Age Enfreakment in Nursing Home Drama

Abstract

This essay explores how the concept of enfreakment can be used to analyze older adult characters in late 1970s US American theatre, focusing on D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game and Tennessee Williams’s This is the Peaceable Kingdom. These tragicomedies reflect societal fears and stigmas surrounding aging, linking back to the historical context of freak shows. Enfreakment intersects with themes of otherness and ableism, highlighting the sensationalism associated with freak culture. The social construction of P.T. Barnum’s freak and older adults as non-hybrids (Haim Hazan) shares common ground. Using a comparative approach and close reading, this research reveals that the fictional nursing home setting limits freedom and produces both repulsion and compassion through its residents, showcasing invective as a protocol of enfreakment.

1. Introduction

This study examines age enfreakment in two American plays of the late 1970s that tackle institutional care of the elderly: The Gin Game (1976) by D.L. Coburn and This is the Peaceable Kingdom or Good Luck, God (1978) by Tennessee Williams. The fictional representation of older adult characters can take grotesque and freakish forms, reflecting a common fear in the West of old age and aging. This fear, gerontophobia, is depicted in nursing home dramas of the 1970s, reflecting the legacy of 19th-century American freak shows. This decade marks the social challenges of increased longevity and aging, inextricably linked to the zeitgeist of uncertainty, anxiety, and rage. Thomas Bostelmann’s history of the 1970s shows the destabilization of hierarchies in this period, which led to improvements and regression in equality. The historian claims that for most Americans, “the 1960s” really happened in the 1970s (Borstelmann 2012, p. 3). The popular culture was marked with “nostalgia, pessimism, and escapism” (Hamilton 2006, p. xi), and in particular, “on large movie screens, films were often dark and gritty” (Bradford Edwards 2024, p. 64). Plays about nursing homes at this time also reflect the cultural pessimism seen in the media. I will demonstrate that enfreakment, an act of defining someone as abnormal, “the process of applying to someone “a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness” (Garland Thomson 1996, p. 10), in the selected plays builds upon the topos of the nursing home, the use of invective language and silence, and the theatrical script of a tragicomedy.

Complicated and conflictual perceptions of late adulthood in Western cultures are illustrated by Michel Foucault, who registers its in-betweenness mentioning retirement homes: “old age is a crisis, but it is also a deviation, since, in our society, where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation” (Foucault 1986, p. 25). Explaining discrimination against older adults, this argument is further developed by freak studies scholar James W. Cook, Jr., who explores discrimination against older adults through various perspectives, including a diachronic view of the 19th-century freak show. Additionally, in the context of social anthropology, Haim Hazan differentiates between the hybridity of the Third Age, which showcases mental and physical health in late adulthood, and the non-hybridity of the Fourth Age, marked by complete dependence and physical deterioration.

Initially linked to physical deviation, the concept of freakery expanded to include mental and psychological abnormalities. The cultural heritage of US freak shows, side shows, and dime museums, as well as the concept of enfreakment, is alive in other ongoing performative practices, such as art, cinema, and theatre. Enfreakment is the process of constructing or categorizing somebody as a “freak”, which shares common ground with othering or ableism. Fiona Campbell argues: “an ableist viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of “type”) is inherently negative and should the opportunity present itself, be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated” (Campbell 2009, p. 5). Because the Other is feared, oppressed, and to be erased, othering destabilizes and dehumanizes those social and cultural differences that the Other embodies (Saikia and Haines 2024, p. 4). Both othering and ableism discriminate and perpetuate stigma (non-normativity, e.g., disability), contributing to the marginalization of differences (Chemers 2008, p. 5). Michael M. Chemers argues that freak shows are not just a symptom of marginalization; they are a strategic means of managing stigma. Though often exploitative, they allow disabled individuals to control their stigmatization, highlighting disability as a form of social performance (Chemers 2008, p. 19). Likewise, enfreakment plays on “our basic insecurities, the sort of primordial fears” (Fiedler 1978, p. 34). In the context of photography of disabled people, David Hevey considers disability, “the symbol of enfreakment or the surrealism of all society”, to be the source of human fear (Hevey 2006, p. 376). Hevey addresses the problematic representation of disabled people in charity advertising and broader photographic contexts, highlighting how such imagery perpetuates oppressive stereotypes (Hevey 2006, p. 432). Although disabled individuals are largely absent from mainstream photographic representation, the author seeks to explore how they are occasionally included, often as symbols of “otherness” without genuine engagement or integration into society (Hevey 2006, p. 433). This lack of authentic representation highlights a critical distinction: enfreakment differs from othering or ableism in the use and practical application of fear. Rosemarie Garland Thomson specifies: “Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize” (Garland Thomson 1996, p. 10). Therefore, sensationalism is a powerful legacy of the freak show, a second crucial feature that distinguishes enfreakment from other discriminatory forms.

