off at the ground are like a family denied its collective memory, left with no sense of rootedness or identity.

Although Wilson does not push as incessantly as Arthur Miller the notion of the debasement of the American Dream by the drive for unlimited success through competition and aggression, this criticism remains implicit in his Chekhov-like questioning of what has been sacrificed or lost in order to achieve material gain.

An integral part of the formulation of the American Dream has always been the promise of a New Eden, the restored garden to the West. The California in Wilson’s Lemon Sky, however, is a sterile wasteland, both environmentally and emotionally, where nothing is “naturally” green; rather, everything is autumnal, “umber, amber, olive, sienna, ocher, orange.”

While gardens, literal and symbolic, proliferate in Wilson’s work, they are just as likely to be dying out (as in The Hot l Baltimore and Redwood Curtain) as growing or thriving (as in Fifth of July). When the garden is healthy, it is usually because an artist tends and nurtures it. Even the creative imagination seems to atrophy when cut off from garden places.

Artists and artist figures—often estranged from their fathers—abound in Wilson’s plays. In Lemon Sky an adolescent writer-son is rejected by a long-lost father, who suspects him of homosexuality. In Burn This, a choreographer learns that the creative process necessarily involves drawing upon personal experience; eradicating the line between life and art can give rise to a representation that somehow mysteriously transcends life. In Redwood Curtain, a young pianist who discovers her identity through music expresses disillusionment with a public increasingly lacking any interest in art.

In the apocalyptic Angels Fall, set in a southwestern mission church under threat of radioactive fallout in a postnuclear “garden” surrounded by a uranium mine, a reactor, and a missile base, the concept of artist expands to include all who recognize their vocations—be they teachers, painters, priests, doctors, or athletes.

Once one hears the call and decides “what manner of persons who ought to be,” then “magic . . . happens and you know who you are.” Each of these characters, in the face of the pervasive danger of annihilation, goes forth from this temporary sanctuary committed to doing his or her work in a perilous world.

If the determination to work that one finds at the end of a Chekhov play sometimes seems but a hollow response to fear of facing the void, when such a determination occurs in Wilson’s work (for example in Angels Fall or in Fifth of July), it reflects instead a hard-won resolve, a positive renewal of oneself to active fellowship in the community of humankind.

The Mound Builders

First produced: 1975 (first published, 1976)

Type of work: Play

An archeological excavation pits scientists against land developers, uncovering not only a primitive god-mask but also human greed, jealousy, and violence.

The most complex treatment of Wilson’s themes appears in The Mound Builders, probably his most impressive achievement. The action occurs in “the mind’s eye” of Professor August Howe, who recalls an archeological dig he led the preceding summer in southern Illinois that unearthed an ancient burial ground of the Temple Mound People. Howe(accompanied by his wife, Cynthia, and their daughter) and his young assistant Dan Loggins (accompanied by his pregnant wife, Jean) come into conflict with the owner of the property and his twenty-five-year-old son, Chad, who hope to make a great deal of money by selling the land for a vacation resort.

Chad, who is carrying on an affair with Cynthia Howe, had saved Dan from drowning the summer before but now tries unsuccessfully to lure Jean away from him. Thwarted both personally in his desire for Jean and financially because laws prevent developing the property, Chad eventually kills Dan, bulldozes the excavation, and kills himself, leaving the god-king mask to be reburied by the mythic flood waters.

Wilson’s dramaturgy in this memory play approximates that of Williams in The Glass Menagerie. The playing area might be seen as August’s mind, with the slides of the precious artifacts that are projected onto the back wall prompting his remembrances. The central conflict is between the preservation of a culture, on one hand, and commercial progress on the other; between a past age of poetry and a present age of facts. The scientists stand poised between commercial promoters and creative artisans, capable of bending either way.

Whereas the ancient tribe sought its immortality through gorgeous works used in rituals, modern humans seek theirs through material gain. When Dan holds the death mask from the god-king “up to his face, and almost inadvertently it stays in place,” it is perhaps an act of hubris, revealing his lack of sufficient awe for the primitive culture and leading unwittingly to his death at the hands of the sexually jealous and money-crazed Chad.

The modern artist who arrives in this midwestern “garden of the gods” is Howe’s sister Delia. The author of one successful novel, she has been unable to summon up the creativity necessary to produce a second book. The source of her writing block was the death of her father and her separation from her paternal home.

