Cormac McCarthy's "The Sunset Limited"
Finding the "Lingering Scent of Divinity"
On the day I published “Road Runner Rules,” I learned that novelist Cormac McCarthy had passed away. The last play I directed before I retired was McCarthy’s “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited, a play that I found so rewarding to work on because the more closely I dug into the text, the more I discovered deeper and more profound meanings. It was in exploring the Given Circumstances of the play, however, that a secret emerged that changed the way I viewed the play’s action, and as a result changed the play’s Theatrical Contract, which then changed every aspect of the design and the actors’ conception of their role.
On the surface, The Sunset Limited seems pretty straightforward: a middle-aged, white academic named White has been saved from throwing himself in front of a subway train (i.e., “the Sunset Limited”) by a middle-aged African American man named—you guessed it—Black. Black has brought White back to his apartment in what McCarthy calls “a tenement building in a black ghetto in New York City.” Once there, Black, who earlier in his life was imprisoned for murder and was born again while serving his sentence, tries to save White’s life by saving his soul. It is a long conversation with no plot, per se, beyond that simple struggle to persuade someone to keep living. The stakes are high—life and death—but the discussion is fairly lowkey and “undramatic.” It doesn’t have the twists and turns of a play like, say, ‘Night, Mother, which in some ways has a similar premise.
When I first read the play, I was fascinated by the relationship between the two men, and the intelligence of the wide-ranging conversation. I wasn’t sure whether an audience would find the intellectual and theological twists and turns as fascinating as I did, but I thought the relationship between the two characters and the occasional moment of mordant humor would give me a fighting chance. Besides, it was my last play, so I figured I could do anything I wanted to do!
As most of you know by now, I am the co-author of Introduction to Play Analysis and the author of Play Analysis in Action: Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. I have been obsessed with figuring out how plays work for most of my life, first as a director and later as a professor teaching dramatic literature. I have always felt as if playwrights leave clues scattered throughout their text that tell me how to understand what is most important about the play and how to make it work on a stage. It was my job to pay close attention, and treat the play as a detective treats the crime scene in a mystery novel. The more I looked at The Sunset Limited, the more I had a weird feeling that there was a lot more going on than it seemed at first, despite McCarthy’s seeming attempt to lull me into seeing the play as a talky realistic “novel.” The HBO version, which starred Tommy Lee Jones (who also directed) and Samuel L. Jackson, stuck with with talky realism. But something nagged at me.
Given Circumstances are the things mentioned in the play about the world in which the characters live: time, place, social systems, cultural attitudes, back story. McCarthy doesn’t say anything about the year, so one assumes it is contemporary unless proven otherwise. It’s sometime after morning but before night, which is about all we know. Place is another matter—there are several clues to go on. The room the play takes place in, McCarthy tells us, is in “a tenement building in a black ghetto in New York City. There is a kitchen with a stove and a large refrigerator. A door to the outer hallway and another presumably to a bedroom. The hallway door is fitted with a bizarre collection of locks and bars. There is a cheap formica table in the room and two chrome and plastic chairs. There is a drawer in the table. On the table is a bible and a newspaper. A pair of glasses. A pad and a pencil.” Can you visualize it? Spare, dingy—White eventually descibes it as “horrible”— and…all those locks. Are they there to keep people out, or keep them in? Only Black can open them, and we later find out that the reason for the spartan surroundings is that Black takes in junkies and alcoholics and tries to help them, so he has very little stuff because the junkies will try to sell whatever they can get their hands on (including, once, his refrigerator). But there are no junkies in apartment right now. It’s just Black and White.
More on Place: In the early pages of the play, it is mentioned that White’s suicide attempt took place at the subway station on 155th Street. An examination of the New York Subway map reveals only one station on 155th Street, the B and D line, that is located at the intersection of 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard at the border of Harlem and the Coogan’s Bluff section of Washington Heights not all that far from Columbia University where, perhaps, White is a professor.
These details can be helpful to the actors as they do their homework, of course, but my interest was piqued when I read two sections of dialogue that suddenly made the station seem vastly more important. Very early in the play, when White is wanting to leave and Black is declaring, much to White’s chagrine, his intention to accompany him back to his house, the following exchange occurs:
WHITE. Who appointed you my guardian angel?
BLACK. Let me get my coat.
WHITE. Answer the question.
BLACK. You know who appointed me. I didn’t ask for you to leap into my arms down in the subway this morning.
WHITE. I didn’t leap into your arms.
BLACK. You didn’t?
WHITE. No. I didn’t.
BLACK. Well how did you get there then? (The professor stands with his head lowered. He looks at the chair and then turns and goes and sits down in it.) What. Now we ain’t goin’?
WHITE. Do you really think Jesus is in this room?
BLACK. No. I don’t think he’s in this room.
WHITE. You don’t?
