Why Marry?

Jesse Lynch Williams's Pulitzer-winning comedy takes aim at the institution of marriage with sharp, progressive wit. When a self-supporting, independent young woman enters a household where Jean, the younger sister, has been raised with one purpose, to marry, she sparks a furiously funny battle of ideals. The family mounts its defense of marriage as sacred and moral, but the New Age visitor poses uncomfortable questions: Is marriage a partnership or a prison? Does it unite lovers or separate them? What begins as a comedic clash of old and new values becomes a surprisingly modern examination of love, autonomy, and what it truly means to choose someone. Williams writes with a lightness of touch that makes his radical ideas go down like champagne, yet the play's underlying arguments about women's economic independence and emotional agency were genuinely radical in 1917. A century later, Why Marry? remains dazzling entertainment precisely because its central question has never been fully answered: what is marriage for?