A Study Guide for Gore Vidal's "Visit to a Small Planet"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Gore Vidal's "Visit to a Small Planet," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535842181

Book preview

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Visit to a Small Planet

Gore Vidal

1957

Introduction

If a visitor from another galaxy happened to land on earth to observe the United States firsthand, what kind of impression would the country make on a complete stranger to die human race? This is the question posed in Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, a comedy subtitled as A Comedy Akin to a Vaudeville. Originally presented as a television play in 1957 (it had a New York City stage premiere in the same year), the satirical play follows the exploits of Kreton, an alien who lands on Earth, hoping to catch a glimpse of the American Civil War only to find that something went wrong with the machine; he has landed in the Manassas, Virginia, of the mid-twentieth century, outside of the Spelding family’s home. Upon learning that it is not 1861, Kreton nevertheless decides to stay and observe human behavior: You are my hobby, he tells the Speldings, and I am going native.

Unlike film aliens such as E.T. or the creatures in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Kreton is no lovable Martian. Arrogant, selfish, and patronizing, he is determined to make his stay memorable by starting a full-scale war between the United States and die Soviet Union (die setting being the days of the Cold War, when trust between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was distinctly lacking).I admit I’m leaping into this on the spur of the moment, he admits at the end of Act I, "but we’re going to have such good