BLACK. I know he’s in this room. (The professor folds his hands at the table and lowers his head.)
There are three interesting things about this patch of dialogue. First, the mention of a guardian angel, which White throws out ironically, but which Black seems to imply has become his role as a result of White having chosen him through his actions. Second, White’s inability to describe how he ended up in Black’s arms when he tried to throw himself in front of the train—it’s like when you’re trying to describe a dream, but you can’t…quite…remember…all the details…and then you give up. But it seems to be on his mind. In fact, in the opening moments of the play, White is already trying to figure it out, declaring “I didn’t approach you. I didn’t even see you.” Finally, after White gives up trying to answer Black’s question and sits down at the table, the sudden change of topic to the presence of Jesus is a complete non sequitir. Either this was part of the conversation prior to the start of the play (how long has White been there?), or… I don’t know. But the dialogue seems to take an odd turn there.
They talk for a while longer about Jesus and why White has only read a small part of the bible when, seemingly out of nowhere (again), White blurts “Can I ask you something?” And now comes the second interesting exchange:
WHITE. Where were you standing? I never saw you.
BLACK. You mean when you took your amazin leap?
WHITE. Yes.
BLACK. I was on the platform.
WHITE. On the platform.
BLACK. Yeah.
WHITE. Well I didn’t see you.
BLACK. I was just standin there on the platform. Mindin my own business. And here you come. Haulin ass.
WHITE. I looked all around to make sure there was no one there. Particularly no children. There was nobody around.
BLACK. Nope. Just me.
WHITE. Well I don’t know where you could have been.
BLACK. Mm. Professor you fixin to get spooky on me now. Maybe I was behind a post or somethin.
WHITE. There wasn’t any post.
BLACK. So what are we sayin here? You lookin at some big black angel got sent down here to grab your honky ass out of the air at the last possible minute and save you from destruction?
WHITE. No. I don’t think that.
BLACK. Such a thing ain’t possible.
WHITE. No. It isn’t.
BLACK. Well you the one that suggested it.
WHITE. I didn’t suggest any such thing. You’re the one put in the stuff about angels. I never said anything about angels. I don’t believe in angels.
But of course, White did bring up angels just a few moments earlier when he demanded to know who appointed Black to be his guardian angel. Black hasn’t forgotten; White has.
Regardless, White’s insistence that the 155th Street platform was empty—that he checked because he didn’t want to traumatize anyone, especially a child (his is a careful and caring plan)—and Black’s lack of specificity about his whereabouts caught my attention and sent me to the internet to see what the 155th Street platform looked like. And glory be, Wikipedia had an actual picture!
Now I’m intrigued. This isn’t one of those big platforms that is used by crowds of people; it’s small, shallow, one with few places to hide. And while it is possible that Black was standing behind a pillar, the likelihood that White overlooked him while he was preparing to jump, and that Black would be in a position to suddenly be in front of him as he took the few steps to the edge of platform without White having seen him…well, it seems implausible.
And this got me to thinking.
How might the rest of this scene have played out? If White didn’t see Black, and Black somehow caught him…then what? How did he get White to his apartment? Did he carry him in his arms out of the station onto the street? Surely White would have resisted, and people on the street would have noticed. Given White’s state of mind, I can’t imagine that Black could have just talked him in to coming with him. I mean, maybe to go with him to get a cup of coffee, but up to his tenement apartment with the lock-festooned door? Unlikely.
None of this adds up, and surely someone as experienced as McCarthy wouldn’t leave such an error uncorrected. To me, they seemed like hints. But of what?
Now I’m really curious. Who is Black? And where are we?
There is a lot of evidence that Black is someone who tries to rescue people who are in extremely desperate situations, although White is the first person he’s tried to save from intentionally attempting suicide; his usual clientele are junkies and alcoholics who are killing themselves less consciously than White. Black’s focus is wholly on the poor and the desperate. “Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good?,” White asks. “As opposed to someplace where good was needed,” Black responds. Point taken.
But when White demands to know whether he “has ever stopped any of these people from taking drugs,” Black responds ambiguously, “Not that I know of.” “Then what’s the point?” White demands, “I mean, it’s hopeless.” Hard to argue. And yet throughout the play, Black insists that he has “no choice” but to do what he’s doing, especially as it pertains to White. Near the end of the play, after White has delivered a blistering defense of why he has no choice but to take the Sunset Limited, Black seems to be defeated and unable to respond.
White. You see what it is you’ve saved.
Black. Tried to save. Am tryin. Tryin hard.
White. Yes.
Black. Who is my brother.
White. Your brother.
Black. Yes.
White. Is that why I’m here? In your apartment?
Black. No. But it’s why I am.
“It’s why I am”? I suspect you can see where I’m going with this: there is more to this encounter than just an evangelical Christian trying to convert an atheist in Upper Manhattan. Black has a job, a task, a transcendant purpose, one that seems to be beyond his control: to save the spiritually desperate.
