Am I Blue?

A response essay after reading a play

What’s in a Color?

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

-Adolf Hitler

      The question I was assigned was: How many times and where is the word “blue” used? On what meanings do you think the playwright intended for us to concentrate? The word “blue” was used 7 times in Am I Blue. As for the meanings the playwright intended her audience to consider there are several.

     Blue in and of itself is an ambiguous color if you think about it. Depending on tone, shade, and lighting the color can have any connotation and induce any mood. Paint a room a blue that is a mix of slate, robin’s egg, and stormy ocean and you have a relaxed more serious environment. Wear a pair of adorable turquoise blue shorts and you feel perky and happy. See a pale soft blue blanket and you automatically think of a sweet baby boy. Different blues have different tones just as different sections of Am I Blue have different meanings. 

     In the beginning of the play, we see the word blue in Ashbe’s description of an old woman of whom she is fond. We see an elderly woman in a “sunhat and blue print dress.” In our mind’s eye, the connotation blue brings is positive. Sunhat makes us think of the sun, summertime, working in a garden and then with the blue print dress we think of pretty blue flowers on the dress and then with the mention of blue and sun together like that we are reminded of a beautiful summer sky. The playwright wanted us to see Ashbe as a young woman who liked this happy, friendly sounding woman, to show the caring side of Ashbe and her appreciation for life and happiness.

     We see the word blue again towards the middle of the play. Once when Ashbe asks John Polk his favorite color and the second when she tells how her sister made the blue ceramics. With John Polk’s limp response to Ashbe’s enquiry, we see just how bland and depressed he is feeling, blue as a boy’s favorite color is expected and stereotypical. He is just going along with trend as usual, saying and being what he believes others think he should be. Basically his answer was a copout. When Ashbe said her sister made the blue ceramics her tone had changed from being bubbly as before. Then she says “Madeline gets to live with Mama.”  From the way the conversation has turned we see Ashbe’s happy carefree demeanor change as we see how alone she is, how young she is. And how being separated from her mother has affected her. Blue takes on the typical meaning for sadness here.

The last time blue is mentioned in the play is to describe drinks. Ashbe describes a ball she wished she could go to, complete with “bubbly blue champagne!” She also fixes “blue drink” for herself and John Polk. She makes it with just water and food coloring because she is poor and can’t afford to buy much of anything. Here blue is used as a means for us to see Ashbe’s imagination and creativity. She wishes for blue champagne and fancy dances but because of her situation she can’t have that, she makes do with the best that she has. She has only water to drink, but colors glasses of water blue, making the ordinary a bit more extraordinary. It’s more “aesthetic” that way. Even though she has a bleak situation she colors her world and makes her surroundings much happier by changing and brightening up what she can, in this case, her water. 

     Another way we see blue used is in the way Ashbe speaks. Everything is random. She starts a conversation and then, out of the blue, changes subject completely by asking an odd question. Much like the Hatter asks Alice why a raven is like a writing desk. Her habit of changing the subject is a coping mechanism of sorts. If she gets uncomfortable she changes the subject. Because she does this often and in the same manner all the time, people see this as normal behavior for her and her distractions work in her favor. At the end of the play she finally lets her guard down and seems almost normal with John Polk, almost like she used her flamboyancy and brightness as a shield she finally lowered. 

     Overall we see several different uses for “blue” throughout the play. Henley used pretty much every facet the color blue has to offer. Happy, sad, light, depressed etc. She was able to use blue not only to manipulate the audience’s view of her characters and their feelings, but also to create a certain mood within the audience-member; just as Ashbe created her own happiness.  I’m sure the quote at the beginning of this paper sticks out as a major contrast in attitude. Especially against bubbly Ashbe. Ashbe saw her world differently, she created her own reality. In Hitler’s Germany she should have been killed according to the quote. But in this world she created a life as beautiful as possible, a world she could exist in, because her reality was so horrible and bleak. Her world was blue. But she changed the blueness into brilliant cerulean with her imagination.