone since who has looked more finally and absolutely dead.

LIA

And your father. What did he do? Did he alert someone when the train reached the next station?

ALEX

I don't know. I don't know if I told him. The memory ends here. I draw a total blank. This is the subway. He's reading the sports pages. The column he's reading is part boldface, part regular type, and I can see the face of the columnist in the little photo set into the type. He has a slick mustache. A racetrack mustache.

LIA

Can you tell me his name?

ALEX

His name will come to me in a minute.

Scene 2

Present time. Lights up on the sitting figure. This is Alex, after a massive second stroke. The rest of the room remains dark.

Alex is motionless in a straight-backed chair with arms. It is now possible to see that he is attached to hydration and feeding tubes that extend from a metal stand next to the chair. His eyes are open, mouth open slightly. His hair is cropped. He is clean shaven and neatly dressed -- casual pants and shirt, new pair of running shoes.

Lights up on entire room. Toinette and Sean are situated some distance from the sitting figure.

TOINETTE

I don't like sharing a toilet.

SEAN

Maybe I can use the shed.

TOINETTE

Nothing personal.

SEAN

Or dig a hole somewhere.

TOINETTE

What will she say?

SEAN

You know what she'll say.

TOINETTE

I don't know her. I know her for half a day.

SEAN

I don't know her much longer.

TOINETTE

You've been here before.

SEAN

Once. After the first stroke. He was home from the hospital. She was looking after him, very capably, without help. That's what she wanted then and that's what she wants now.

TOINETTE

Do you think she has any idea?

SEAN

Tell her.

TOINETTE

You tell her.

SEAN

You must have shared a toilet with Alex. Somewhere along the way.

TOINETTE

We shared many things. We exhausted each other. We shared our exhaustion.

SEAN

She does everything one person can do for another. A male fantasy of the caring woman. But not really. She's not a little house sparrow. She's smart and tough. Stubborn too.

TOINETTE

Finally what we shared was silence. The entire last year. Everything became internal. Shapeless and motionless. Vaguely sinister. Each of us wishing the other dead in a car crash. I'd sit and study that look of his. Angry and dangerous. Always a question in it. He's puzzled by something.

SEAN (IN ALEX'S VOICE)

I'm probing, I'm searching. Trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes me want to tear out your liver and use it in a painting.

TOINETTE

Our car crashes were different. In my mind, Alex was the only victim. Lying there looking okay, actually, sort of presentably dead.

SEAN

The crash in his mind. What?

TOINETTE

Three or four cars. Nine or ten dead. My friends, colleagues, secret lovers. And I'm in the middle of it, smashed and burnt. All right, I wanted him dead at times. But not scattered into smoky little pieces.

SEAN

That's the difference between men and women.

TOINETTE

That look became a fixed look. We'd seen the last of our living, breathing days and nights.

SEAN

But you're here. Because -- tell me.

TOINETTE

There were times, I swear, when we were living in the same skin. That's how I remember it and that's what I want to believe. Makes it easier to understand how we could live as enemies, off and on, for as long as we did. I'm here to be with him, that's all. I want to be close -- close as we can get, he and I. I've been here before. You know this.

SEAN

No, I don't know this.

TOINETTE

Couple of days. Long before Lia. Maybe it had a mellowing effect.

SEAN

Why don't I know this? I thought we talked, you and I.

TOINETTE

It was six or seven years ago, and many years after he and I had lost contact. The old furies were not so intense. I guess we both felt this, telepathically. He called out of nowhere. This is nowhere, isn't it? Said come visit for a few days.

SEAN

What happened?

TOINETTE

I don't know. What happened?

SEAN

Did you make reparations? Talk in the same old way. Sleep in the same old bed.

TOINETTE

Why so interested?

SEAN

I'm interested in his life.

TOINETTE

Get your own.

SEAN

He's my father.

TOINETTE

Look at him.

Sean does not look.

Copyright ©2006 by Don DeLillo

Customer Reviews

Mystery play for a secular age
Having limned "the force of history," DeLillo has since turned around and gone in the other direction, into "the small anonymous corners of human experience," as he phrased it, with works like The Body Artist and, to some extent, Valparaiso and Cosmopolis.

