Julia Cho presents an American family in her play, The Architecture of Loss. In the play, Catherine’s multi-generational family—Catherine, her father Richard, and her daughter Carmie—lives in the Arizona desert. Looking into the family as they go about their daily chores, Cho exposes layers of past experiences of loss of the family members and deals with such issues as a missing child, domestic violence, alcoholism, and a war veteran’s trauma. The painful experiences of loss in this family started with Richard's war trauma. His alcoholism caused domestic violence against Nora, his Korean wife, and led to Catherine marrying Greg, another alcoholic who left his family 14 years ago. Catherine's son, David, has been missing for eight years. Now as Greg visits his family led by “signs,” he becomes the witness of melancholic stories of the wounds of his wife and daughter and remembers his own experience with a hitchhiker, Jay.
This paper discusses the traumatic, melancholic, and supernatural aspects of loss presented in the play. Applying Freud and Cathy Caruth’s theories of trauma, Richard’s war trauma and its effect on other family members are discussed. Richard finally realizes his trauma and asks Catherine, whom he sees as Nora, to forgive him. According to Freud, experience of loss causes mourning and melancholy. On top of individual experiences of loss, the family members are suffering from melancholia due to David's disappearance as they do not even know whether he is dead or alive. In order to fathom the depth of the feelings of loss, Cho has the characters mention religious and supernatural phenomena. Some of the “supernatural” phenomena the characters experience, however, are caused by the strong light of the desert. Whenever Richard sees people with strong light behind them, he says they are from Nora. At the end of the play, Catherine sees a young man who is supposedly the grownup David. Unlike Richard, who realizes and tells “Nora” of his trauma only too late, Greg tells the story of his wound to Catherine. This may turn out to be a cause for reconciliation of the couple as the last stage direction indicates rain.