The Performance of Heartbreak: An Epilogue

The Performance of Heartbreak: An Epilogue begins in familiar territory for Scott Caan: a writer, Jimmy (Daniel Irmas), struggles with relationship issues and turns to his best friend Giovanni (the always delightful Joe Pease) for help. Caan’s writers are often tortured and tormented men, but in Heartbreak, a finger is finally put on the pulse of that despair: capitalism.  

The play opens with Jimmy flipping a coin, a decision weighing on his mind. Giovanni patiently waits his friend out as he rambles about trips to Paris, babies and the aggravation of his live-in girlfriend taking over “his” space. 

            Jimmy: Having a woman move in with you is like the worst deal in the history of

                         bad deals. Think about it. She gets a new house, new furniture, new place to put 

                         all  her shit, and what do you get in return? Love? Support? Occasional affection. 

                         But what the fuck? She’s still getting all that shit too. Nothing’s changed, except 

                         mine becomes ours, and I just became we. For what? I mean, I was just having 

                         sex with you, regularly, for free, and now I’m paying for it.”

            Giovanni: Someone has to be the Masculine and someone has to be the

                             Feminine. I mean, everyone plays a part. You move in, she moves in. 

                             Someone wears pants…Generally the one wearing those very pants wakes up 

                             every morning and puts money in them.”

The very language Jimmy and Giovanni use to seek an understanding of cohabiting with a romantic partner is infused with patriarchal capitalist constructs.  The negotiation of two human beings merging their individual lives is overshadowed by fiduciary concerns. Someone wears the pants in the family, someone has financial responsibility, and that someone is male. The man provides (Masculine = active) and the woman takes (Feminine = passive).  And thus it becomes clear how desperately patriarchy relies on capitalism to maintain its power.

What’s fascinating to note is that while Caan never mentions marriage, which in its historical tradition outright treated women as property, even the act of cohabitation between Jimmy and his girlfriend replicates that patriarchal structure. And an equal relationship turns into an unequal one.  By moving from her house to Jimmy’s, where everything has been bought and paid for by him, she no longer carries the burden of financial need, but that doesn’t mean she stops “owing.” She pays her debt with her body. And sex that was once “free” becomes a business transaction, turning her into the very definition of a prostitute. (That a wife “owed” her husband sex was in large part why spousal rape wasn’t considered a crime until the mid 1970’s and didn’t become law in all 50 states until 1993.).  What does she get in return for all this? Status with her female friends, Giovanni guesses. Talk about a bad deal…

It might be easy to dismiss both Jimmy and Giovanni as unrepentant Neanderthals at this point, but it would also be a mistake. We are all born into a cultural history, born into traditions and values that lurk beneath the surface in our psyches even when we no longer believe they’re the truth. Masculinity, we are taught, has more value than femininity. And while femininity can gain value when infused with masculinity, masculinity is devalued when infused with femininity. It’s the patriarchal playbook. And though Caan’s work doesn’t touch on race, capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy go hand in hand. 

Ultimately, though Jimmy and Giovanni maintain the binary construct of Masculine and Feminine throughout their discussion, they also boil people’s behavior down to individual choice, and women can choose the “masculine” behavior just as men can choose the “feminine.” Essentially it comes down to what feels right to each individual person, no judgment. It’s progress, and as come to find out, Jimmy’s churlishness about sharing his things doesn’t so much stem from selfishness as it does from that very pressure to be the “provider.” To make enough money to provide all the things and the trips to Paris and babies…because Jimmy wants to quit his soul-sucking job, writing for a popular television show.

            Jimmy: “These people. This machine. They don’t have hearts. There’s no pulse. 

                          They don’t give a shit about feelings…It’s actually a prerequisite. I know this 

                          sounds crazy, but I’m pretty sure, in order to be an executive at one of these 

                          big television networks, you have to take a class on how to ignore compassion.”

No matter whether your business is producing television or selling coffee pots, when profit is given a higher value than people, people simply become things, cogs in a machine that have no value as human beings.  And when art is reduced to a profit making business, it’s only imperative is to make what sells. And it has a vested interest in selling the values of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy, in upholding the system that made it profitable to begin with.

And here is the crux of Jimmy’s despair. He has become one of those cogs. Even worse, he’s become complicit. 

            Jimmy: “It’s all our problems now because we signed up. We said ‘okay, I’ll play along, 

                          but just for a bit. I’ll feel it out.’ We didn’t know that once you settle in, it’s hard 

                          to come back… Money. We move for it. We break for it. We sell our original 

                          dreams for it. We take the blueprints we set up, and turn ‘em into something else 

                          to fit the way. We trade our heroes for homes and speedboats that don’t work 

                          anyway and we teach our kids that creativity and passion’s for someone else. Or 

                          that it just plain ain’t. Period. That’s the performance. That’s the heartbreak. Life."                           

The system breaks for no one. And this is why I see this as one of Caan’s darkest plays, because despite Jimmy’s romanticizing of the starving artist, the hard reality is, no money, no food, no roof over your head, no survival. The purpose of life has been reduced to making enough money to live. And the truth of the matter is, the poorer you are, the harder you work.  Throw in centuries of sexual and racial oppression that barred women and people of color from educational systems and equal opportunities and fair pay. Throw in the historical truth that this country’s economy was built upon the backs of African slaves.  And now toss in the all too common eagerness to blame immigrants, women, black people, brown people, Irish people, and on and on and on for your own despair. And the system keeps rolling, its power undiminished.

We are all trapped in this machine. It’s why civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King began to see that their fight, our fight, wasn’t just with the system of white supremacy, or patriarchy, it was with capitalism itself, which gave white supremacist and patriarchal oppression a place to flourish. 

And yet, in art there is still hope. Art not bound to financial gain. Art written with the express purpose of pushing against the darkness in search of a way out.  Art that gives representation to women, to people of color, and to alternative forms of masculinity that aren’t toxic to everything around them. 

Jimmy and Giovanni see the theater as the stage for that hope. But theater is also a business, and even if one isn’t interested in making a huge profit, one has to at least make enough to keep the lights on. So unless the theater is privately funded, productions that made money would need to be given some kind of priority to keep the seats filled.

But that would be quite the dream, wouldn’t it? A theater as a philanthropic project dedicated to producing work that is resistant, representative, and revolutionary. Someone, make it happen, please. 

I can’t help but think that in addition to art, Caan offers us one other glimmer of hope. That Jimmy was on to something when he finally realized that what his girlfriend gives him (in exchange for a couch) is patience. Because isn’t patience one of the most important things we can give each other, and ourselves? Compassion is intrinsic in patience, as is connection. Patience gives us the breath we need to keep listening, to try again, to not give up on other people, on ourselves, and even on change. Most of us live with some form of privilege, most of us, at some point, are going to screw up as we wend our way through issues of sexism, racism, sexual orientations and gender identities, and class. When we do, we can only hope there’s someone in our lives patient enough to take the time to explain it to us.  In this sense patience is an act of resistance. It’s not passively waiting for something to happen. Rather, it’s the deliberate act of giving another person a chance to grow. And that finally might lead to a little progress, instead of perpetually spinning around in circles.