In contrast to the encompassing sym...

In contrast to the encompassing symphonic vision of Pullman Car Hiawatha, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is striking in its minimalism. While it makes use one time again of a stage manager and nearly bare stage, the play includes barely five characters and emphasis completely through is thrown almost entirely upon gesture and language that has been radically "emptied." Brecht relied heavily onward the concept of "gest": "Gest should not be understood as gesticulation; it involves not emphatic or revealing hand action s but overall attitude [to life]" (252) "It is necessary that [the actor] enact a social gest" (252) revealing the character's political situation. In no other play in the dramatic repertoire is the universal of gest so radically foregrounded as in The Happy Journey, albeit without the political impulse of Brecht

From the entrance the various characters shoot imaginary marbles, state on imaginary hats, and walk down imaginary stairs (an acting feat). While the audience beholds only four chairs, the actors wave fill up on gas, check the oil, bribe and eat hotdogs, and climb back in their "car." With language serving as signification of a typical-and, we assume at first, largely uneventful-Sunday outing, the family's motions estrange the audience, forcing them to fill in the particulars of an actual car trip and actual landscape in their minds. Here the emphasis is les in succession music-though we do hear advertising jingles, a slave sonnet and a hymn-than on mime. This foregrounding of gesticulates devoid of physical referents in incline differently throws the emphasis back forward language, which is so stylized and stereotypic as to become satiric.