Miracle Play

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates, in her long and prolific career, has been nothing if not well-rounded. If there is a genre in which to write, she has written in it, and usually very well. She has turned her attention to drama a number of times over the years, producing a slow, but steady, stream of interesting plays. Miracle Play, from 1974, is one of them.

Miracle Play takes place in an unnamed American city (though one suspects Detroit was on her mind, as it often was in the early seventies). It opens with Titus, a drug dealer, confronting his girlfriend Beatie over a missing stash of heroin worth approximately five hundred dollars. Beatie denies knowledge of its existence, and is beaten for her efforts. The begins a round of escalating violence between Titus' and Beatie's family, and ends in Titus on trial for the murder of Beatie's brother Earl.

Rather uncharacteristically for Oates, all of the actual violence, except for a bit in the first scene, is kept offstage; things fade to black just as the action gets heavy. It's effectively suggested, though, and we are always made aware of its aftereffects. (One assumes this is because of the problems there would be staging some of the mentioned acts without the use of special effects that would be very difficult, and costly, to produce live onstage.) This has the effect of forcing us to look even more closely at Oates' characters and their motivations, since we don't have the bread and circuses around to distract us. As always, she comes through with flying colors. Despite the fact that we get to know very few of these characters with anything approaching intimacy-- we simply don't have the time-- they are well-drawn, and their motives are clear, when they're supposed to be. The figures sometimes range dangerously close to stereotype, especially in the case of the idealistic young defense attorney representing Titus, but never quite step over the line.

I've read a good portion of Oates' output over the years, though I can't claim to have read all, or even most, of it. In all that time, I have yet to run across a work by Joyce Carol Oates that isn't worth reading. Miracle Play is yet another tick in the success column. Recommended.