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​Orphans.

​By Lyle Kessler
 
Produced by The Public Theatre
March, 2004
 
AN AUDIENCE GUIDE
by Martin Andrucki
Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater
Bates College

​The Public Theatre and Professor Martin Andrucki own all rights to this Study Guide.
THE PLAYWRIGHT. ​
At the time he wrote Orphans in the early 1980s, Lyle Kessler was an established actor, dramatist, and screenwriter.  His other plays include The Watering Place, produced on Broadway, and Possession, staged off-Broadway.  His screenplays include Touched and Gladiator—the latter a film about boxing, not Roman swordsmen. 
 
He studied acting with Lee Strasberg, famous as one of America’s premier exponents of the so-called “method”—a style of performance that emphasizes deep psychological identification between the actor and the character.
 
He was also artistic director of The Imagination Workshop, a theater group in which actors, working with psychiatric patients, create and stage original dramatic events.
 
Kessler’s work with these patients and with Strasberg relates directly to Orphans, a play that explores the psychological complexities of family relationships and the nature of violent, often pathological, emotions.
THE SETTING.
The action takes place in “an old row house” in North Philadelphia.  In Act One the cluttered and dingy rooms are filled with old, worn furniture, torn curtains, and a tangle of domestic litter.  It is a place whose physical decay suggests an underlying spiritual disorder.  At the beginning of Act Two, however, “The house has changed.  It has been cleaned up.  There is more color, new drapes, rugs, plants, pictures, a liquor cart . . . [a] new couch. . .”
 
This alteration in the physical setting reflects a transformation in the characters and in their relationships to one another.  The set looks different, because the action of the first act has caused a dramatic change of situation.  A new character has been brought into the household, and he has generated a sense of energy and purpose that seems to revitalize his surroundings. 
 
Also, we now understand why the playwright places this row house in North Philadelphia, a transitional neighborhood between the city’s thriving downtown and its crime-ridden ghetto. This in-between location underlines the play’s focus on characters who are poised on the border between one identity and another, thus demonstrating how the setting of a drama helps to clarify its action.
THE PLOT.
As the play begins, Phillip, a young man in his late teens or early twenties, is sitting in semi-darkness looking out the window.  Something he sees prompts him to rush around the room, hiding books and newspapers, shutting off the t.v., and stashing a lady’s red, high-heeled shoe under a sofa cushion. (We later learn that he thinks this shoe belonged to his mother.)  He then runs off, heading upstairs.  A moment later Treat enters through the door from the street, out of breath and apparently worried that he has been followed. 
 
Somewhat older than Phillip, Treat is evidently the figure whose appearance prompted the younger man’s flurry of concealment and hasty exit.  As soon as he is satisfied that no one is after him, Treat turns the lights up, and begins emptying his pockets of jewelry while calling out to Phillip: “I imagine you’re hiding from your big brother. . . .  Come on out . . . I ain’t in the mood for no hide-and-seek game.”
 
We learn that these two young men are brothers, that Treat seems have some kind of authority over Phillip, and that the two engage in various kinds of game-playing—an impression confirmed by the first exchange between them:
PHILIP.  Don’t tag me.
TREAT. I ain’t gonna tag you.
PHILIP. ‘Cause I’m sick and tired of being it, Treat.
Their lives seem to be governed by childish rituals in which Treat is the dominant partner.  As their dialogue continues—with Treat playing the aggressor, and Phillip constantly on the defensive—we learn various facts about their lives together in this down-at-heels row-house.  Phillip, it seems, frequently hides from his big brother in a closet filled with their mother’s clothing; he also seems to spend all of his time inside the house, gazing out the window or watching television.  He seems to be unable to read; and he eats nothing but canned tuna and mayonnaise, a diet approved by his brother. 
 
Treat, on the other hand, spends his days out in the city robbing people—hence the pocketful of jewelry he dumps on the table upon entering.  He seems to enjoy tormenting his brother, threatening to sell their mother’s clothing in spite of Phillip’s anguished objections.  And most strangely, he seems outraged when he finds newspapers with underlined words— evidence that his brother is teaching himself to read.  Treat, we begin to realize, wants Phillip to be illiterate, wants him to be helpless and dependent, perpetually “it” in the game of life they play in this dingy house.
 
