Night, Mother

Anton Chekhov, a significant playwright in the realism and naturalism movements, argued that a gun that appears onstage in the first act must be fired by the end of the play. Although this dramatic principle also functions as a metaphor for the necessity of curating details and story elements so that nothing is superfluous or gratuitous, it can also be taken literally. Once Jessie retrieves the gun from the attic, even after she removes it from view, the existence of a loaded gun makes a dramatic promise. It must be fired, at least metaphorically, which means that the story must resolve it as a dramatic element. Likewise, most of Chekhov’s major plays resolve the promise of the gun with a character’s suicide (Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya) or a death by shooting (Three Sisters).

In ’Night, Mother, the playwright employs conventions of naturalism, so the promise of the gun is significant as a nod to Chekhov. However, in postmodern theatre, playwrights don’t always conform to genre conventions. The gun must be resolved, but audiences have become accustomed to solutions that deliberately defy predictability. Audiences expect dynamic characters—characters who change during the story, usually because of the action.