It is essential to analyze the elements of enfreakment in drama texts because this medium combines textual features and visuality, leading to a sensational effect. While Leslie Fiedler, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, and Robert Bogdan developed a fundamental theoretical background of the process of enfreakment, Michael M. Chemers studied stigma onstage in the history of the American freak show. Supporting the prior scholarship, Chemers focuses on the theatricality used by enfreakment, in which non-normativity is enhanced and deliberately exaggerated for entertainment. Moreover, its transgressive nature enables (along with burlesque theatre) the violation of such taboo topics as “monsters, sex, degeneration, violence, and madness” in the prudent Victorian era (Chemers 2008, p. 69). This number of taboos can be complemented by ripe old age, which in the 19th century epitomized “the frightening character of the aging body in a culture where control of that body forms the lynchpin of secular morality and its mortification is the condition of salvation” (Cole 1992, p. 88). The famous case of Joice Heth, “the alleged 161-year-old woman who was displayed before the public as George Washington’s nursemaid, in June of 1835” (Fretz 1996, p. 102) championed the freakery of age alongside other human oddities of the time. In his study of the narrative of decline in drama and theatrical productions, Michael Mangan cites Heth’s story as an example of the controversial fascination with old age, which exists “somewhere between attraction and repulsion” (Mangan 2013, p. 241). This controversy is particularly intense in the practice of enfreakment (one of the components of which is performance) and its connection with performativity. For example, in his definition of the tragicomedy (the genre variety of the selected dramas), John Orr argues: “If it is reflexive in its use of play and performance as human ‘theatricality’, it is equally stark in its use of shock effects which resist rational psychology or sociological continuity, which defy life-as-usual to provoke us into questioning our concept of the normal” (Orr 1991, p. 5). Because the biological aspects of age are constructed, age functions both as a performance and a performative (Lipscomb and Marshall 2010, pp. 1–2). In her 2016 book, Valerie Lipscomb continues to explore the cultural construction of age as performance in the theatre, using the example of a subgenre of memory plays. Relying on performativity as one of the staples in age studies (Swinnen and Port 2012), Lipscomb takes into account the life continuity of the characters in the examined plays, focusing not only on late adulthood. In the context of performativity, the theatre scholar examines the connection between physical aging and self-perception, questioning how aging influences our identity. The author suggests that the essence of life goes beyond physical changes and that theatrical depictions of an unchanging body express a longing for immortality. In her assumption that “the public gathering of theatre, the commitment to come together as a group to attend to the same ideas at the same time, makes it an appealing forum for exposing and fighting ageism” (Lipscomb 2016, p. 154), the scholar establishes relationship between freakery, one of the subtle manifestations of ageism, and performance as well as age performativity.

In the wake of Robert Bogdan and his understanding of freakery as “the enactment of a tradition, the performance of a stylized presentation” (Bogdan 1988, p. 13), Jessica Williams studies freakery as a performative identity socially constructed through its exhibition reflecting “hegemonic values and ideologies” in contemporary versions of a freak show (J. L. Williams 2017, p. 4). It is the public display that produces freakery via enfreakment. Similar to ableism and othering, enfreakment, by highlighting the dichotomy between abnormal and normal, generating ostracization and shame, can lead to trauma. In this respect, enfreakment is akin to what Mark Seltzer understands as a “wound culture”, i.e., “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 1997, p. 3). Often understood in medical terms as worn, deteriorated, and ruined, “aged” can be easily substituted with the notion of “wounded.” Seltzer argues, “In wound culture, the very notion of sociality is bound to the excitations of the torn and opened body, the torn and exposed individual, as public spectacle” (Seltzer 1997, p. 4), which is indicative of the freak show sensationalism.

A similar dichotomy is pertinent to the negotiations of age politics. A cutting-edge photographer of her time, Diane Arbus reflected deviancy not only visually but also verbally: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats” (Arbus [1972] 2022, p. 3)1. Heavily criticizing Arbus’s art, David Hevey argues that “the enfreakment of disabled people in these new practices became the symbol of the alienation of humanity which these new photographers were trying to record” (Hevey 2006, p. 441). Like photography, staging that incorporates elements of freakery compels the audience to perceive what is typically concealed, inviting them to reevaluate the perspectives regarding disability and the associated stigma (Chemers 2008, p. 5). The link between trauma and freakery leads to an assumption of enfreakment in the representations of late adulthood in the nursing home plays by Donald Coburn and Tennessee Williams.

Despite inevitable social changes within a century, the culture of freak shows stays alive. After the turbulent 1960s, the “amusement and profit” policy changed: late-night US talk shows featured individuals often labeled as “freaks”, including those with disabilities and various medical conditions (Brottman and Brottman 1996, p. 94). These shows often treated guests with sensitivity, posing sympathetic questions to acknowledge their struggles while promoting a fashionable “serious” presentation (Brottman and Brottman 1996, p. 95). In contrast, the nursing home plays of the mid-1970s and their reception remain somewhat ambiguous.

2. On Tragicomedy and Enfreakment

The common denominator of the selected dramas is the fictional topos of the nursing home involving what Mangan defines as “the separation between the inmates’ former selves and their institutional selves” (Mangan 2013, p. 206). The theatre scholar argues that, although there is no parallel with institutions such as prisons or concentration camps, in public opinion, care homes for the elderly “do share some of the structural characteristics of the total institution” (Mangan 2013, p. 207). In his reading of the older adults’ nursing home in the modern drama, Mangan analyses the theme of this topos as a site of oppression and resistance, the binary indicative of the enfreakment. Joyce Weil and David Lefkowitz further apply this thematic analysis to the age representations of older adults in the theatre space, where resilience and self-reflexivity combat the trope of frailty, which can be enfreaked in institutional care (Weil and Lefkowitz 2019). Despite the changes in the societal attitude towards the old age and its institutions in the 20th century, “the legacies of the poor house and the hospital persist, creating panicked views of the nursing home as a dreaded fate for people who may benefit from new living quarters in late life” (Chivers and Kriebernegg 2018, p. 17).