Treat is so furious at Phillip’s attempt at “getting an education” that the younger brother has to appease his elder by making the absurd claim that the words in the newspaper were underlined by an intruder, an Errol Flynn lookalike now hiding upstairs.  In another example of the game-playing that rules their lives, Treat accepts Phillip’s fantastic explanation, hands his brother a knife, and orders him to kill the culprit. 
 
A terrified Phillip dutifully agrees, takes the knife, climbs the stairs, and proceeds to commit an offstage imaginary murder.  He returns from the “stabbing” with a bleeding hand, wounded in his phantom struggle with the intruder.  Always eager to cow his brother, Treat warns Phillip his wound might become infected, causing him to lose his arm.  As the first scene ends, a triumphant and menacing Treat is standing with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, as Phillip walks slowly and obediently towards him: “Come here Phillip,” Treat commands, “Let me help you.  Let your big brother . . . take care of you.”  The lights go to black on this tableau of cruelty masquerading as care.
 
Eventually we learn that these two young men, the “orphans” of the play’s title, have been living by themselves in this row house for years.  First their father abandoned the family; then their mother died; then Treat expelled Philadelphia’s social services bureaucracy:
TREAT. And then when they came for you . . .  who stood in the door blocking the way.  Do you remember?
PHILLIP. I remember!
TREAT. You were crying.  You hid in the closet.
PHILIP. Yes!
TREAT. They tried to come in, but I stopped them.  I bit the man’s hand.  I was only a little boy, but I bit his hand. . . . They never bothered you again.
It was at that moment that Treat established himself as his brother’s protector and master, as head of this bizarre household. 
 
He has maintained this superiority by terrorizing Phillip into total physical and emotional submission.  Besides keeping him illiterate, he virtually imprisons Phillip by convincing him that he would die of suffocation from Philadelphia’s toxic air should he ever venture out of doors.
 
In light of this, we see the importance to Phillip of the mother’s clothing in the closet and the red shoe: these are the only tangible links he has with someone other than Treat, with a world outside the house, with a real parent.  As such, they are sacred objects, or, as in the case of the shoe, objects of disputed sanctity.  Is the shoe mother’s or not?  If so, what does the flashy footwear tell us about her?  If not, what is it doing in the house?
 
The second scene introduces a new character to this already volatile mix: Harold, a drunken “middle-aged man wearing an expensive suit and carrying a briefcase.”  Treat returns to the house with Harold in tow at the end of a night-time foray into center city—a sort of prize catch bagged by an urban game hunter.  In his drunken state, Harold  talks obsessively about the Dead End kids, reminisces about his days in an orphanage, and sings “The Prisoner’s Song,” an old tune whose last verse is, “Now if I had the wings of an angel,/ Over these prison walls I would fly,/I’d fly to the arms of my poor darling/ And there I’d be willing to die.”
 
What ties these drunken obsessions together is nostalgia for bygone cultural landmarks and the older pieties and softer sentiments they recall. 
 
The Dead End Kids were a group of young actors who first appeared on Broadway in the early 1930s in the play, Dead End, by Sidney Kingsley.  The young performers played tough but good-hearted slum kids who met the challenges of New York’s mean streets with pluck and humor.  The play was adapted for the screen in 1937, with many of the same young actors playing the same roles.  As one commentator has written,                  “The film spawned a popular phenomenon that stretched over two decades, with the actors portraying the characters as victims of society in a series of films with both original and new actors.”  The Dead End Kits morphed into the Bowery Boys, and then the East Side Kids, milking their early success until the mid ‘50s, when many of them were well into middle age. 
 
The song Harold sings repeatedly—a sentimental ballad filled with love and longing—was written some time before 1920, and became a seminal influence on American popular music.  One historian of popular culture has written, “the influence of ‘The Prisoner's Song’ cannot be minimized. Recorded by Vernon Dalhart in 1924, it became Victor's best-selling pre-electric recording, boosted the sales of records in a declining market, and firmly established Dalhart's reputation as a hillbilly singer. It still is being recorded and, to some extent, imitated today....”
 
