Larry and Joanne
Love and attention in Company
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A few weeks ago, we looked at Company’s Joanne as she attempts to recruit Robert into her own carefully managed emotional life. A question remains hanging in the air: If Joanne is so committed to the performance of not-feeling, what do we make of the man she’s married to? Larry has watched Joanne’s performance for years, knows every move, still loves her deeply… And in most discussions of Company, he barely registers.
Larry is fond, gently comic, reliably present. He pays the bill. He goes to the john. He takes his wife home. But his brief monologue, delivered to Robert at the end of the nightclub scene, is certainly worthy of our attention.
In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he argued that all social interaction is essentially theatrical. We are all, Goffman suggested, performers managing the impressions we make on our audience. But he drew a crucial distinction between two kinds of performer. The sincere performer has genuinely become the character — they believe in the role they are playing. The cynical performer knows exactly what he or she is doing, and does it anyway, as a means to an end.
Joanne is Goffman’s cynical performer made flesh — perhaps the most self-aware character in the Sondheim canon. She catalogues her own evasions with precision, raises a glass to each one, and keeps going. The zingers. The theatrical drinking. The elaborate nihilism. She knows these are performances. And as Larry’s monologue reveals, she has been running the same scenes for years: packing her bags twice a year so he’ll beg her to stay. Goffman would recognize the routine immediately. It is protest behaviour, carefully staged for a permanent audience of one.
What Goffman’s framework doesn’t quite account for is what happens when the audience, refusing to be manipulated by the performance, stays nonetheless.
Larry’s monologue deserves a close reading.