The Gin Game has two main characters—Weller Martin, an older man of 70–75, and Fonsia Dorsey, an older woman of 65–70. The action unfolds in the Bentley Nursing Home, where both have been placed, as it turns out later, not by their own will. Another character is the nursing home itself, labeled by Weller “a Goddamn slum” (Coburn 1977, p. 65). Donald Coburn refutes the stereotypical idea that older adults in such homes feel better because they are surrounded by peers with whom they can share their interests and fears. In Weller and Fonsia’s remarks, institutional care appears rather bleak, and contact with its other residents is more traumatizing than helpful in adapting to the realities of the Third Age. However, Fonsia and Weller hit it off and enjoy each other’s company. As they play a card game of gin and Fonsia keeps winning, their characters evolve. The two intelligent and reserved people no longer appear as victims of circumstances who voluntarily entered the nursing home to avoid being a burden to their children, who work hard and live far away, but as stubborn loners who are afraid to take responsibility for the mistakes they have made in their lives and therefore hide behind the fact that they are “unlucky”. Both Weller and Fonsia can finally open up to someone and confess their fears. However, in the end, the protagonists use it all to hurt each other. Both characters, brought to this home by poverty and loneliness, sink deeper and deeper into anger and fear, consumed by pessimistic thoughts, which eventually lead to psychological decline.

The action of This is the Peaceable Kingdom takes place in a rundown nursing home located in one of the dreariest sections of Queens, New York City (T. Williams 1981, p. 333). The helplessness of the home patients is evident because there is no medical staff in the institution, as the nurses go on strike2. Patients do not receive medicines and are not fed. A television crew visits the institutional care facility only to film the Fourth Agers, whom their caregivers have abandoned—nobody helps them. The exception is Mrs. Shapiro, an ancient Jewish woman looked after by her son and daughter in their young old age. Anti-Semitism and religious intolerance in the play showcase that only Jewish families still preserve the tradition of caring about elderly parents, even though they become a burden. In this gloomy realm of the Fourth Age, where patients no longer live but live out their time, there is a ray of hope in the relationship between the wheelchair users Lucretia and Ralston; their relationship is the only thing that can save them from oppressive alienation and despair.

A comparative approach is applied to the two dramas in the study of the uncertainty of the decade through the lens of the invectives and silence of their characters as one mode of enfreakment. The study of the tragicomedy and the mention of the staging of the selected nursing home dramas shed light on the legacy of the freak show’s sensationalism. Finally, close reading serves as a primary methodological tool for detecting the process of construing fictional older adults as freaks, thereby interpreting the phenomenon of age enfreakment in nursing home drama. Thus, in her existentialist, Sartrean perspective on late adulthood, E. Ann Kaplan asserts that as a path to death, growing old can be seen as a traumatic experience of humankind: “The trauma of aging consists in being in time and unable to get out of it. One irrevocably must age; one must deal with the ravages of the aging body; and one must confront the fact that death is inevitable” (Kaplan 1999, p. 173). From the sociological stance, the ordeal of old age includes more chronic illnesses and more loss of significant others (George 2005, p. 294). These factors constitute dramatic conflict in the selected plays. Patrick Duggan suggests that theatricality and performance are uniquely suited to dialogue about and even depict trauma (Duggan 2012, p. 8). Particularly, the characters in a tragicomedy are often traumatized individuals engaging in unusual behaviors and participating in unfamiliar games; therefore, “tragicomedy uncomfortably confronts us with our fragile sense of normality” (Orr 1991, p. 8). Duggan claims that “trauma-tragic theatre is not only concerned with illustrating the destructive nature of a traumatic past that is not properly witnessed, but also that it can address the gap between the impossibility of articulating trauma and the necessity of doing so” (Duggan 2012, p. 10). Coburn and Williams, in writing tragicomedies, use gallows humor to depict the trauma of old age. Selected dramas depict the traumatic experience of old age, revealing blatant ageism along with comedic conventions that exemplify the heritage of freak shows, distinguishing enfreakment from ableism and othering. To support my arguments in the following analysis, I will refer to James Cook Jr.’s study of the non-descript3 individual of the 19th-century freak show and Haim Hazan’s anthropological findings on the Third and Fourth Age, demonstrating the freakery of the latter based on his interviews with nursing home residents.

3. Results

3.1. Topos of the Nursing Home

In his dehumanizing series of exhibitions, “What is It?” (1860), a freak show entrepreneur P.T. Barnum presented to New York audiences an African-American as a nondescript, “neither “man” nor “monkey”, a creature demonstrating characteristics of “animal” as well as “human”, “civilized” as well as “brutish” (Cook 1996, p. 140). Analyzing the exhibition in the political and social context of the époque, James Cook detects in Barnum’s “disturbingly cruel enterprise” the ambiguity and fluidity of the middle-class New Yorkers whose negotiation with the freakery reflected their own controversial and transgressive identity (Cook 1996, p. 149). The stage title “What is It?” belongs to the dark-skinned man, allegedly from the African jungles, who transforms from a savage into a civilized person in New York, “the world’s first quasi-man” (Cook 1996, p. 151). Naturally, his role was performed by different actors in different years (Cook 2001, pp. 126–29)4.

James Cook examines the racial implications of “What is It?” and the politics of nondescription as “a remarkably flexible ideological tool” (Cook 2001, p. 152) and an instrument of discrimination applicable to other forms of marginalization, particularly ageism. For instance, in Barnum’s exhibition, “It” is compared not only with an animal but also with the elderly (Cook 2001, p. 152). The scholar claims that Barnum managed to devise a new kind of caricature, non-describable, that avoided discussions of the racial hierarchy, intolerant in mid-19th-century America. Thus, the experimental conclusion by Haim Hazan regarding nonhybrids as the representatives of the Fourth Age is relevant.

