Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play

Having limned "the force of history," DeLillo has since turned around and gone in the other direction, into "the small anonymous corners of human experience," as he phrased it, with works like The Body Artist and, to some extent, Valparaiso and Cosmopolis. Lies-Lies-Bleeding continues this trend. Consisting of brief, spare scenes, clipped sentences, and unnerving silences, the play focuses on three characters as they deliberate over and eventually carry out the mercy killing of a stroke victim trapped in a persistent vegitative state. Though the characters debate the decision extensively and even fiercely, DeLillo doesn't make the mistake having them just reiterate the arguments of pundits and philosophers. It is the play's genius to push through the cheap, politicized controversy towards the immediacy of the dilemma faced by these characters and the death-haunted atmosphere that pervades their lives. The individual who is the subject of the decision, Alex, appears in three flashbacks, once in robust health and twice while his body is failing, just before the stroke. These appearances, though brief, flare poignantly like the last glimpse of a setting sun. There is also one scene where Alex's widow, Lia, speaks at his memorial service. Her words summarize the themes, mood, and style of the play quite well, and are worth quoting at length: "I know people tell stories at these gatherings. I don't want to do that. People tell stories, exchange stories. I don't know any stories. You know things about him that I never knew. This means nothing to me. There are no stories. You're here for the wrong reason. If you're here to honor his memory, it's not his memory, it's your memory, and it's false. There are no stories. There are other things, hard to express, so deep and true that I can't share them, and don't want to. In the end it's not what kind of man he was but simply that he's gone. The stark fact. The thing that turns us into children, alone under the sky. When it stops being unbearable, it becomes something worse. It becomes that air we breathe."