The Stick Wife by Darrah Cloud

First published: 1987

First produced: 1987, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Los Angeles

Type of plot: Social realism; symbolist

Time of work: 1963

Locale: Birmingham, Alabama

Principal Characters:

• Jessie Bliss, a middle-aged housewife
• Ed Bliss, her husband, a mechanic
• Marguerite Pullet, a housewife, younger than Jessie
• Tom Pullet, her husband, a truck driver
• Betty Conner, a middle-aged housewife
• Big Albert Conner, her husband, a mechanic

The Play

The Stick Wife is a two-act play set behind the Bliss home in Birmingham, Alabama, during the autumn of 1963. Clotheslines haphazardly crisscross the stage, which is littered with what Cloud terms “the junk of marriage.” Rusting upturned tubs substitute for patio furniture and a rifle box serves as the back step. Such a set is appropriate for the debris of human lives that fall under examination throughout the play. In act 1 the play interweaves the lives of three unemployed working-class white men and their wives as they respond to the news of the Birmingham church bombing, which killed four young black girls. In Cloud’s backyard perspective of historical events, the most unremarkable of characters become the key figures: housewives, who passively watch the unfolding events on television, and their husbands, members of the Ku Klux Klan, who clandestinely participate.

The title character and protagonist is Jessie Bliss, a housewife married to Ed Bliss, an out-of-work mechanic, who insists her place is in the home. While Ed roams the city on Klan business, Jessie remains in a backyard that is more prison than playground. “You always gonna be right where you are,” Ed insists when Jessie threatens to leave. His words prove eerily accurate when he returns, after a prolonged absence, to reunite with her in the same place. In his absence she reclaimed the yard as her refuge and her body as her own, but upon his return, both the land and, by extension, her personhood are instantly relinquished to him. Two additional stick wives and their controlling husbands complete the cast of characters. Shadows of light appear at intervals during the play to indicate moments of insight or haunting, but these ghosts are technologically produced, not enacted. Thoughts of her grown children, who fled the very home that she cannot leave, equally haunt Jessie.

Act 1 opens with Ed and Jessie engaged in a verbal battle. Jessie wants to know where Ed is going and when he will return, but her repetitive questions about space and time are deflected. Ed’s reticence drives Jessie to consider following her husband, an idea he prohibits. She cannot accompany him on his secret mission because, according to Ed, as a woman she cannot protect herself from attack, and he refuses to be her bodyguard. Jessie is commanded to keep quiet and stay put, while Ed is free to speak and to leave. In a monologue Jessie reveals her fantasy of having a former life in which she was a makeup artist to the Hollywood stars. Though this past is obviously a creation, Jessie’s confession that she has “dreams that don’t come from sleep” is followed by the appearance of the first ghostly shadow of light, signifying that her last admission is true. Echoing Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech given in Washington, D.C., Jessie’s unfulfilled desires link women’s rights and civil rights, a connection maintained throughout the play.

During Ed’s absence, Jessie is visited by her girlfriends, Marguerite Pullet, a cola addict, and Betty Conner, who numbs herself with stronger spirits. Unlike these other stick wives, Jessie does not imbibe: Her respite will not be found in a bottle, but in rebellion. While the women gossip at the clothesline, news of the bombing is revealed. “Who would be so hateful as to bomb a church?” asks Marguerite, while certitude of their husbands’ connections remains unvoiced. The last words spoken by Ed to his wife in act 1 are “You don’t know nothing.” Yet Jessie does know something, and it is knowledge that she will leak to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) once Ed, arrested on suspicion of committing the heinous act, is safely ensconced in a jail far from home. Big Albert Conner enters the Bliss backyard to warn Jessie to stay put and maintain her silence, announcing, “We gonna be watchin’ out for you,” implying that the Klan will fulfill the patriarchal role of watchdog in Ed’s absence.

As act 2 begins, Jessie has exchanged her tattered robe for a diaphanous nightgown, indicating her transformation from housewife to free spirit. She avoids entering the house, which neighbors fear hides FBI agents. Jessie denies this interpretation, offering instead the possibility of ghost dogs, whose whines she hears at night. Reminiscent of her own phantasms of desire in act 1, the ghosts have multiplied into the unfulfilled desires of white society in general, people who “stay too long at the all-white lunch counters.” Bright red dresses replace the white sheets on the lines that bisect the yard, emblems of her newfound sexuality and social activism. When she is caught masturbating against the clothesline pole by a shocked Marguerite, Jessie is ordered into the house and out of public view, but she stands her ground.

