Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky

A simple story of an older man falling in love with a younger woman, and the challenges their relationship faces because of skepticism from their families.

Lessons learned on next page...

1. Love: The falling in love is very simple. Betty feels isolated and unheard by her husband, and when she tries to talk to anyone else about her emotions, she is almost immediately shut down until she meets Mr. Kingsley, who not only listens to her, he insists that she not apologize for talking. It’s very clear that he’s the first person who’s found her opinions worth hearing, so she loves him. It’s a good technique, showing her being thwarted over and over and then suddenly she’s not. Also, Kingsley’s love for her makes sense... he doesn’t want someone in his situation, a widow to his widower, he needs someone who makes him feel more needed.

2. The boning: Betty and Kingsley have unremarkable sex at a certain point, and they have a really real and personal conversation. He was afraid, she was afraid, but they couldn’t maintain a chaste relationship. Basically, they’re both just like, yeah that sex was eh, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what this is about. It’s an interesting contrast: Betty’s sex with her husband is great, and her mom repeatedly says that sex is all that’s important. So Betty basically HAS to have bad sex with Kingsley in order to challenge her love for him, and when she does, it just presents this other hurdle. I feel like sex is often used as a metric for the success of a relationship, and here, it’s almost like the mature choice is for Betty to accept that she wants more than physical love and not care about Kingsley’s performance. It’s a strong choice in the play and a strong choice for her character.

3. Language: Simple. Timeless. Could have been written today. People say Chayefsky was ahead of his time but I feel like he just had a sense of human conversation that transcends a particular moment in history and that’s something we should also try to achieve. The whole story is very simple and timeless.