Haim Hazan treats late adulthood as a social construct, a collection of symbols, narratives, interpretations, and indicators (Hazan 2015, p. 49). Thus, the social construction of a freak and an older adult has common ground. The scholar places “freaks, monsters, and other humanly challenged beings” in one row (Hazan 2015, pp. 66–67), implying that among the latter are older adults. To study extreme old age, Hazan develops the trope of non-hybridity. Non-hybrids are “aging bodies […] at a point in which they become non-marketable objects and hence commercially (and socially) invisible or masked” (Hazan 2015, p. 5). Although non-hybrids “transgress social space and personal time” (Hazan 2015, p. 46), they are ostracized due to their lack of bodily control and close connection with dying. Gradually, the “young” old (or Third Agers) may start losing control, becoming uncivilized, and unable to negotiate: “… residents of an old-age home blatantly delegitimize the more incapacitated by assigning to them feral-animal images, hence consigning that category to the realm of savagery” (Hazan 2015, p. 68). If the older adults in the Third-Age phase still occupy the cultural space, the Fourth Agers live only in the present.

In The Gin Game, Weller Martin, a male protagonist in his seventies (representative of the Third Age), considers his nursing home “a warehouse for the intellectually and emotionally dead. Nothing more than a place to store them until their bodies quit” (Coburn 1977, p. 44). Weller shares his anxiety about non-hybrid residents with his game partner and the only friend in the home, Fonsia Dorsey:

“I don’t see how you stand it in here. The same damn empty look face after face. You ought to see them on the days they change the bed linens […] All lined up in their wheelchairs, up and down the halls—like the rows of wrinkled pumpkin heads”.

(Coburn 1977, pp. 46–47)

Weller’s line contains the apprehension of his own not-so-distant future. Weil and Lefkowitz argue that in this way the protagonist “pushes back against the fear of becoming just the type of zombie he rails against” (Weil and Lefkowitz 2019, p. 653). In the comparison of the older residents with the traditional Halloween symbol, Weller’s invective cue is disparaging (dolt; blockhead) and horrible (a terribly-grinning lantern on All Saints’ Eve). Another of Weller’s epithets describing the Fourth Agers, “glassy-eyed old bastards” (Coburn 1977, p. 44), renders the institutional care residents not only indifferent but also alien5.

The US American sociologists and gerontologists demonstrated in the diachronic perspective that an individual’s likelihood of residing in a nursing home depended on factors such as poverty, among others (Kart and Beckham 1976, p. 901; Weissert et al. 1990). The residents in both dramas are at home due to unfavorable financial circumstances. In The Gin Game, the protagonists (there are only two acting characters, Weller and Fonsia, in the play) spent a fortune on their hospital bills, which left them without means for independent existence: Weller confesses to Fonsia, “I was placed here. Placed! By some lowly, brainless bastard at the welfare department” (Coburn 1977, p. 61). Likewise, the latter reveals that she is also on welfare even though her middle-aged son lives in the same town but never even visits his mother in the nursing home (Coburn 1977, p. 64). They have not spoken for five years because of his desire to find his father. Fonsia even disinherited her son by signing over her only property, a small house, to the Presbyterian Church. She is placed in the home because of poverty, although she tries hard to hide it from Weller.

If The Gin Game brings the “young” old characters into the limelight, then This is the Peaceable Kingdom develops rich interaction between the Third and Fourth age brackets. In his unusually naturalistic drama, Tennessee Williams recreates a day from the 1978 nursing home strike week, filling the premise with the oldest of the old patients, “confined to wheelchairs” (T. Williams 1981, p. 333). The plotline of the drama revolves around the visit of “young” old children of Mrs. Shapiro, who is a Jewish-American patient in a vegetative condition in palliative care. The sexagenarians Bernice and Saul manifest opposite responses to their mother’s predicament. While the daughter sympathizes and does her best to alleviate Mrs. Shapiro’s suffering, the son is repelled by his mother’s non-hybrid nature. His lines carry pity and terror: “I can’t bear to watch it!” (T. Williams 1981, p. 333); “It’s better that Mama should go” (T. Williams 1981, p. 337); “Mama’s gone past understanding and I am grateful for that” (T. Williams 1981, p. 343); “Look at Mama, drooling, no teeth in her mouth, deaf, blind, reduced to a vegetable…” (T. Williams 1981, p. 344); “Oh, God, Mama, you have gotten so-ugly! It is killing us, Mama” (T. Williams 1981, p. 352). Bernice and Saul’s contrasting reactions to Mrs. Shapiro’s condition align with Brian Rosenberg’s (1996, p. 306) assertion about “the hidden qualities in normals to which freaks give perceptible form”. In this context, “freaks” can be replaced with “non-hybrids” without changing the essential meaning. Mrs. Shapiro unintentionally reveals Saul’s fear of aging. Age invokes fear through its fluidity, “the dehumanized institutionalized environment” or the nursing home (Mangan 2013, p. 205), and “the failure of battling” the imminent end (Hazan 2015, p. 54). The origins of the fear of age and ageing are synonymous with those of death, represented by the gothic culture of the undead (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2004, p. 148). Linda and Michael Hutcheon detected a shift in Western civilization from the end of the 18th century, where death is treated as a personal rather than a collective experience. The interest of popular culture in the uncanny, which can encompass freaks and the elderly alike, creates “anxiety about borderline states that has not disappeared, even in our postmodern, boundary-crossing world” (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2004, p. 149). Saul’s fear of old age is exacerbated by the uncertainty of the decade. Rage was one of the responses of the Americans to this emotional state: “Simmering anger pervaded many American lives in the 1970s” (Borstelmann 2012, p. 10). As anger fueled activism, the 1970s emerged as a pivotal period where many began to rally against systemic injustices, seeking justice and dignity in a changing world.

