Contents: IntroductionCharacters Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Plot Summary
Talley’s Folly opens with the frank revelation that this is a play: the set, which under the proper lighting represents a boathouse surrounded by weeds and trees, is here illuminated by work lights and the house lights, so that the artificiality of the set is obvious. Matt speaks directly to the audience, announcing that the play will run for ninety-seven minutes with no intermission, and that the story will unfold as a waltz, a valentine. If all goes well, he says, the play will end with a romance. He is somewhat nervous as he reveals that one year earlier he met Sally at a dance and the two were together in this same boathouse; he has returned to ask for her hand. Matt points up the hill to the Talley family home and explains that, even in this remote small town, world events including the Great Depression and the Second World War have their influence. He also describes Sally, whom he calls a “terrible embarrassment to her family.” As Sally approaches the boathouse and calls Matt’s name, the lights dim, the stage takes on its conventional theatrical appearance, and Matt steps into his character. For nearly the rest of the play, Sally and Matt will speak only to each other.
From their first moment on stage together, there is tension between Matt and Sally. She has just come home from work to find her family upset about the “communist traitor infidel” Matt — who came to the door asking for Sally. Although Sally’s brother believes he has run Matt off with his shotgun, Sally has guessed that Matt is waiting for her in the boathouse. Matt has come to claim Sally for his own, but she insists she has no intention of encouraging his courtship. As the two squabble and Sally demands that Matt leave, several things are revealed: Matt has written Sally a letter every day since he last saw her a year ago; Sally has responded only once, asking him to stop writing. Matt tried to visit Sally at the hospital where she is a nurse’s aide, but she refused to see him. Matt mocks the Talley family for their accent, their narrow-mindedness, and their bigotry, and although Sally tries to defend them she is clearly disgusted with them herself.
Matt is determined to keep the conversation going so Sally will not leave or send him back to St. Louis, where he works as an accountant. He senses, as the audience does, that beneath her scolding she does truly love him. He admires the beauty of the Talley land, and Sally also expresses appreciation for its beauty. He coaxes from Sally the story of Uncle Whistler, who built the whimsical boathouse in 1870. Like Sally, he was odd, a misfit, and Sally calls him “the healthiest member of the family.”
Finding an old pair of ice skates in the boat-house, Matt tries them on. He and Sally share a brief moment of intimacy as they hold hands and pretend to skate across the floor, but Matt spoils it by referring to Sally as his “girl,” and she backs off again. She almost leaves the boathouse and ends the encounter, but Matt falls through the rotting floor and Sally comes back to be sure that he is not hurt. Now Matt urges Sally to remember their “affair” of last summer, when they were together every day for a week. Sally remembers, but claims to attach no importance to their time together. Matt begs her not to let fear keep them apart. He knows that the fact that he is Jewish and older is a scandal for her family, but he is sure she loves him in spite of their differences. He points out that although she claims to have come to send him away, she has put on a pretty new dress to do it. Why won’t she admit that she loves him?
Now Matt reveals that he has learned quite a bit about Sally’s past by talking with her patients in the hospital and with her Aunt Charlotte. Matt knows that Sally is not in sympathy with her capitalist family, and that they consider her an “old maid.” Charlotte is apparently the only spirited member of the family, and she has encouraged Matt to pursue Sally. Charlotte’s approval intrigues Sally, who tries to turn the conversation to Matt’s past, which he has refused to talk about. In the play’s most wrenching episode, Matt hesitatingly, through a series of jokes and indirections, tells the story of his family’s torture and murder in Europe when he was a child, before World War I. He was smuggled into the United States by an uncle, and has never recovered from the trauma of his childhood. Although he is forty-two years old, he has never dared love a woman before, because he has vowed never to bring children into this cruel world, and he has not thought any woman would want to marry him under those conditions. Sally, he is sure, is a woman who thinks and feels as he does, and he is confident of her love for him.
When Sally hears Matt’s story, she is not swept away with passion, but instead becomes angry with him. She believes that he has made up his horrible story only to trick her into loving him, and that Aunt Charlotte has told Matt Sally’s secret: an illness has left her unable to bear children. Sally was engaged to be married after high school to the handsome son in the town’s other leading family, which would have created a merger of the town’s richest empires. Her infertility made the marriage — and Sally — no longer useful to the families, and the engagement was broken.
Matt convinces Sally that he did not know her secret, that his story is true. They are a perfect couple, he says, because they love each other, they think alike, and they want the same things. At last, Sally agrees. Matt and Sally kiss and agree to leave for St. Louis right away. Matt speaks directly to the audience once more, pointing out that the waltz of love has ended exactly as he promised.
