Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Themes

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll tells the story of four friends—Roo, Olive, Barney, and Nancy—whose summer tradition is changing. Roo and Barney, who work as sugarcane cutters in the bush seven months out of the year, spend their five non-working months (the "layoff season") with Olive and Nancy, engaging in all manner of youthful shenanigans. They've been observing this tradition for sixteen years, but the seventeenth year is different: Nancy…

For the past sixteen years, Barney, Roo, Olive, and Nancy have idealized the layoff season, the five months of each year that they spend lounging, drinking, going out, and having sex. They value this time beyond measure and without any sense that their lifestyle is shallow, immature, or possibly damaging in the long run. During the seventeenth summer of the layoff, however, Nancy doesn't participate because she recently married another man. To…

The layoff season is a longstanding tradition for Roo, Barney, Olive, and Nancy, and it is the guiding event around which they organize their year. As such, the characters prize loyalty to their tradition highly—even at the expense of loyalty to and empathy for one another. When the seventeenth layoff season doesn't unfold as planned, the play begins to question the wisdom of relying so heavily on upholding a tradition, since…