Similar to “the formalized spaces of shows, museums, fairs, and circuses” (Garland Thomson 1996, p. 7) and other social facilities, institutional care space allows people to observe others in a supervised way, “controlled voyeurism” (Hazan 2015, p. 81), where people can safely look at others, at unknowable and unsettling. Yet, this setup reinforces a strong barrier, limiting interaction and communication between those who observe and those who are observed (Hazan 2015, p. 81). For example, in This is the Peaceable Kingdom, the Strange Voice (“as if from outer space”, T. Williams 1981, p. 338) randomly repeating the play’s eponymous title is a propaganda loudspeaker connecting the Queens nursing home with other topoi of limited freedom6.

The Fourth Age, culturally constructed, is enfreaked because of the loss of agency. Institutionalized care in the USA witnessed “suffering a multiplicity of breakdowns including physical and mental functioning, social support, mental disorders, and financial resources” by its residents as the findings of the comparative study of 1977 and 1985 (Weissert et al. 1990). Baltes and Smith warn of the risk of psychological mortality among the oldest old, which subverts such key aspects of the human being as “intentionality, personal identity and psychological control over one’s future” along with “the chance to live and die with dignity” (Baltes and Smith 2003, p. 133). The empirical gerontological findings inferring that “Living longer seems to be a major risk factor for human dignity” (Baltes and Smith 2003, p. 128) are illustrated by the nursing home topos in both dramas.

In This is the Peaceable Kingdom, a parallel plotline revolves around a pair of WASP octogenarians, Lucretia and Ralston, juxtaposed with Mrs. Shapiro. No one visits them; they can rely only on each other during the strike. Down-to-earth Lucretia talks about the absurdity of life in ripe old age with the physical decline: “The control of the bladder and bowels, when you lose that control, Mr. Ralston, that is the point where decent existence is ended and indecent existence begins” (T. Williams 1981, p. 335). Having outlived all her relatives, the female patient objects to survival, which became a metaphor for American society in the mid-1970s (Borstelmann 2012, p. 9). Michael Hooper argues that Lucretia’s “longevity has proved a curse” (Hooper 2012). Her arc manifests an opposite of non-hybridity through Lucretia’s realistic lens (she shouts that non-hybrids care about nothing but “dark falling” (T. Williams 1981, p. 345)), refusal of political correctness (her utterances abound with anti-Semitism), and self-destructive expression (the octogenarian knocks her head hard against the wall as a response to a violent behavior of the home’s residents). Lucretia says, “Want to die, priest, priest, confession and last rites of […] I wanted to knock my brains out, I wanted to knock my brains on that wall but don’t have the strength to…” (T. Williams 1981, pp. 357, 359). Despite the tendency toward the theatre of the absurd in his late style, Tennessee Williams remains true to his early-period poetics in “the veiling of prosaic things with a theatrical vision of beauty and sadness” (Parker 1987, p. xi). The sufferings of the older female character are met and enveloped by her friend in misfortune, Ralston, who, though barely able to help himself, nevertheless solaces Lucretia:

LUCRETIA: You’re just an old man in a nursin’ home in a wheelchair.

RALSTON: This is just a disguise. I am God, disguised to protect yuh.

(T. Williams 1981, p. 361)

Himself a wheelchair user, Ralston tries to wheel Lucretia back to their ward slowly. The final lines of the drama belong to Lucretia, who accepts his help and anoints Ralston “Mr. God” (T. Williams 1981, p. 365). Unlike the unresolved conflict between the Third Agers, Fonsia and Weller, in The Gin Game, the Fourth Agers, Lucretia and Ralston, in This is the Peaceable Kingdom, seem to overcome their fears. Their vulnerabilities become agency and activity, promising “a site of empowerment” (Masschelein et al. 2021, p. 3). As we have witnessed above, the nursing home topos propels enfreakment in several ways, including the enclosed space limiting freedom, the non-hybridity or non-description of a resident as producing repulsion and sympathy simultaneously.

3.2. Invective and Silence

Both dramas abound in invectivity as well as rage. The dramatic conflict in The Gin Game lies in Weller’s inability to win a gin game and establish a relationship with Fonsia. A novice in the gin game, Fonsia always wins (except once, when she deliberately loses a game that Weller cannot accept). Weller becomes enraged by the unfolding events because he cannot win on his own, not even once. Despite Huizinga’s argument that card games “never succeed in eliminating chance completely” (Huizinga 1992, p. 198), the male protagonist’s inability to utilize this chance enrages him, transforming the comedy into tragedy. The dramatic conflict is unresolved, leaving the play’s finale open-ended. The dialogue between the characters reveals the anxiety and uncertainty of the 1970s, which was partly caused by the increased longevity and the uncharted territory of the Third (and Fourth) Age for Americans. More expressive language, a legacy of the counterculture, spread further into the mainstream (Borstelmann 2012, p. 162), which theatre reflected immediately.

