VOICE: A "DOVE" refrigerator, Housewives of America, is love! (jingle: it's a love, it's a love...)
VOICE: Housewives of America - you are more fortunate because you have a "DOVE"!
But, you, sick people of America, You are more fortunate because you can have a "DOVE"! "DOVE" keeps even your heart fresh, sick people of America,
"DOVE" is living "DOVE" is thrilling It's a thrilling "DOVE"!
-Voice of TV commercials from Michael Fratti's play "The Refrigerators" (1969)
In 1964, future U.S. President Richard Nixon said, "the Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat" (Reader's Digest). Postwar politics desperately needed some cooling off, and the American government perhaps took that too literally - sending refrigerators and other appliances around world. Just five years earlier, in 1959, the federal government curated the American National Exhibition, which showed at the Moscow Trade Fair. The exhibition featured "home appliances, fashions, television, and hi-fi sets, a model house priced to sell [to] an 'average' family, farm equipment, 1959 automobiles, boats, sporting equipment and a children's playground" (Evening Post). Of all the aspects of modern convenience, kitchen appliances received the most attention - partly because of new innovations, also because of a famous happening known as the "Kitchen Debate."
Then Vice President Nixon attended the fair as the prominent American delegate, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev accompanied him around - an interaction the press dubbed "Nik and Dik." The two debated at every turn, talking about technology here and missile ammunitions there. The conversation reached a pinnacle at the model kitchen installation as cameras snapped photos of the two delegates inspecting and pointing at appliances. Dik saw wholesomeness in the sleek white counter, cupboard, washer, and refrigerator. Nik saw wastefulness.
It is interesting that the two talked politics in an imagined American home - a place, according to propaganda, that was vulnerable to moral corruption by the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, propaganda fueled erratic fears that manifested culturally in absurd and hyperbolic forms. One particularly weird example is Michael Fratti's play, "The Refrigerators," from 1969 - a decade after the "Kitchen Debate." In the play, a mad scientist named Willy, who works for the famous appliance company Dove, keeps a former lover, a friend, and the family pet orangutan in three separate refrigerators. The refrigerators keep the individuals in a state of "artificial hibernation" or "suspended animation." They are still alive, but they have no free will. Of course, Willy obtained his idea from a breaking news story from - where else but - Russia, where they defrosted and revived a lizard, leading presumably to an irrational refrigeration race between countries. If the Soviets could not invade by military force, they would do so by compression - vapor-compression that is - turning Americans into enslaved, slumbering produce.
Using modified refrigerators, Willy can create "an automaton, a passive doll in my hands," representing the misuse and abuse of innovations. The illogical premise illustrates the derangement and obsessive irrationality of the Cold War period, which was dangerously wrapped up in technology. By exposing and exploiting this, "The Refrigerators" is just as clever and spot on as Stanley Kubrick's film "Dr. Strangelove" (1964). Society must be mad if something as simple as the refrigerator can become sinister.