Lies-Lies-Bleeding continues this trend. Consisting of brief, spare scenes, clipped sentences, and unnerving silences, the play focuses on three characters as they deliberate over and eventually carry out the mercy killing of a stroke victim trapped in a persistent vegitative state. Though the characters debate the decision extensively and even fiercely, DeLillo doesn't make the mistake having them just reiterate the arguments of pundits and philosophers. It is the play's genius to push through the cheap, politicized controversy towards the immediacy of the dilemma faced by these characters and the death-haunted atmosphere that pervades their lives.

The individual who is the subject of the decision, Alex, appears in three flashbacks, once in robust health and twice while his body is failing, just before the stroke. These appearances, though brief, flare poignantly like the last glimpse of a setting sun.

There is also one scene where Alex's widow, Lia, speaks at his memorial service. Her words summarize the themes, mood, and style of the play quite well, and are worth quoting at length:

"I know people tell stories at these gatherings. I don't want to do that. People tell stories, exchange stories. I don't know any stories. You know things about him that I never knew. This means nothing to me. There are no stories. You're here for the wrong reason. If you're here to honor his memory, it's not his memory, it's your memory, and it's false. There are no stories. There are other things, hard to express, so deep and true that I can't share them, and don't want to. In the end it's not what kind of man he was but simply that he's gone. The stark fact. The thing that turns us into children, alone under the sky. When it stops being unbearable, it becomes something worse. It becomes that air we breathe."

much talking without saying anything
Love-Lies-Bleeding is the third play written by novelist Don DeLillo. This drama has Alex, an old man who after several strokes is in a persistent vegetative state, being cared for by his current wife Lia, a previous wife Toinette and his son Sean. Except in flashbacks Alex is silent throughout the play, but the wives and the son discussing his life and arguing about him and themselves. This is a play about the end of a life and the decisions family has to make regarding it.

The blurb on the back cover of the book concludes with this description:

"Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it."

This is a very fine description that gets to the heart of what this play is about, but the key word here is "spare". Spare writing is a trademark of Don DeLillo and he leaves a lot unsaid in the gaps between words. Another trademark of DeLillo's spare writing is this bit of dialogue: "The memory ends here. I draw a total blank. This is the subway. He's reading the sports pages." So many times in DeLillo's writing he will give the reader lines of dialogue which no person would say in life but the dialogue fits in the context of the story he is telling. In Love-Lies-Bleeding the characters are speaking, but they are saying less than usual. The format of a play does not allow DeLillo to truly focus his writing because all of the motion is from the words of the characters rather than description and described action and here DeLillo is less successful. There are questions about the value of life, but I am not sure Don DeLillo addresses those questions.

-Joe Sherry

A few deep, moving lines, not much else
Love-Lies-Bleeding seems like a continuation, or alternate telling of the novel The Body Artist. A (much) younger woman marries an older man who has had a long, eventful life before her, and now he's dying (or in The Body Artist, he's dead) and she sits and thinks and talks and nothing much happens.

While DeLillo is clearly a talented writer, I think that his talents don't transfer to novels, and definitely not to plays, as well as other reviewers seem to think they do. Maybe he should write some poems, or some philosophical ponderings. This is the third work of DeLillo's that I've read, and what I've noticed is that there is always a point in the story when you get to a monologue by one character that really captures the meaning of the whole story. I just wish DeLillo would write a bunch of those and put them out together, instead of writing an extra 100 pages to wrap around these little gems.

In Love-Lies-Bleeding, an old man (70s) is in a vegetative state after a stroke. His present wife (30s), ex-wife (50s), and son (30s) are all gathered to take care of him and contemplate euthanasia. I simply can't imagine this show actually being performed on a stage and not boring audiences to... well, death. Besides the lack of a real driving force in the plot, there are three acts, and probably around 15 total scenes, maybe more. Each scene is short and stilted, and while reading you can see that time has passed and maybe gather the meaning of the scene... on stage this seems like it would be far too distracting. And I know I wouldn't want to sit there through wooden deliveries of these stylistic lines.

Sometimes artistic creative work is really moving. And sometimes it's just self-indulgent and bland. I feel like this play is closer to the latter. There's a line in here where one of the stroke-victim's ex-wives remarks "I'm not sure how it works but men who don't know themselves have a power over others, those who try miserably to understand." I think Don DeLillo has a power over others for the same reason.