Thus, invectivity communicates the rage of the main characters. In The Gin Game, it evolves from good-natured utterances (e.g., “WELLER: I have one of the most advanced cases of old age in the history of medical science. The mortality rate’s incredible” p. 11; or “WELLER: Does the food around here give you diarrhea?” p. 20) to unhidden aggression (“WELLER: You shut your fucking mouth!” p. 69; “WELLER: I would’ve knocked your damned teeth in” p. 70). Weller’s hate speech also borders on physical violence when he hits the furniture (Coburn 1977, pp. 39, 71–72).

On the one hand, Weller’s self-reflexivity of the age freakery is manifested through his invective rhetoric. The male character highlights the disadvantages of the homes. Himself a part of this rhetoric, Weller uses the first-person plural, “we” after a storm of mutual altercations: “I guess we just lived too long, Fonsia” (Coburn 1977, p. 64).

On the other hand, the male protagonist’s abusive speech builds the enfreakment poetics of the dramatic text. Weller expresses his anger through verbal insults and curses aimed at the home staff and residents, as well as through physical acts, such as raising his middle finger (Coburn 1977, p. 25). His uncontrolled behavior, ostensibly a form of domestic violence, is also evident in nonverbal actions, such as “sweeping the cards wildly into the air” and “turning the entire table over” (Coburn 1977, p. 39) after regularly losing a game. It is known that older adults can “violate the expectations of proper patient behavior” (Harris 2005, p. 4); yet “one study found that aggressive patients were four times as likely to be abused than were passive patients” (Harris 2005, p. 4). Weller’s injured masculinity is exacerbated by his constant loss in the card game. As “one of the cardinal features of much Western European play is that it often involves competition” (Hall 1980, p. 52), this is indicative of Weller, who, in contrast to Fonsia, does not enjoy the game but instead takes it as a business7.

The Gin Game’s climax, marked by the male protagonist’s violence, subsides into a denouement with Weller’s “horrible cry to the sky.” After this howl, he seems to cease to exist as a distinct personality (Coburn 1977, p. 72). The playwright’s use of the feral animal metaphor adds freakery to the unsettling and uncivilized behavior of the older adult. Fonsia, less emotional and more fortunate in the gin game, follows Weller’s model of behavior without acquiring freakish characteristics; however, she becomes prone to curses and obscene vocabulary, defending herself from Weller’s attacks that proves that “defamation and vilification can also serve individuals in the struggle for social positions, as well as create a sense of cohesion for the group as a whole” (Ellerbrock et al. 2021, p. 14).

This argument correlates with the characters’ dynamic in This is the Peaceable Kingdom, which showcases invective communication between the Third and Fourth Agers. In the staging remark preceding the action, the author warns that the play features bizarre or gallows humor and advises staging it “in a manner to avoid giving any ethnic offense” (T. Williams 1981, p. 333). However, the play was revived only in 2022 as a puppet show. The characters’ politically incorrect humor may hinder the drama’s staging: in the words of the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, This is the Peaceable Kingdom is “a play that no one else would dare to do” (Read 2022).

Hazan explains the cultural dominance of pejorative language about late adulthood (“disengagement”, “disintegration”, “invisibility”, “rolelessness”) as stemming from the absence of “conceptual substance in the attempt to recognize old age” (Hazan 2015, p. 58). In both dramas, old age is recognized in the rhetoric of decline. In Williams’s interpretation, the invective is revealed through the metaphor of a peaceable kingdom that fails, as well as in non-verbal resilience and silence. Performed in the primitive style, the eponymous painting by Edward Hicks serves as an intertext of drama. Based on Isaiah 11: 6–9, the allegorical Peaceable Kingdom series (c. 1820–1849) consists of 62 painted versions. Hicks painted the wolf, the lamb, the leopard, the kid, the calf, the lion and so on, in which destructive animals (worldliness) are quieted by the nurturing animals and the child (innocence) (Tatham 1981, p. 44). The allegory reveals an allusion to the “beastly qualities” of mankind’s animal nature (Tatham 1981, p. 43). However, biblical intertext of Hicks’s utopian series is pessimistically reinterpreted by Tennessee Williams: if the home administration and visitors, including middle-aged children, embody the predators, the helpless residents stand for prey. The power relations between the two groups are unequal. Mentioned only through the reiterations of the Voice-Over, the peaceable kingdom could have been analyzed as an ekphrasis in the play. Still, Williams envisioned it as a grotesque and apocalyptic picture lacking peace. His older adult characters fight for survival, literally and metaphorically. The expressions “wheelchair bound” or “confined to a wheelchair” are ascribed with passivity concerning wheelchair users (Linton 2006, p. 169); however, Tennessee Williams not only crowds his drama with disabled characters in wheelchairs but also empowers some of them with unexpected activity. Like Weller, who is direct about the physiology of late adulthood, Lucretia talks straight about soiling the bed or wetting the wheelchair (T. Williams 1981, pp. 335, 360). The female older adult verbally abuses other characters, e.g., African Americans enjoying smutty jokes “Blacks talkin’ so dirty” (T. Williams 1981, p. 341) or Jewish-Americans feeding their mother (T. Williams 1981, p. 347). From their side, the characters mentioned add to the drama’s invective texture, manifesting verbal aggression that develops into physical violence:

[A black inmate, the First Black Man heard offstage earlier wheels himself rapidly into view.]

FIRST BLACK MAN: Fuckya negotiations, we want food! […]

[The First Black Man, onstage, wheels his chair with amazing force into the Supervisor’s back, knocking him over].

