ABSTRACT

In Eugene O’Neills Long Days Journey into Night, the foghorn blows and we can smell the salt air off the coast of New London, Connecticut; at the same time, the fog shrouds the characters in their ghostlike lives. In all of Tennessee Williams’s plays, the Southern heat clings to the sheets and wearies the characters trying to fight their way to love. The Bakersfield, California, of Sam Shephard’s plays is as arid in landscape as the characters that populate them. Like the local earth itself, the characters’ efforts to make a living have left them depleted and angry, tearing at one another. In John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, the New York life of glamour, celebrity and reinvention, is only possible in this city that has spawned such a culture. Location is all.