Circus lady is a play by Jason Miller. The play takes place in an apartment in a Puerto Rican ghetto in Bronx, New York. The apartment faces the streets. The apartment is really messy, and everywhere lays clothes, newspapers, magazines, and empty TV-dinners. The furniture is dirty, and covered in dust, and a smell of pet shop is filling the apartment. There are cockroaches everywhere. It is actually one of the first things we read, so we have already some pictures in our heads.
In all of this, live Marie and her son John. John is 18 years old, and he wants to move. Move far away from all of this, and far away from that poverty, there are shown all over the neighborhood. He is tired of sitting down on the corner everyday, doing nothing but play dominos and getting drunk with his friends. Luckily for John he has got a job-training offer in Chicago. And this might well be his best chance ever to get out of poverty and away from the ghetto.
He still has chances and he knows that, compared to his mother Marie. She has not been outside the door the last six months, because she is afraid, that she cannot walk the 3 floors up to her apartment again. Marie is a large lady, 5’2” and weights about 250 pounds. Once she had worked at nights as a waitress at The Plaza Dinner. That was when she was thin. One night she came home and saw her husband in the tub, dead. He had committed suicide. Ever since, she has been afraid that John should know the truth about his father. So she has always told him that he had abandoned her and went back to Puerto Rico.
They live in a very bad and poor neighborhood. They are poor and afraid. Especially Marie, she is afraid of John leaving her and she will be left alone, she is afraid that the welfare office will cut the welfare check and place her in a smaller room, or even a mental clinic. And at last, there is a serial rapist out in the neighborhood. External she is afraid of the rapist and is very aware of