(T. Williams 1981, pp. 352–53)

Another form of resistance, employed by both dramatists, is silence. Similar to Leslie Fiedler, who considers that “the silence of freaks is translated into an iconic-verbal form as fixed and conventional as a Byzantine mosaic” (T. Williams 1981, p. 282), Haim Hazan employs the metaphor of silence enveloping the Fourth Age. At the same time, Hazan regards silencing as a “social denial” (Hazan 2015, p. 79). Negation is one of the basic psychological defenses in negotiating reality. In the selected dramas, those representing the Fourth Age, such as Mrs. Shapiro and the unnamed mute residents in the Bentley nursing home referred to by Weller, are silent characters whose agency is primarily manifested through pantomime. The inability of cultural negotiation of both non-hybrid characters produces a depressive effect on other characters. It mirrors mainstream anxiety about the close connection of the Fourth Age with death. Hazan concludes his analysis with the appeal to decode “a refusal of speech, which must be seized upon to say something of the unspoken” (Hazan 2015, p. 87).

Weller’s rage in The Gin Game and the (non)verbal resilience of the minor characters in This is the Peaceable Kingdom are complemented by the indiscernible sounds of Mrs. Shapiro attempting to speak in Yiddish (T. Williams 1981, pp. 335, 338–40, 345, 349–50). Following the appeal of Haim Hazan, I argue that along with her uncontrolled enfreaked movements, seemingly meaningless (“the ancient mother makes greedy sound, mouth open”, “still opening and shutting her mouth, her head lolling this way and that”, “gulping sounds” pp. 349, 351–52), the Fourth Ager resists the repulsion of her son.

In both plays, the invectivity of Weller, Fonsia, Lucretia, and African American characters is born from the conflictual circumstances and is accompanied by strong emotional responses, including rage, despair, and violence, to the loss of power, which includes physical decline. The invective utterances “resignify insult as empowerment” (Kanzler 2021, p. 29), forming resilience among the vulnerable actors. As long as they demonstrate resilience, they are no longer susceptible to vulnerability. Thus, invectivity provokes and escalates existing conflicts and operates in the same vein as enfreakment, which uses fabrication for its sensationalism aims.

3.3. Enfreakment’s Sensationalism of Tragicomedy

Michael Mangan argues that tragedy is closely connected to old age because the genre tackles existential issues, particularly in light of the years that have passed (Mangan 2013, p. 59). Meanwhile, comedy, which evolved from political satire saturated with obscenities and criticism directed at individuals rather than their opinions, generalizes and stereotypes family and/or social oddities, for example, the misbehavior of an older adult whom the recipient disapproves (Mangan 2013, p. 80). Functioning as an oxymoron, tragicomedy became a popular genre in post-World War II drama, coinciding with the rapid aging of the global population. Defining tragicomedy as a “short, frail, explosive, and bewildering” drama that balances comedy against tragedy in the “coexistence of amusement and pity, terror and laughter” (Orr 1991, p. 1), John Orr describes the characters of the tragicomedy as “nobody in an unknowable world” wielding neither power nor other resources (Orr 1991, p. 2). In applying comedic and serious perspectives to the drama script, the authors of the tragicomedy examine accompanying circumstances typical not only of rare individuals who manage to survive to late adulthood but also of a significant number of the Western aging population. A comedic layer of the genre is responsible for the construction of freakery. At the peak of the freak shows’ popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the drama scholar and playwright Gustav Freytag mentions droll freaks as an element of comedy, alongside “political satire and humorous portraiture” (Freytag [1894] 1900, p. 57)8. Introducing the genre of the spectacle play as the dramatic variety of his time, Freytag envisions the tragicomedy. The principles of building the characters in both subgenres seem similar. In the spectacle play, the rising action sets up character motivations that lead to a gentler resolution of conflicts in the denouement. This structure conveniently manifests the protagonist’s determination in developing the plotline (Freytag [1894] 1900, pp. 113–14). However, in the tragicomedy, the resolution of dramatic conflicts is open-ended. Another common feature of the two subgenres is the use of sensationalism. Highlighting buffoonery, opera, and comedy on stage, Freytag infers that “All is sought which can please, the newest, the most singular; and, again, what affords the great multitude most pleasure, thrusts all else aside” (Freytag [1894] 1900, pp. 342–43).

In modern reflections on cultural products in the framework of pessimism, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman single out the universal tendency of post(meta)modern distrust to penetrate different genres and media, “… rebelling against expectation and form, and emerging unexpectedly—during laughter, after catharsis, beneath an optimistic veneer …” (Packer and Stoneman 2018, p. 20). The scholars question the blend of tragic and comic elements. If grave and comedic elements strike a balance, comedy can alleviate the weight of tragedy, offering relief through humor, whereas tragedy, paradoxically, can still evoke a sense of hope and reassurance (Packer and Stoneman 2018, p. 21). A new articulation of the comedic elements in tragicomedy reveals aspects of non-normativity, continuing, along with the hype, the traditions of enfreakment. Creating novel cultural forms with pragmatic goals evokes sensationalism, which has become an established practice in entertainment.

The Gin Game enjoyed great popularity. After its Broadway premiere in 1977, the play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded to Donald Coburn in 1978. Based on the play, a film was produced by RKO/Nederlander in 1981, followed by a TV adaptation in 2003. In addition, the play has undergone numerous theatrical revivals, both domestically and internationally, in the 21st century. I single out two non-verbal elements pertaining to the sensationalist aspect of Coburn’s tragicomedy: the attire of the protagonists and the melodramatic use of the storm, lightning, thunder, rain, and a choir singing a hymn at the climax of The Gin Game.