Exacerbating the local political turmoil caused by the bombing in act 1, act 2 brings the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The violence has spread from the city of Birmingham across the United States and to the national capital. The violence returns to Jessie’s backyard when Big Albert Conner and Tom Pullet, attired in Klan robes, come to silence her with a litany of punishments for independent women: Denied a job, she will starve; without the mechanical aptitude of her husband, she will be stranded; unprotected, she will be raped. Before the latter can happen, Marguerite and Betty intervene, hurling an accusation of their own at their husbands: “You cheatin’ on us?” The men’s anger is now directed at their own wives, who, inspired by Jessie’s independence, drive them off with the revelation that “Nobody understands you!” The three women establish their own matriarchy free of male dominance, but it is short-lived. Big Albert and Tom return bearing news of Ed’s imminent release. Jessie resumes her subservient role with ease, again asking a wandering Ed where he is going, but not before revealing “I know who you are.”

Dramatic Devices

The Stick Wife calls on both realist and Symbolist dramatic genres. Domestic concerns about the prescribed social roles of women and men are enacted beneath a cat’s cradle of clothesline, representative of divisions that separate and entangle wives and husbands, blacks and whites, poor and rich. The minimalist set is static with no location shifts and few props. The scene is always the Bliss backyard. While other characters enter and depart, Jessie remains onstage throughout both acts, a woman firmly rooted in place. The play employs special effects of light and sound to project the disembodied spirits of deferred dreams and unrealized lives central to the play’s main theme: the quest for self-realization.

The play relies on symbolism to convey the complex interrelationships of women and men confronting racial, class, and gender stereotypes. Symbolism is carried into the characters’ names. The ironic last name for Ed and Jessie Bliss is obvious in their joyless marriage. Marguerite Pullet acts as a pullet, or young hen: She is a coward, afraid to defy the berating and belittling Tom. A model of submission, she clucks around Jessie’s backyard until called home to roost by her husband. The Conners are self-conning artists. Numbed by alcohol, Betty endures being Big Albert’s diminutive possession. Big Albert’s nominal adjective enhances his stature as a man, but he is still a little man, unimportant, unemployed, and invisible. The men’s racial intolerance stems in part from their own working-class insecurities and sense of inferiority, as Ed reveals to Jessie before leaving to bomb the church: “You see me marchin’. . . through the rich people’s neighborhood, just to prove I’m equal as them? No you don’t. I admit myself. I accept what I am.” Ed’s self-loathing seeks release in a hate crime enacted against people he deems low on the social ladder.

Critical Context

Cloud first debuted her work on the American stage with The House Across the Street (pr. 1982). The success of her second produced play, The Stick Wife, secured for her a place among such notable feminist American playwrights as Marsha Norman, Megan Terry, and Beth Henley. Much of Cloud’s work for the stage and screen, whether original or adapted, focuses on the social concerns of women’s lives. Her plays are a product of and for feminist theater and its goals of providing insight into the lives of women otherwise unrecorded, its exposure of patriarchy through which women are subject to male dominance, and its mission of promoting gender rights.

Her plays in the 1970’s and 1980’s depict women’s struggles to gain autonomy within a culture of socially prescribed and oppressive roles, as well as their efforts to find and employ authentic voices to break the silence of sexual repression. Her works in the 1990’s and early twenty-first century, including her 1990 adaptation of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), depict strong, intelligent, self-emancipated women, who defy traditional stereotypes and succeed on their own merits and efforts. After writing The Stick Wife, Cloud focused on ongoing racial injustice in Honor Song for Crazy Horse (pr. 1993) and surviving physical and sexual abuse in The Sirens (pr. 1992), two issues originally confronted in The Stick Wife. Cloud continues to be on the cutting edge of social issue drama.

Sources for Further Study

Arkatov, Janice. “Cloud’s New Play: The Tough Life of a Klansman’s Wife.” Los Angeles Times, January, 14, 1987, p. 2.

Brown, Janet. Taking Center Stage: Feminism in Contemporary U.S. Drama. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Miles, Julia, ed. Playwriting Women: Seven Plays from the Women’s Project. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993.

Richards, David. “The Demons Next Door.” Washington Post, April 29, 1989, p. C1.