Circus Lady Circus lady is a play by Jason Miller. The play takes place in an apartment in a Puerco Rican ghetto in Bronx, New York. The apartment faces the streets. The apartment is really messy, and everywhere lays clothes, newspapers, magazines, and empty TV- dinners. The furniture is dirty, and covered in dust, and a smell of pet shop is filling the apartment. There are cockroaches everywhere. It is actually one of the first things we read, so we have already some pictures in our heads.
In all of this, live Marie and her son John. John is 18 years old, and he wants to move. Move far away from all of this, and far away from that poverty, there are shown all over the neighborhood. He is tired of sitting down on the corner everyday, doing nothing but play domino’s and getting drunk with his friends. Luckily for John he has got a Job-training offer in Chicago. And this might well be his best chance ever to get out of poverty and away from the ghetto. He still has chances and he knows that, compared to his mother Marie.
She has not en outside the door the last six months, because she is afraid, that she cannot walk the 3 floors up to her apartment again. Marie is a large lady, 5’2″ and weights about 250 pounds. Once she had worked at nights as a waitress at The Plaza Dinner. That was when she was thin. One night she came home and saw her husband in the tub, dead. He had committed suicide. Ever since, she has been afraid that John should know the truth about his father. So she has always told him that he had abandoned her and went back to Puerco Rice.
They live in a very bad and poor neighborhood. They are poor and afraid. Especially Marie, she is afraid of John leaving her and she will be left alone, she is afraid that the welfare office will cut the welfare check and place her in a smaller room, or even a mental clinic. And at last, there is a serial rapist out in the neighborhood. External she is afraid of the rapist and is very aware of everything. But when she realizes that John is leaving she use the rapist as some kind of threat against him. But luckily he is lever enough to move on.
And hopefully start a new life. And that’s why I think that she might wants to be raped in the end. Because she opens the door without even asking who it is. I think Marie is very selfish in big parts of the play. It is always “ I can’t live alone”, “ Stay here” and so on. She does not care about John. She is holding him back. Even though she knows he will get an easier and better life if he leaves for Chicago. Luckily there is a little progress for her. When John leaves, she tells him to take the money on the table.
At this point she knows that there is nothing she can do to hold him back. And she accepts it. Family, but that has not stopped him dreaming about a better life. He knows that if he works hard, it will get paid off. He does not want to life in a pigsty, in a poor ghetto in the dirty part of New York City. He is tired of living off people. He wants to make his own way of living. That is one of the last things he tells his mother, on page 62. It shows us readers that he has bigger plans for his life. He does not want to be old alone, in some Shiite apartment like his mother.