The former element is emphasized grotesquely at the protagonists’ first meeting. Weller wears an old bathrobe on his pajama top, and Fonsia is dressed in an old housecoat (Coburn 1977, pp. 9–10). Though these wardrobe elements are meant for privacy and signify home, they marginalize older adults, enhancing ageist stereotyping of the aging identity in the first act of the tragicomedy. It should be noted that in the subsequent meetings, the characters are dressed more formally, and the unfolding of events takes a more serious turn.

The latter element echoes the finale of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear; however, The Gin Game offers an open-ended ending, with Weller leaving the stage and Fonsia rocking back and forth in the glider. With its unresolved interpersonal conflict, Coburn’s drama still holds out hope for its protagonists: life continues, and it can take unexpected turns.

In contrast with The Gin Game, This is the Peaceable Kingdom was closed shortly after its premiere in 1978, yet it received its unexpected revival in a puppet theatre production in 2022. However, this theatrical solution, creating its own hype, correlates with the freaky nature of this dramatic piece. Detecting the origins of puppet shows in medieval London’s cultural life, Paul Semonin considers them to be “the ‘drolls,’ short comic performances, often featuring dwarfs, trained animals, and persons with natural anomalies” (Semonin 1996, p. 77). For example, one such enterprise, “Bartholomew Fair was a theatrical extravaganza in which the monsters were normal, and their extraordinary form became part of a spectacle of the unnatural, the grotesque, and the lewd” (Semonin 1996, p. 77). At the sideshows, puppets, wild animals, and freaks were exhibited equally (Smithfield Market 2006). Thus, the medium of puppetry enhances the deeply unsettling ageism, showcasing the practice of enfreakment in Williams’s drama. Additionally, Mrs. Shapiro’s character assumes the features of a puppet in the finale of This Is the Peaceable Kingdom. In the following excerpt of the play, the Fourth Ager is already dead, and her children try desperately to make their mother’s still body decent:

[<…> Bernice has unconsciously arranged the scarf with a rather coquettish bow on top of her <dead> mother’s head.] <…>

SAUL [noticing the bow on his mother’s head]: My God, that scarf, you got a Baby Snook’s bow on her head?!

BERNICE [weeping louder]: Mama’s jaws were open, her mouth was hanging wide open with no teeth!

SAUL: Untie it! A low comic’s bow tie!

[A journalist’s camera flashes in the corridor. Saul shouts furiously and starts a pace or two toward the journalist. He then turns and shields his dead mother’s chair from a second camera flash, reaching behind him to snatch off the scarf].

(T. Williams 1981, p. 364)

This mise-en-scène, with Mrs. Shapiro’s unintentionally coquettish bow, produces freakery. Saul’s response invokes the set’s enfreakment. Although there are even fewer comedic elements in the gallows humor drama This is the Peaceable Kingdom than in The Gin Game, this production attempts to reveal the possibility of hope for the spectatorship (Repertoire 2022).

4. Discussion

Significant changes in American healthcare and society during the 1960s and 70s made The Gin Game and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom particularly pertinent. This period saw the establishment of Medicare and Social Security, along with the creation of nursing homes and convalescent facilities for the elderly. Both plays engage with these societal shifts. In the late 1970s, particularly in New York, where This Is the Peaceable Kingdom takes place, there was considerable anxiety regarding escalating crime rates and racial tensions, which are reflected in Tennessee Williams’ portrayal of the unnamed African-American residents in the nursing home. Limited by two nursing home dramas by Donald Coburn and Tennessee Williams, the examination of the practices of enfreakment in the theatrical script demonstrates the supervised spatiality of assisted living, typical of the freak show, with invective, silence, and sensationalism as an enfreakment protocol. Further exploration of enfreakment in drama representing institutional care would entail a close reading of two plays: Tina Howe’s Chasing Manet (2011) and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Ripcord (2015). Written forty years after the late 1970s, the nursing home comedies by Howe and Lindsay-Abaire manifest a changed dynamic of enfreakment in US American theatrical practice. Though the nursing home comedies of the 21st century abound in invectivity, the Fourth Agers demonstrate their agency beyond the confines of institutional care. The significant transformations are that the topos of the home is no longer enclosed, and silence is no longer emphasized. Sensationalism unfolds either in the escape from the home (Chasing Manet) or in the adventures of the Fourth Agers outside the home’s walls (Ripcord).

In the second half of the 20th century, ageist stereotypes continued to influence the representation of old age as freakish, providing elements of tragedy and entertainment in The Gin Game and This is the Peaceable Kingdom. The late 1970s marked a transitional stage in the history of age studies in drama, echoing the legacy of the freak show and the fear of aging in the characters of Saul, Lucretia, and Weller. The characters’ rage appears to be connected to the anxieties of the 1970s. The freak show’s limited space is reinterpreted in the drama, acquiring additional connotations of imprisonment, far from the harmonious and secure assisted living that is often associated with ripe old age. The aged characters prefer to enfreak others instead of facing the challenges of their own late adulthood. The close reading of Coburn and Williams’s plays reveals the enfreakment heritage and the significant role of the stereotypical imagery in them. The dynamics of treating the Fourth Age have changed in the 21st century, emphasizing the agency of older adult characters and reducing the tragic component of the theatrical script.