With their scenes of innocent poverty and ethnic pathos, Harold’s memories of the orphanage where he says he was reared suggest a grotesque Chaplin film.  He recalls that the orphanage kitchen was run by a “big son-of-a-bitching German” who “took a liking to me . . . filled my plate with meat and potatoes.”  Meanwhile, the other unfortunates were “coughing up blood” and “dropping dead all the time.”
 
Old movies, old songs, old verities are the themes of Harold’s drunken rambling.  Eventually he passes out, and immediately Treat rifles his briefcase and finds a fortune in stocks and bonds.  Realizing he has hit the jackpot of his criminal career, Treat orders Phillip to help him tie Harold to a chair.  Phillip is reluctant because he finds that Harold has a “friendly face,” a hint at a conflict between the brothers over their captive that will develop more fully later in the play. 
 
Eventually they bind and gag their captive, but another face-off occurs when Treat finds the red high-heeled lady’s shoe that Phillip had earlier concealed.  “Maybe it was mom’s,” Phillip says.  “Maybe it’s been there all these years.”  Treat vehemently rejects this idea, saying, “Mom never would have worn a shoe like this.”  Why not, we wonder.  What does the flashy footwear suggest to Treat?  Or, more importantly, what actual memories does it arouse of a mother he would rather forget?  He accuses Phillip of acquiring the shoe from a woman he invited in off the street for a sexual tryst, making clear that the shoe for him is alive with erotic associations.  Finally, he throws the shoe out the window.  The second scene ends like the first with Treat asserting his mastery, a position now augmented by his kidnapping of Harold.
 
Scene three opens with Harold trussed up in the chair and Phillip standing guard. Treat, we later learn, is downtown, making inquiries about their captive.  Eventually, Harold manages to work free of his gag, and begins to ply Phillip with talk.  Far from being distressed or angry about his situation, Harold seems a model of cheerful assurance.  Learning that Phillip doesn’t know how to tie his shoes, he promises to buy the young man a pair of loafers, indeed a whole new wardrobe.  But most importantly, he offers Phillip encouragement.  Freeing himself Houdini-like from his bonds, he hugs the young man, and promises that he will “never leave” him.  Suddenly, it seems, Phillip has found a new father.
 
When Harold spots the red shoe, which Phillip has retrieved from the lawn, his response is arresting:
HAROLD. Looks familiar.  I know a woman who wore shoes like that.  She was an acrobat, female contortionist, actually . . . the positions that woman would find herself in!  Boggles the imagination. . . .  This was a Chicago woman, she was about so high, had light blonde hair, aquiline nose, blue eyes . . . sound familiar? . . . Who’s it sound like?
PHILIP.  My mother.
Is it possible that Harold did in fact know Phillip’s mother?  That she was a contortionist?  That one of the positions she “found herself in” was with Harold—and on intimate terms?  Does all this mean that the prodigal father has finally returned, bringing a fat wallet, promises of future wealth, hugs of encouragement, and memories of mom?
 
If so, then Treat will find himself abruptly dislodged from his position as lord and master of the row house, a threat he senses immediately upon his return from his downtown errand.  Harold has liberated himself from the rope and gag, wooed Phillip, and taken himself upstairs to shave with Treat’s razor. “The guy’s taking over,” Treat says, clearly in no mood to accept such a coup.
 
