We All Get So Lonely Sometimes: THE LONELINESS PILL AND OTHER PLAYS by Dr. Dayana Stetco

Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with a collection of four plays by University of Louisiana at Lafayette professor and former head of the English department, Dayana Stetco. This collection spans from 2017 to 2020, and while the final play The Loneliness Pill, was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, and slated to be performed just as the lockdown began, it seems to predict the feeling of isolation that is now endemic within all of us and our broader society. Likely because loneliness has always been with us, and been part and parcel of the human condition long before we finally began admitting it outloud and much louder than usual, thanks to the heightened sense of it. But before it became our natural state of being, it was something more closely associated with certain states, systems, mindsets, and Stetco’s collection dives deep into these particular view points with a nuanced and artful touch that is fantastical, personal, witty and heartbreaking.

Within the four plays readers will encounter a traveler, a mermaid, bureaucrats assigning lonely hearts pre-selected beaus, scientists and tarot readers, and frustrated writers conversing with literary constructs. The pieces in this collection are transparently influenced by the author’s life, a new turn for Stetco, in which she turned parts of herself into absurd, fantastic, and beautiful artifice. Her position as a foreigner fled from Romania manifests as a traveler in the desert who speaks to her own fantasies of others—and herself, before a cardboard setting. Her experience in upper academia morphs into an agency full of fantastical creatures assigned to manage the love lives of mortals, a task that the rules and regulations and inhumane jargon of bureaucracy often interferes with—if not impedes completely, and her process as, and the inevitable frustrations of, a writer are portrayed in the dove-tailing relationship of Liz and the Master Builder, and a great fall. The final play, The Loneliness Pill, is perhaps less individually personal than the others, but a personal look at the malady of society that has only become closer and clearer with time. About its motivations and influences, Stetco writes:

The Loneliness Pill emerged out of an admission of defeat. Somewhere between the pressures of a political regime that began to remind me, alarmingly, of the authoritarianism I thought I’d left behind (…) and a progressive, collective inability to deal with life’s basic problems, I sensed a national, if not global, nervous breakdown, possibly an epidemic of pessimism, loneliness, and mass hysteria.

Stetco, The Loneliness Pill and Other Plays, 181

Again, this was written pre-Covid, pre-Capitol Hill Riots, before much of the anxiety that had been boiling societally had come to a head. This collection shows us how the personal can represent the universal, how the individual, in meditating on their own life, can predict the tensions and large-scale breakdowns of the world-at-large, so long as they are watchful and examining their patterns and the patterns of those around them. The plays themselves are fantastic illustrations of this process, but what will add an extra layer of interest in particular to writers both new and established, is the deconstructions of Stetco’s processes and influences in writing them. Each play is introduced with her notes on the formation of the work, and delves into its influences, and within the appendix, there are further notes on the formation of the plays. In a sense, reading these extra-textual details is like listening in on a lecture on the act of writing itself.

Peppered through out the collection, there are often biting, often witty, often meta-discussions about being a writer as well. While much of the work is, as a whole, full of a dull-pulse of isolation and heartbreak, there is a lot to laugh at as you want to cry. The conversations, both heartbreaking and hilarious, ring with a sense of authenticity that is as rare in writing as it is common in the everyday. For instance, I have been apart of this conversation about the disappointment of bad narrative endings before, almost word for word:

"Where do these screenwriters get their material, that’s what I want to know? And when we get over it, and suspend our disbelief, and start caring for those absurd characters, the ending sucks. Like, hire someone good at endings if you suck at them, don’t put your audience through that disappointment at the end of each series.

Stetco, The Loneliness Pill and Other Plays, 27

In other cases, what should be absurd and out of place is all too real, such as in The Registry, where employees are required to attend “voluntary” events such as art therapy and talk therapy sessions, which are in reality “voluntary-mandatory.” Whenever this contradiction is mentioned, employees are told it “works in mysterious ways” (97) and that “all the rules are still in effect” (116). Stetco often uses repetition, the fantastic, and humor to illustrate the ever closing gap between what is considered absurd, and what is reality, and invites us to laugh in the face of the natural fear and frustrations that evolve from this uncomfortable closeness.

Which highlights and sharpens the teeth of these narratives when they choose to stop laughing and start biting. Often, when the collection has lulled you into a sense of ease through laughter, through misdirection, that is when Stetco choose to drop the curtain, and let loose the knives that are hidden behind it. After a one-sided conversation with a delusional telephone-tarot-reader, we cut to a woman reading her deceased husband’s journal:

We eat. We sleep. We go through life without passion, content in our mediocrity, comforted by it, burdened by the smallest act of generosity. We take everything for granted (…) I don’t know a single courageous man. I trust no one. (…) These are my husband’s diaries. I found them clearing his desk—dozens of notebooks that sketch the portrait of a man I didn’t really know (…) Death is a simple phenomenon in nature, but we still find if perplexing and tragic. Every day I sort through my husband’s papers and learn that I shared my life with a stranger.

Stetco, The Loneliness Pill and Other Plays, 186

In each of these plays, at the heart of them, lies the very real, very commonplace, and very heartbreaking, even when it is sometimes funny, tragedy of miscommunication, misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and missed connection. Characters want love, they want connection, they admit that together they could be more than they are alone, and yet continuously, they fail at coming together. Fear, fantasy, fanatical adherence to rules, the failure of language, all insert themselves in the way of the necessary yet ever-illusive connections that could ultimately heal the characters loneliness, help them break free of their self-imposed or societally imposed systems of oppression, or the repetitive cycles of obsession and isolation they find themselves in.

Again, it is all too relevant, perhaps now, which makes it all the more funny, all the more heartbreaking, and all the more important to read.