Setting
The play takes place in Greenwich village in New York City, in the present day at its writing in 1966.
Greenwich Village has traditionally been a home for artists, bohemians, and NYU students, with whom Sam Hendrix probably would have worked ("Greenwich Village."). It is also the location of the Stonewall Inn, where the Stonewall Riots occurred in 1969, beginning the queer rights movement. Susy, Sam, and Gloria would probably have run into many beatniks and queer people in their daily life: Greenwich Village has always been filled with people who lived in tight-knit communities when the rest of the world would not accept them.
Asbury Park ( pg 15): a small city on the Jersey Shore ("Asbury Park Historical Society.")
Scarsdale (pg 20): a suburb of New York City, located in Westchester county ("History of Scarsdale.")
27B Grogan Street (pg 36): a fictional address
Port Authority Bus Terminal (pg 60): located in Times Square, it is the biggest bus station in the country ("About the Terminal.")
St. Vincent's Hospital (pg 69): a hospital in Westchester
The map below is centered on Greenwich Village, and can be used to explore the area and find the places listed above.
Greenwich Village has traditionally been a home for artists, bohemians, and NYU students, with whom Sam Hendrix probably would have worked ("Greenwich Village."). It is also the location of the Stonewall Inn, where the Stonewall Riots occurred in 1969, beginning the queer rights movement. Susy, Sam, and Gloria would probably have run into many beatniks and queer people in their daily life: Greenwich Village has always been filled with people who lived in tight-knit communities when the rest of the world would not accept them.
Asbury Park ( pg 15): a small city on the Jersey Shore ("Asbury Park Historical Society.")
Scarsdale (pg 20): a suburb of New York City, located in Westchester county ("History of Scarsdale.")
27B Grogan Street (pg 36): a fictional address
Port Authority Bus Terminal (pg 60): located in Times Square, it is the biggest bus station in the country ("About the Terminal.")
St. Vincent's Hospital (pg 69): a hospital in Westchester
The map below is centered on Greenwich Village, and can be used to explore the area and find the places listed above.
Historical Context
Daily Life
The sixties was the first time that America engaged in a way of life recognizable as distinctly contemporary. McDonald's was spreading, and with it came the rise of fast food (Goodwin). Color TVs were being adopted by more families. Life was beginning to move faster, to forget about the hardships of the decades before, and to enter the Space Age. Culture was expanding away from the rigid comportment of the 1950s and towards new lifestyles and new opportunities.
Art & Media
Andy Warhol's art, particularly emblematic of the day-to-day social climate of the early sixties, was just rising into prominence (Goodwin). Authors like Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, and Sylvia Plath were becoming household names, and Elvis experienced a resurgence in popularity as he re-entered civilian life. West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, and the film came out in 1961 (Gottlieb).
Childhood
Gloria and/or her classmates probably would have been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy and playing with Barbie dolls, which would have been a new fad of the era, and passing around MAD magazine during class (Goodwin).
She would have been raised according to Dr. Spock's ideas. His advice included being loving towards your children instead of severely disciplinary, acting according to the child's actual needs for food and sleep instead of a pre-determined schedule, and questioning the practice of circumcision (Crowther). However, many of his ideas were later proved to be unwise advice, including putting babies to sleep on their stomachs, which led to an increase in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Politics and the World Stage
The early sixties was very politically active. The tragic assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F Kennedy took place in 1963 (Goodwin). Before his death, he was forced to handle the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which was disaster involving a secret US plan to turn Cuban exiles against their home country ("The Bay of Pigs."). The invasion was crushed very quickly by Cuban forces, leaving a stain on the reputation of the Kennedy administration. He was also in office when the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall, a key event in the Cold War ("The Cold War in Berlin.")
The Vietnam War, closely related to Cold War goals, lasted from 1955 to 1975 ("Vietnam War."). By 1962, there were 9,000 American troops in Vietnam, up from no more than 800 throughout the fifties. Combat really picked up in 1965, with the support of the American public. However, support quickly declined, leading to the famed Vietnam protests.
The Civil Rights movement was in full swing: it lasted, officially, from the mid-fifties until the late sixties ("American Civil Rights Movement."). The Voting Rights act was passed in 1965, limiting restrictions on African American voting. Desegregation and interracial marriage were getting mainstream support.
Feminist issues like birth control, abortion, and artificial insemination were entering the legal limelight. Birth control, including the IUD, had just been invented, allowing women greater sexual freedom with a lower risk of pregnancy. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966.
The Space Race was also a defining feature of the political climate, in which America and the Soviet Union were in competition for control of the space around the Earth. Though we may now see it as a frivolous venture with only the betterment of science to take into consideration, it was actually nail-bitingly urgent to make sure that the other power did not gain the ability to "nuke" you from space. Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, left the atmosphere in 1961 ("LIFE With the Astrochimps: Early Stars of the Space Race.").
