Love!Valor!Compassion!

I would like to say that at first I did not like this play, but after reading is multiple times and getting a better grasp on understanding this play, I actually have come to really enjoy it.  Though it is quite different than a well-made play, that doesn’t mean that this type of play is any less entertaining or valuable to society. Structurally, this play is non-linear and the characters are consistantly talking at the same time to different people and even addressing the audience at some points. Dramaturgically, this play says a lot yet a little at the same time. By this I mean, they characters have a lot of dialogue but have far less action than speaking of what has happened or what will happen in the future. All of these factors make this play quite different than others we have read. I think if a historian was reading this play, they might get the sense that america in the 1990’s was disjointed and confused. The whole play has a sense of disjointed-ness just by looking at the title: Love!Valor!Compassion! It does not seem to roll of the tongue, but rather it is broken and not one complete sentence, instead it is three different sentences. Also adding to the disjointed-ness of this play, the characters  braking of the fourth wall from time to time makes the reader think of the disjointed view of what theatre is “suppose to be” at this time. We get that maybe a capital T- truth could be seen differently by whoever is viewing it. For example when the characters talk of how they die, they each say when they go or how they believe they go. Ramon says, “I don’t die. I’m fucking immortal. I live forever” (McNolly 138) Here we see that Ramon’s belief of death is that it didn’t happen, as opposed to Perry who has his death counted down to the second. They view is different as what the Truth of death is and who controls death (human or God) is based on a person’s point of view.