When a shaven Harold descends, Treat immediately begins challenging the usurper. But Harold responds with the same kind of benign assurance he displayed while tied to the chair.  “You’re a Dead End Kid,” he tells Treat, “and that’s why I’m going to give you everything I have . . . I mean that, son. . . .”  Treat is outraged by Harold’s easy self-confidence, and especially by his paternal tone.  He savagely refuses all offers of gifts, opportunity, or emotional succor, and pulls a knife on Harold, ordering him to empty his pockets.  But Harold remains unperturbed, promising both brothers fat weekly salaries, big bonuses, and women galore.  Phillip is clearly being seduced, which drives Treat into a homicidal rage.  “I’m gonna cut this fu**er’s heart out!,” he declares, advancing on Harold with his knife.  But Harold, ever the magician, pulls a gun out of a hidden pocket, turning the tables on Treat.  “Drop that knife . . . little Dead End Kid. . . .  I’m going to train you! . . . I’m going to make you my very own.”  Sidestepping Treat’s  murderous lunge, Harold knocks him unconscious with the butt of his pistol.  As Act One ends, we see a victorious Harold with his arm around Phillip, and with Treat lying helpless at his feet—a classic dramatic reversal.
 
At the beginning of Act Two, the lights go up on a transformed environment.  “The house has changed.  It has been cleaned up.  There is more color, new drapes, rugs, plants, pictures. . . .”  The inhabitants, too, have been spruced up.  Phillip is wearing a “new pair of trousers, a shirt, and a handsome sleeveless sweater.”  And his first act upon entering is to untie the big red ribbon on a gaudy box which, he finds, contains a bright yellow pair of loafers—Harold’s promised boon.  Treat then enters, wearing a “stylish French suit.  He is almost unrecognizable, moving smoothly and confidently.”  Meanwhile, their benefactor is offstage singing his favorite song about angelic transcendence and escape.  Life has become bright, rich, and scented with freedom.  And Treat, it seems, has fallen under Harold’s spell.
 
Despite all the improvements, however, Treat is dissatisfied.  He wants Harold to give him more responsibility, but Harold is wary of Treat’s volatile emotions, especially his hair-trigger temper and his inclination to self-indulgent violence.  And so he refuses.  Meanwhile, Phillip, declaring in favor of Harold’s corned-beef and against Treat’s tuna and mayo, makes it clear that he is transferring his allegiance from brother to interloper.  As the lights dim, Phillip is feasting with Harold, while Treat is thoughtfully “fingering the bottle of mayonnaise.”  Trouble is clearly brewing.
 
The second scene takes place a few days later.  As it begins, Phillip, advancing in worldliness, is eating a bowl of bouillabaisse as Harold lectures him on the mysteries of the cosmos.   At the end of the meal, Harold proposes a walk in the night air—in direct defiance of Treat’s prohibitions against the outdoors—and provides Phillip with a map of the city to help him find his way freely around the mysterious outside world.  As Phillip rejoices at finding his street on the map, Treat enters, flushed with a sense of success at completing the mission assigned him by Harold—collecting a fortune in stocks and bonds. 
 
But as Harold quizzes him, we see that Treat has blundered in serious ways.  Instead of taking a taxi, he has taken a public bus, thus allowing himself to be followed by Harold’s unnamed enemies from Chicago.  And while on the bus, he deliberately picked a fight with an obnoxious passenger, thus courting violence and disaster. 
 
When Harold tries to teach Treat a lesson in self-control by forcing him to re-enact the encounter non-violently, Treat is so overcome by the force of his unexpressed rage that he “stops and begins flailing at himself, moving around the room.  He falls to the floor, unconscious.”  Harold, calling him a “poor little Dead End Kid” tries to soothe him with an encouraging hug, but Treat, regaining his senses, pulls away angrily.  “I’m not your son,” he declares, “I don’t need you!  . . . Stay away!  Don’t come near me!  Don’t touch me!”  As the scene ends, he breaks away and “runs out into the night.”
 
As the third scene begins, an hour has passed.  Treat is still missing, but Harold has decided it’s time for Phillip to take his first walk in the city.  Putting a 1930s style newsboy cap on Phillip’s head, Harold transforms him into a Dead End Kid and leads him out into the street.  A moment later, Treat returns, finds Phillip missing, and is seized with anxiety.  He grabs one of his mother’s old coats and clutches it to himself.  As the scene ends he is waiting in the dark and softly calling out his brother’s name.
 
Scene four begins two hours later.  Treat is sitting where we left him, still clutching the coat.  Phillip returns from his walk with a bunch of flowers, exhilarated at learning he is not mortally allergic to the outdoors.  Harold, however, has disappeared during their stroll. 
 
