Riff on Scenes 1 and 2 in Mineola Twins

I was thinking about the first two scenes of "Mineola Twins," how they mirror each other. In terms of the sisters: good girl, bad girl; sexual repression, sexual abandon; radical conformity, radical nonconformity. But why does Vogel contrast cars--Square Jim's Ford vs. Jimmy Dean's crumpled Spyder? Why does Jim dream of hard work and accumulated wealth with his repressed beloved, but dream of poetry with his sexually exuberant beloved? My sense of the meeting of Freud and Marx is largely derived from the footnotes of one of my favorite novels, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. In his (sometimes fictional) intellectual history of Freudian-Marxian thought, Puig claims that sexual repression is necessary for capitalist accumulation: delayed gratification leads not only to marriage but business prosperity. On the contrary, lovers of instant gratification, live, according to Puig's account, in primitive conditions. I do not know if there is any reality to this. But Vogel seems to be exploring the intersection of sex and political-economy.

Most people I know assume that sexual repression is a bad deal--boring, etc. (And it appears that way in Vogel's play.) But Vogel seems aware, too, that sexual freedom has its costs... or, if it is not sexual freedom that is expensive, it is, more generally, the lack of discipline (which hipsters see as repression). I guess that is what I love about Vogel: she is both critical and forgiving of everyone--the repressed Myra's of the world and the unrestrained Myrna's of the world (though I still think Myrna's hipster discourse in scene 2 is some of the greatest dialogue I have read in a long time.)

Jim, by the way, strikes me as one of the most pathetic characters I have ever encountered on the page. Peck is a good old boy, compared to Jimmy-Jimbo. Though he needs the praise and admiration from Myra, he wants to control her; and though he is weak and guided by Mryna (have I mixed up the names?), he feels at ease condemning her. It is a horrific portrait of American masculinity.