At the very end of the play, after White has insisted that Black let him leave and White has made his final exit, Black “collapses to his knees in the doorway, all but weeping,” insisting that he will once again “be there” in the morning when White will doubtlessly try to take the Sunset Limited again. And then, alone and in despair, Black looks up to the heavens and says:
I don’t understand what you sent me down there for. I don’t understand it. If you wanted me to help him how come you didn’t give me the words? You give em to him. What about me?” (He kneels weeping rocking back and forth.) That’s all right. That’s all right. If you never speak to me again you know I’ll keep your word. You know I will. You know I’m good for it. (He lifts his head.) Is that okay? Is that okay”
So Black has been “sent…down there” to save White, and has failed. Remember when White was trying to figure out where Black had been on the platform, and Black responds, “So what are we sayin here? You lookin at some big black angel got sent down here to grab your honky ass out of the air at the last possible minute and save you from destruction?” An echo. Intentional? Man, it sure seems with McCarthy everything is intentional, but one can only conjecture.
I’m not saying that Black is Jesus and White is 21st-Century Enlightenment Man on the edge of self-destruction—McCarthy would probably punch me in the face for advancing such a simplistic interpretation—but at the same time, well, it seems to rhyme with that interpretation. It certainly made me revisit what had seemed a non sequitir at the start of the play: “WHITE. Do you really think Jesus is in this room? BLACK. No. I don’t think he’s in this room. WHITE. You don’t? BLACK. I know he’s in this room.” Is it possible to laugh retroactively at a joke?
I found myself thinking about a novel I had taught several times at the university, Gloria Naylor’s masterpiece Bailey’s Cafe. It’s about a cafe run by a man who had fought in the final, horrific battles of World War II until “Pika-don”—the Atom Bomb—fell and he came out of the war alive, but deeply traumatized. On the night the war officially ends, he is in San Francisco. While the city celebrated, he stood in the fog on the wharf, unable to join the party, listening to the sound of waves slapping against the wharf, and thinking that “it all stopped being worth it” after Hiroshima. He’s teetering on the edge of the wharf, contemplating suicide, when suddenly:
“A hand reached through the fog and touched my shoulder.
—There’s a customer waiting, Nadine (his wife) said.
Startled, I turned around and she was standing in back of me. And in back of her was this cafe.”
And he finds he’s standing with a spatula in his hand and a hamburger sizzling on the grill. “We were in business,” he says. It is a cafe that appears only when somebody is desperate enough to need it. He explains its purpose:
“Even though this planet is round, there are just too many spots where you can find yourself hanging on to the edge just like I was; and unless there’s some space, some place, to take a breather for a while, the edge of the world—frightening as it is—could be the end of the world, which would be quite a pity.”
The people who come in to Bailey’s Cafe have been snatched from the edge, just like Bailey, just like White, and brought to a place where they can “take a breather,” and perhaps make a different decision. McCarthy uses an eerily similar image to Naylor’s at one point in the play when Black is trying to help White realize that there are many people who are just a desperate as he is, but who don’t choose to take the Sunset Limited. They’re all crowded on the platform, Black says,
“but they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it’s somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He’s starin at the end of all tomorrows and he’s drawin a shade over ever yesterday that ever was.”
At the very least, this close examination of the Given Circumstances convinced me that this is no ordinary meeting on an ordinary day in an ordinary apartment. This wasn’t Ibsen’s world. Time has stopped, and somehow, like Bailey’s Cafe, Black and White are poised between possibilities, trying to save each other using words with “the lingerin scent of divinity” that no longer seem capable of reaching through the modern pain and fog. To fail to provide the audience enough hints through design and interpretive choices to at least make them realize that a more poetic and metaphysical interpretation was available, would diminish the tragedy, it seemed to me.
So I asked the designers to make a few subtle (or maybe less-than-subtle) hints that would appear in the very last moments of the play—a violation of the Realistic Theatrical Contract that I had established up until that point. For ninety minutes, it had been a traditional realistic play, but when Black removed the locks covering the door in order to let White leave, it opened onto darkness, and as White stepped over the threshold, he was lit by a spotlight and at the same time the walls of the theater were illuminated by pinpoints of light. Black slumped against the door frame, unable to leave, surrounded by a universe of stars, and had his conversation with whoever had failed to give him the necessary words.
What I wanted was for the audience to suddenly see everything that had happened in a different light, the stakes raised even higher, the struggle metaphysical and philosophical and not just personal and psychological. As the lights dimmed, the sound designer provided the sound of a subway car’s brakes squealing as it came to a halt. Had time started again? I don’t know. I wasn’t sure whether White would emerge from the building onto the street and head home to his apartment, or whether his journey had now ended. I wanted the audience to wonder.
All I knew is that I thought McCarthy was ultimately trying to point our minds toward eternity.