Character Analysis

Clothing

When all of the characters first walk onstage at the beginning of this play, you might notice that Betty is played by a man and Edward is played by a woman. Churchill does the same thing in Act 2 when she casts a man as the little girl Cathy. And the point of all of this is… what, you ask?

Well, Churchill wants to show us just how much our everyday assumptions about gender are based on performance instead of reality.

As you read Act 1, for example, we're willing to bet that more than once you'd forgotten that Betty is played by a man and Edward is played by a woman. That's because it's just too easy to slide back into the assumptions we tend to make in our everyday lives about the appearance and behavior of men and women. Churchill, though, is here to make sure that we question these assumptions.