Play - Malibu Ranch

"At a party in May she left not with the choreographer who had brought her but with an actor she had never met before...driving up through the canyon in the actor's Ferrari she felt good for the first time in a long while" (152).

Malibu Ranch is where the anonymous actor Maria sleeps with takes her. In the middle of the night, she steals his car and uses it to drive to Las Vegas. Even more so than her drive to Baker, her drive to Las Vegas in the actor’s car symbolizes a regression for her. Taking the car would appear to be a rare moment of action for Maria, but in doing it in the middle of the night, and as a way of avoiding an uncomfortable situation, rather than confronting it, Maria, in typical fashion, attempts to escape her problems. She tries to flee to her hometown in order to visit her parent’s graves, and when she gets caught, she is picked up by a friend who treats her like a child. For Maria, literally as geographically westward as she can go, and figuratively on the edge of her emotional capacity, her only options are to drive in a circular manner, which gets her no where, or drive eastward, which takes her into her past—neither of which are healthy. In one she is in an emotional stasis, and the other has her rehashing the past (not even coming to terms with it and moving on, but reliving it).