Treat immediately tries to reassert his damaged authority.  He declares that Harold must leave, and he begins hectoring Phillip about the Errol Flynn figure from Act One.  When Phillip resists this return to the old regime, Treat grabs his city map and tears it in pieces.  But Phillip still refuses to back down.  He begins packing a bag, evidently ready to leave home and strike out on his own.  But just as he is about to cross the threshold, Harold returns, grievously wounded by his mysterious enemies who, we assume, have tracked him down because Treat’s earlier incompetence has blown his cover.  In effect, Treat has exposed Harold to mortal danger.
 
The wounded man babbles about returning to Chicago, and about the orphanage where he was raised, recalling the time his fellow-orphan, Fred, stole the keys from the German guard.  With the doors unlocked, the children poured out into the city: “orphans everywhere, hundreds of orphans running through the streets.”  Having recalled this vision of liberation, he offers again to give Treat a hug of encouragement, and again Treat refuses.  “You’re a Dead End Kid,” Harold says, “I know a . . . Dead End Kid when I see one.”   And with these words he dies.
 
Once again alone in the world, the two orphans are stunned.  Phillip grabs Harold’s hand and weeps, while Treat, having resisted Harold while he was alive, now collapses in an effusion of grief.  “NO!  NO!  NO! NO! . . . DON’T LEAVE ME!  DON’T LEAVE ME, HAROLD.”  He crawls to the body and embraces it while Phillip enfolds his older brother in a comforting hug.  As the curtain falls, “TREAT sobs like a baby in PHILLIP’S . . . arms.  PHILLIP cradles him.” ​
​THE CHARACTERS.
PHILLIP has been cast by Treat in the role of helpless younger brother in the drama of their lives.  He must play this part in order to enable Treat to enact his role, that of dominant, all-knowing, and all-protecting elder.  Unfortunately for Phillip, Treat cannot permit any deviation from the script in his head, which means that Phillip can never be allowed to change.  He must remain forever the little tyke Treat saved from the bureaucrats when he bit the social worker’s hand.  Thus, Phillip can not be permitted to learn to read, or to go outdoors, or to choose his own diet.  And he cannot form any attachments not sanctioned by Treat.  In fact, Treat demands a degree of subordination  far beyond that of younger to elder brother: Treat in effect wants to be the father to an infantile Phillip.  Which means that Phillip can not be permitted to embrace any other parent—not their dead mother, whose red shoe must be discarded, and certainly not Harold, who represents an overwhelming threat to Treat’s authority.
 
For Phillip, of course, this is an insufferably stifling situation.  To be human is to pursue growth and change.  And so Phillip walks an anxious line between his brother’s paralyzing demands for stasis, and his own innate need for development.  If he rejects the former, he faces Treat’s rage and rejection; if the latter, he faces his own spiritual erasure.
 
Thus, Harold’s arrival offers a kind of salvation for Phillip.  Harold represents an alternative father, one who offers affection, encouragement, and liberation as opposed to the hostility, derision, and enslavement imposed by Treat.  Phillip instantly succumbs to Harold’s allure, saying almost immediately on seeing him, “I like his face. . . .  He’s got a friendly face.”  And as the play goes on, Phillip becomes more and more attached to this “friendly face,” and, as a result, increasingly “empowered” in the ways of life.  He begins to change, to grow, to become independent, so that, by the end of the play, it is he who, father-like, is cradling a weeping Treat in his arms.  Thanks to Harold, he has undergone a complete reversal.
 
TREAT’S character received its indelible stamp at the moment he bit the intruding social worker on the hand and discovered the power of violence.  Through this savage act, he made himself into the head of the house and the protector of his little brother—in effect replacing his absconded father.  He has lived by rashness and violence ever since, robbing people on the street, and if necessary, cutting them to get his way.   He carries the same ferocity into the house, abusing his brother verbally, ordering Phillip to stab an imaginary interloper (and later boasting he has cut his hands off) and pulling a knife on Harold.  As the latter says, “You’re violent. . . . I admire violent men, men who’ll stop at nothing. No limit men!”
 
