Fosse: Plays Three

Book excerpt: Includes Mother and Child, Sleep My Baby Sleep, Afternoon, Beautiful and Death Variations Mother and Child is the intense journey of two individuals trying to connect. Like strangers on a first date, mother and son stalk each other, confronted with a shared history they cannot ignore. In Sleep My Baby Sleep, three people are in a strange unnamed place; through visual and linguistic association they try to decipher their predicament. In Afternoon, characters come and go in a flat that is for sale; they will never understand each other; someone will always insist on one thing, while others will insist on something else. In Beautiful, the past disrupts the present when a man and his family go back to his childhood valley. Conflicts simmer when husband and wife punish each other by courting his best friend, while his daughter meets a local boy. Death Variations explores different aspects of the theme of death; death of love, death of relationship, death of happiness, and finally the death of a young person. As the characters in Fosse's plays search for meaning or even just familiarity in their ruptured lives, their struggles find an echo in the rhythms and repetitions of their speech.