Growing Up in the Thirties and Forties
Adults that were in their 20s or 30s in the 60s, like the characters in the play, would have been born in the thirties or forties, and therefore their childhoods would have been hard.
The thirties and its Great Depression made life hard on everyone. Farming families in rural areas suffered from an excess of crops that, because of the general poverty, could not be sold for a profit, forcing them to do without many things that we now take for granted (Egan). Families in cities could not grow their own food and therefore often went hungry. Work was scarce, though the situation was partially alleviated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.
In the forties, many children would have gone without their fathers as they fought overseas in World War II, leading them to have an intense sense of patriotism as they wished for their fathers to come home safe and victorious ("Children and World War II."). Though the economy picked up after Roosevelt's work programs and America's declaration of war, many women and children had to do without because of rations (though most did have enough money to get ice cream from an ice cream truck). For the first time, women were getting jobs, replacing men who had gone off to war in the effort to support their families, and many teenagers quit high school so they could work too. Others were not so lucky; Asian Americans were forced by the government to spend years in internment camps because they were viewed as potential traitors.
The sixties was the first time that America engaged in a way of life recognizable as distinctly contemporary. McDonald's was spreading, and with it came the rise of fast food (Goodwin). Color TVs were being adopted by more families. Life was beginning to move faster, to forget about the hardships of the decades before, and to enter the Space Age. Culture was expanding away from the rigid comportment of the 1950s and towards new lifestyles and new opportunities.
Art & Media
Andy Warhol's art, particularly emblematic of the day-to-day social climate of the early sixties, was just rising into prominence (Goodwin). Authors like Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, and Sylvia Plath were becoming household names, and Elvis experienced a resurgence in popularity as he re-entered civilian life. West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, and the film came out in 1961 (Gottlieb).
Childhood
Gloria and/or her classmates probably would have been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy and playing with Barbie dolls, which would have been a new fad of the era, and passing around MAD magazine during class (Goodwin).
She would have been raised according to Dr. Spock's ideas. His advice included being loving towards your children instead of severely disciplinary, acting according to the child's actual needs for food and sleep instead of a pre-determined schedule, and questioning the practice of circumcision (Crowther). However, many of his ideas were later proved to be unwise advice, including putting babies to sleep on their stomachs, which led to an increase in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Politics and the World Stage
The early sixties was very politically active. The tragic assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F Kennedy took place in 1963 (Goodwin). Before his death, he was forced to handle the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which was disaster involving a secret US plan to turn Cuban exiles against their home country ("The Bay of Pigs."). The invasion was crushed very quickly by Cuban forces, leaving a stain on the reputation of the Kennedy administration. He was also in office when the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall, a key event in the Cold War ("The Cold War in Berlin.")
The Vietnam War, closely related to Cold War goals, lasted from 1955 to 1975 ("Vietnam War."). By 1962, there were 9,000 American troops in Vietnam, up from no more than 800 throughout the fifties. Combat really picked up in 1965, with the support of the American public. However, support quickly declined, leading to the famed Vietnam protests.
The Civil Rights movement was in full swing: it lasted, officially, from the mid-fifties until the late sixties ("American Civil Rights Movement."). The Voting Rights act was passed in 1965, limiting restrictions on African American voting. Desegregation and interracial marriage were getting mainstream support.
Feminist issues like birth control, abortion, and artificial insemination were entering the legal limelight. Birth control, including the IUD, had just been invented, allowing women greater sexual freedom with a lower risk of pregnancy. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966.
The Space Race was also a defining feature of the political climate, in which America and the Soviet Union were in competition for control of the space around the Earth. Though we may now see it as a frivolous venture with only the betterment of science to take into consideration, it was actually nail-bitingly urgent to make sure that the other power did not gain the ability to "nuke" you from space. Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, left the atmosphere in 1961 ("LIFE With the Astrochimps: Early Stars of the Space Race.").
Growing Up in the Thirties and Forties
Adults that were in their 20s or 30s in the 60s, like the characters in the play, would have been born in the thirties or forties, and therefore their childhoods would have been hard.
The thirties and its Great Depression made life hard on everyone. Farming families in rural areas suffered from an excess of crops that, because of the general poverty, could not be sold for a profit, forcing them to do without many things that we now take for granted (Egan). Families in cities could not grow their own food and therefore often went hungry. Work was scarce, though the situation was partially alleviated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.
In the forties, many children would have gone without their fathers as they fought overseas in World War II, leading them to have an intense sense of patriotism as they wished for their fathers to come home safe and victorious ("Children and World War II."). Though the economy picked up after Roosevelt's work programs and America's declaration of war, many women and children had to do without because of rations (though most did have enough money to get ice cream from an ice cream truck). For the first time, women were getting jobs, replacing men who had gone off to war in the effort to support their families, and many teenagers quit high school so they could work too. Others were not so lucky; Asian Americans were forced by the government to spend years in internment camps because they were viewed as potential traitors.