But though Treat has lots of brutal energy at his disposal, he is handicapped by a lack of discipline.  While praising him for his violence, Harold also faults him for being “an amateur, a rank amateur. . . . you’re a wild animal!”  Unchallenged in his superiority over Phillip, he has never learned to control himself, to put rational restraints on his ferocity, and it is Harold who undertakes to correct these failings.  “I’m going to train you,” the older man says, “I’m going to tame you, Treat.”
 
As everyone knows, wild animals are difficult, often impossible, to govern.  Treat at first resists Harold with open contempt and force.  Then when Harold bests him in a physical confrontation, Treat’s resistance becomes more indirect.  He accepts an assignment, but disobeys Harold’s instructions for carrying it out.  As a result he nearly has a disastrous public fight on a bus and, almost certainly, exposes Harold to his Chicago enemies.  In the end, he openly revolts against Harold’s fatherly ministrations, struggling desperately to reassert his authority over Phillip.  But when Harold finally dies, Treat is devastated.  “I AM A DEAD END KID, HAROLD!” he cries out to Harold’s lifeless body.  He is now ready to be a son, but tragically his father, a victim of Treat’s willful disobedience, has once again left him.
 
HAROLD arrives drunk, and during his first scene on stage he seems like an easy mark for the predatory Treat.  He seems not to realize that he has been kidnapped, and instead sings his song of escape and talks happily about the orphanage and the Dead End Kids.  But all that changes the next morning.  Harold morphs from drunken victim to Houdini-like wizard, capable of controlling everything and everyone around him.  From this point on—until the very end of the play—he seems invulnerable and utterly self-confident.  He is the father as experienced by a child of five or six:  omnipotent, omniscient, magical, even godlike.
 
And like a father-god, he sees into the souls of his children.  Phillip he conquers immediately, offering him what his soul hungers for: escape, growth, autonomy.  Significantly, he provides Phillip with a pair of loafers: laceless, easy to use, made for walking—the leather vehicles of his liberation.  His other gifts play variations on the theme of freedom, especially the map of the city which allows Phillip to know where is and where he can go.
 
Godlike, too, is his insight into Treat’s heart.  There he sees unruly darkness, violence in need of taming, promise in need of nurture.  Indeed, he sees what Treat is blind to: the angry young man’s secret yearning for a father.  And so he persists: teaching, admonishing, forgiving; always offering the encouraging hug, always rejected.  Of course the paradox of Harold as deity is that what he tries to teach Treat are the criminal arts.  He is a divine seducer. (A word that raises disturbing sexual possibilities.  After all, Treat picks Harold up in a bar and brings him home.  We don’t usually think of such hookups as filial.)
 
But he is a sentimental seducer.  At least twice he promises the boys that he will “never leave” them.  Is this because he actually is the father who abandoned them long ago, and wants to expiate his sin?  Or is he just looking for commitment?  He also sees the boys as Dead End Kids: avatars of old-fashioned urban toughness and virtue, angels with dirty faces, scrappy lads with sassy tongues and hearts of gold.  Harold’s infatuation with memories of the orphanage, with characters from old movies, with cornball songs of the ‘20s stands in sharp contrast to his primary identity as a hard-headed member of the criminal underworld.  It may be that this contradiction kills him.  Had he never taken the orphans under his sentimental wing, the bad guys from Chicago would never have tracked him down.  This gangster identity is his prison, and if only he had the wings of an angel, he would have flown over its walls. But perhaps he should have paid closer heed to the song’s lyrics, which predict the outcome of his attempted escape: “I'd fly to the arms of my poor darling,/And there I'd be willing to die.”
THEMES. ​
Western history, literature, and myth are filled with stories similar to the plot of Orphans, stories in which pseudo-fathers take rambunctious young men in hand and attempt to tame them and teach them wisdom.  Think of Aristotle tutoring Alexander in ancient Macedon; of Merlin and Arthur in medieval Britain;  Falstaff and Prince Hal in the pubs of London; Jim and Huck on the Mississippi Raft; or even Obi-Wan-Kenobe and Luke Skywalker in a world far, far away.  There is something enduringly appealing in these tales of a promising—and often fatherless—young man achieving maturity through the guidance of an uncannily gifted elder.
 
