Sweet Bird of Youth

Alexandra Del Lago, who goes by the “Princess Kosmonopolis,” is an aging movie star who is struggling to cope with the passage of time and her looming fall from stardom. She is a victim of Hollywood’s traditional insistence on the youth and beauty of its stars. The alias by which she is referred throughout the play, Princess Kosmonopolis, is illustrative of her character as a whole. Her stardom makes her a kind of royalty, while the particular title—“princess”—is often that of a young woman. In dubbing herself this, she creates a simulacra of the youthfulness she so desires. “Kosmonopolis” implies “cosmopolitan,” or someone who travels between cities, just as she is doing at the opening of the play. It is also an ostentatious, fabricated word, highlighting the Princess’s darkly humorous state of crisis.

The Princess is self-consciously aware that her days as a performer are numbered. When she finally secures a role in a movie, she flees the movie premiere during a close-up on her face. As she recalls to Chance, “[Y]our head, your face, is caught in the frame of the picture with a light blazing on it and all your terrible history screams while you smile” (38). She thinks she can hear people gasp when they see how old she is. Like Chance, she is driven by bruised vanity: She is mortified by the signs of her aging, such as her need for an oxygen mask and glasses.

Throughout the play, the Princess is disoriented by her self-destructive use of drugs and alcohol. She talks in long, elliptical, poetic monologues in which she refers to herself as an “ogre.” Despite this self-disgust, she remains beholden to her futile pursuit of youth and its attendant moral compromises: As she tells Chance, “I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for” (47). In particular, the Princess uses Chance to feel desired, coercing him into having sex with her in exchange for money. Although she is sensitive to his plight and does not wish harm to come to him, the limits of the transactional relationship are laid bare when she abandons him to return to the spotlight after learning about the success of her movie.

Heavenly Finley is a minor character in Sweet Bird of Youth. She is a young woman in her mid-twenties and Chance’s love interest. Heavenly is the daughter of Boss Finley and a tragic figure. Although she was once young, free, and beautiful, by the opening of the play, she has been “castrated” through an abortion and sterilization.

In Chance’s mind, Heavenly is an idealized woman with almost mystical powers to restore his youth and thus his manhood. After Chance fails to perform during the national theater competition, he has sex with her to reclaim his sense of masculinity and power. When he experiences a mental health crisis while in military service, she becomes “more important to [him] than anything else” (53), presumably because he once again wishes her to restore his sense of personhood. For all this, he fails to recognize how his actions impact her. He does not treat her with respect, only seeking her out when he needs her in a stark illustration of the theme of The Universality of Exploitation and Transactional Relationships. Heavenly is likewise used by her father, Boss Finley, who forces her to stand onstage with him as a model of the Southern virginity that needs to be protected from the “threat” of Black men.

For her part, Heavenly feels “dry, cold, empty, like an old woman” because of the abortion and sterilization (73). However, she does not bear a grudge against Chance despite what he has put her through and laments to her father that he did not let them marry. When her father threatens Chance’s life to secure her participation in his speech, she protects Chance by agreeing, though it means abetting both her father’s racism and his hypocrisy. However, when the Heckler publicly draws attention to her operation, she “collapses” under the stress and scrutiny, securing her characterization as a victim of the men who surround her.

Boss Finley is a caricature of a Southern political boss: one who is racist and obsessed with racial and sexual “purity.” He is a flat character primarily driven by his need for power and is Chance’s primary antagonist throughout the play. Boss Finley did not feel Chance was good enough for his daughter and refused to let them marry. When Chance returns to St. Cloud, he marshals his resources, including his connections with the hospital director, assistant hotel manager, and local police, to force Chance to leave—or to have him killed.

Despite his political power, Boss Finley is another character who must reckon with his impotence and inability to control everything to his liking. His children are, in his eyes, disappointments and embarrassments. His son, Tom Junior, is little more than a violent lackey, while his daughter, Heavenly, is disgraced by her abortion and what it reveals—that she had sex outside of marriage. Even his mistress, Miss Lucy, proclaims publicly that he is too old to be a lover, which serves as a form of figurative castration. As Heavenly astutely observes, “Papa, you have got an illusion of power” (73). Boss Finley’s response, “I have power, which is not an illusion” (73), is belied when his triumphant rally devolves into a riot after the heckler exposes Heavenly’s operation.

Tom Junior is Boss Finley’s son, Heavenly’s brother, and a minor character in the work. He is a violent, toadying young man who seeks his father’s approval despite his lack of intelligence or talent. He is the tool Boss Finley uses to get Chance away from his daughter by any means necessary, illustrating that their father-son relationship is essentially transactional.

Tom Junior is desperate for his father’s approval, but his father is unimpressed with him. Boss Finley recounts how Tom Junior’s drunken antics are an embarrassment and how Tom had “to be drove through school like a blazeface mule pullin’ a plow uphill” (67). Tom attempts to support his father through the creation of “‘Youth for Tom Finley’ clubs” (66), but Boss Finley dismisses them as “practically nothin’ but gangs of juvenile delinquents” (67). When his father says that he wants Chance gone from St. Cloud by midnight, Tom is eager to do whatever it takes to win his father’s approval and thereby prove his value, even potentially commit murder. At the end of the play, Tom finds Chance in his hotel room, where it is implied that Tom and his henchmen castrate Chance.