Word: dorothea
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While the play might qualify as tragicomedy, it is more closely related to "life's little ironies." The locale is St. Louis in the mid-'30s, though that means more in attitude than in geography. The plot is bare-bones simple. Dorothea (Shirley Knight) is a blonde schoolteacher who has read the handwriting on the blackboard. She is spooked by incipient spinsterhood. A recent brief liaison with the school principal, a flighty socialite named Ralph T. Ellis, has lodged the romantic hope in her mind that she is his intended. Bodey...
Miner), her best friend and a kind of Falstaffian mother-hen realist, knows better, partly because she has read the morning society news announcing Ellis' fiancee. It is not Dorothea...
Bodey hides the paper to spare Dorothea, but she cannot, of course, hide it from the audience- thereby spiking any hope of dramatic surprise. The second act brings in the bad-news girl, Dorothea's fellow teacher Helena. Helena (Charlotte Moore) is an antiseptic snob with faintly lesbian leanings who wants Dorothea to abandon her tacky flat and move in with her. Formerly tempted, Dorothea now refuses. The poignance of the situation is that these are women alone, who at best are merely pooling their losses...
...humor salvages their plight. Some of it is sheer vaudevillian antics - Dorothea doing body-wrenching calisthenics in her negligee, the half-deaf Bodey fidding with her hearing aid and trying to camouflage it with an outlandish flower, or Miss Gluck (Barbara Tarbuck), on whom coffee acts as an emetic, rushing to the bathroom to throw up. But more of the comedy springs from Williams' absurdist juxtapositions and mocking putdowns...
...Historians] manage to discuss the reform of insane asylums in the first half of the 19th century without mentioning Dorothea Dix, muckraking without mentioning Ida Tarbell, and the Montgomery bus boycott without mentioning Rosa Parks...