One of the most poignant of these stories is the tale of Hercules and Chiron, which resembles Orphans in some striking ways.  As a boy, Hercules, the hero-to-be, was essentially fatherless, since Zeus, who begot him with a mortal woman, soon absconded to Olympus.
 
As a result the boy Hercules was entrusted to the wise centaur, Chiron, for his education.  Unlike most centaurs—creatures half horse, and half human—Chiron was not a violent drunk.  On the contrary, his reputation as a teacher was so exalted that many a famous prince sent his son to study with him.  (Among his renowned pupils was Jason, later to be famous as the chief of the Argonauts.)  In any case, Hercules learned well under Chiron’s tutelage, went off into the world, and succeeded at many heroic tasks.  One day, however, Hercules fell afoul of a band of drunken and pugnacious centaurs who threatened his life.  He defended himself with his trusty bow and poisoned arrows.  Tragically, however, he mistakenly shot Chiron amidst the confusion, thus killing his own mentor.
 
The parallels with Orphans are numerous: like Hercules, the fatherless Treat is full of promise but lacking direction.  Like a rowdy centaur, Harold makes his first appearance drunk and singing.  But then, like Chiron, he sobers up and offers a guiding hand to a confused young man.  Moreover—and, again, like Chiron—Harold’s death is caused by the young man he tried to educate.
 
There are other similarities.  We mentioned the godlike qualities Harold exhibits in the middle of the play, and noted the strong possibility that he might actually be Treat’s father—just as the father of Hercules was the absent god, Zeus.  And Hercules, like Treat, was famed in antiquity for his fits of irrational violence.  Indeed, one account of the origin of his twelve labors is that they were imposed as a punishment for having killed his wife and children in a fit of blind rage.
 
So in the character of Treat we get a latter-day version of the explosive Hercules, while with Harold we have a combination of father Zeus and pseudo-father Chiron.  And, not to leave anyone out, in Phillip we see an echo of Hercules’s  half-brother, Iphicles—a far more timid soul who, when a pair of snakes was let loose in their nursery, hid in the closet while baby Hercules strangled both.
 
One might ask about these mythic parallels: “so what?”  The answer is this: with its similarities to the Hercules story, Orphans makes it clear that certain kinds of characters, situations, relationships, and events exert a fascination for audiences that crosses the barriers of time and culture.  This mythic appeal must surely have contributed to the play’s success when it first opened in the early ‘80s, and certainly helps explain why it has continued to be revived, and why we are watching it now, in 2004, more than twenty years after its premiere.  It presents a universal story, as old as the Greeks, in a setting and a language that belong to us.  Was Lyle Kessler, the author of the play, aware of these parallels to the Hercules story?  It ultimately doesn’t matter, but it’s hard to believe he wasn’t.
 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
  1. Why is Treat upset to find words underlined in the newspaper?  
  2. Why does the playwright have Treat feed Phillip tuna and mayo, while Harold gives him bouilabaisse?  What does this difference suggest about how each relates to Phillip?  
  3. Why does Harold offer to buy Phillip a pair of loafers?  Is there any symbolic meaning in this gesture?  
  4. Why did Treat drive away the social workers who came for Phillip?   
  5. Harold says he knew a woman who resembled Phillip’s mother.  What might this mean about his relationship to the orphans?  
  6. Do you think Harold actually grew up in an orphanage?  Or is this just a story he made up about himself?  If the latter, why would he tell such a tale?  
  7. Why does Treat refuse to be hugged by Harold?  
  8. Do you think Treat is responsible in some way for Harold’s death?  If so, why and how?  
  9. Do you think the situation in the play is probable?  Would these two boys have been left alone to live in their row house?  Why so?  Why not?  
  10. What will happen to Phillip and Treat following Harold’s death?  Will they continue as before?  Will they change?  Why?  If they change, what will be the new situation?
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