Wilson, Lanford (Vol. 197) - Anne M. Dean (essay date 1994)

Anne M. Dean (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Dean, Anne M. “Balm in Gilead” and “Burn This.” In Discovery and Invention: The Urban Plays of Lanford Wilson, pp. 61-79, 94-122. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Dean asserts that Balm in Gilead displays Wilson's talent for poetic dialogue and that Burn This is one of his most important works.]

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear—

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Balm in Gilead is the earliest and perhaps most disconcerting of Wilson's urban plays. Like his other works set in a city, this drama is both ambitious and brave, seeking to cover a wide range of issues by means of unconventional, even alienating, effects. It is at once a fairly realistic chronicle of life as lived by a particular section of the New York underclass at a specific period in history and a...

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