The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy (Paperback)

This is an outrageous tale with a strong satiric flavor. The story takes place in Guellen, a European town that has fallen into economic depression and decay. As the play opens the townspeople are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Claire Zachanassian, a hometown girl who has gone on to become super-wealthy. The townspeople hope that her financial generosity will save Guellen. But from early on in the first act, Claire hints that she has a sinister, even deadly, ultimate goal.

This is a colorful, richly peopled dark comedy. It's full of arresting dialogue, suspense, and grotesque characters. A major theme is the tension between capitalistic greed and the Western humanistic tradition. The play is also about sex, lies, and injustice.

With her artificial body parts, bizarre retinue, and colorful backstory, Claire is one of the most remarkable characters in the history of drama--perhaps the most commanding female stage character since Lady Macbeth. She is charming yet sinister, grotesque yet oddly sympathetic. The creation of this character is, in my opinion, a great triumph for Durrenmatt.

For companion texts, I would recommend the following: "Rene's Flesh," by Virgilio Pinera; "Bedside Manners," by Luisa Valenzuela; and "The Doorman," by Reinaldo Arenas. Each of these works is, in its own way, as bizarre and stimulating as "The Visit."

Another excellent piece of work from Friedrich Durrenmatt, the story of The Visit takes place in a ..town in central Europe somewhere; the country is not given (the reasons should be obvious). As the town is on the verge of bankruptcy, with almost total unemployment and a pervasive sense of despair, one of the town's local folk made good comes back, hinting that she will give the town enough money to bail it out: get the factory working again, allow the stores to restock, that sort of thing. The night she arrives, she tells the townspeople that their expectations of the reasons for her visit are true, and that she will give them the money they need. She has one condition: she requires justice in the form of a lynch mob. She wants the townspeople to [take out] one of their own.

The revelation of the intended victim is the major twist here; in many ways, the play's climax is actually this scene, at the end of Act I, and the following two acts are a painfully drawn-out dénouement as we watch the townspeople's changing reactions to the woman and her demand. Unlike The Pledge, in which we see the gradual development of one man's madness, in this case we're given a woman who's arguably mad from the get-go (certainly, she's as obsessed as The Pledge's protagonist is at the end of that novel from long before the beginning of this play), and we watch the way her madness, combined with her wealth, affects the town around her over the course of a few days. Durrenmatt is a master at using small details to show how the community changes its views over a relatively short period of time, and even manages to make the rather horrific journey humorous at times (the play is defined as, and works as, a tragicomedy). We find ourselves alternately sympathizing with and horrified at the actions of the townspeople, and see no conflict in the two attitudes. A wonderful play.