If the heritage of the past, whether childhood home or ancient burial site, serves as a creative spur to the artist, then once these places are lost or defiled, judged as worthless or anachronistic except when exploited for profit, all that remains are “syllables, not sense.” Lack of adequate respect for the past results in a present beset by greed and violence and a decline into savagery.

Fifth of July

First produced: 1978 (first published, 1978)

Type of work: Play

Three generations of a family and four friends from the Vietnam War era gather to replay the past and decide on a direction for the future.

The first of Wilson’s plays about the Talley family, Fifth of July explores two of the playwright’s preoccupations: the need to preserve the past in order to live humanely in the present and the importance to both self and society of embracing one’s vocation. Although Fifth of July is an ensemble piece with several protagonists, the focal character is Kenny Tally, who arrived back from the Vietnam War with five citations for bravery but without his legs.

It is 1977, and Kenny is determined not to return to his calling as a high school teacher. Feeling discomfort over coming home alive, although maimed, from the war, Kenny senses the invisibility imposed upon veterans of an unpopular cause when others refuse to look at them out of shame or guilt.

Joining Kenny at the family homestead are his Aunt Sally Friedman, who has come back to spread the ashes of her deceased husband, Matt (the story of their courtship is later told in the 1979 play Talley’s Folly), Kenny’s sister June, who was a flower child in the 1960’s, and June’s daughter, Shirley, an aspiring writer.

Also visiting are John Landis, a record promoter who wants to buy the Talley property, and his wife, Gwen. They had attended the University of California at Berkeley with Kenny and June but had deliberately gone to Europe without Kenny, leaving him behind to be drafted. Tending the grounds of the Talley home has been Jed, Kenny’s homosexual lover.

Jed has gradually been replanting the property in the manner of a traditional English garden that will take years to mature; recently, he has rediscovered a lost rose that once again will be propagated at Sissinghurst Castle in England, “the greatest rose garden in the world.” Jed, in his planting of the garden and his caring for and loving the disabled Ken, is the new Adam who inspires a sense of purpose and restores a feeling of community after the Fall.

Both Sally, a representative of the oldest generation of Talleys onstage, and Shirley, a member of the family’s youngest generation, join Kenny in resisting the lure of spatial dislocation to answer instead the pull of the ancestral home. If necessary, Sally will buy the Talley place so that it will not go out of family control and become a cement airstrip, especially now that she and Jed have spread Matt’s ashes among the roses.

While Shirley commits the younger generation to renewing the Talley clan, Kenny—once he has learned how to understand the virtually unintelligible speech of his young half cousin through creatively having the boy record a story—overcomes the temptation to give up teaching and recommits himself to his “mission” in life. On all levels—the archetypal, the natural, the familial, and the individual—the movement of Fifth of July is thus from despair and death to renewal and rebirth.

Talley’s Folly

First produced: 1979 (first published, 1979)

Type of work: Play

Two misfits approaching middle age and discovering they are made for each other pledge love and commitment despite the opposition of a prejudiced family.

Set on July 4, 1944, Talley’s Folly concerns two characters who are revealed largely through exposition and lengthy monologues: Sally Talley, a nurse headed for self-imposed spinsterhood, and Matt Friedman, a liberal Jewish accountant fond of using comedy routines to mask his vulnerability.

The “folly” of the play’s title and the locale for the action is a boathouse that Sally’s Uncle Everett constructed in place of a gazebo he had hoped to build. Wilson opens the play using a Wilder-like frame, with Matt as narrator/stage manager conspiratorially explaining to the audience that they are about to witness a “once-upon-a-time” romance that could happen only in the theater.

When Matt narrates the history of his family—of a Prussian father and Ukrainian mother “indefinitely detained” by the Germans in World War I; of a Latvian sister tortured by the French so their father would divulge information he never had; and of himself, born in Lithuania and arriving as a refugee with his uncle from Norway via Caracas—he distances the painful story by narrating it in the third-person voice.

Because of his wandering family’s past, Matt considers himself non-nationalistic, feeling little allegiance to any political cause or “ism.” Although he escaped the draft because of his age, he is not unaffected by the war (which, he believes, governments deliberately prolong for economic reasons). Uncertain that there will ever be a time after this war, he refuses to bring another child into the world “to be killed for political purposes,” and thus he hesitates to marry Sally.

Sally yearns on this Independence Day to break free from a restrictive family that is anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, and anti-German—and, therefore, anti-Matt. Yet political, religious, and racial intolerance are not all that prevent her marriage. Years before, she was engaged to her high school sweetheart; their marriage portended a merger of two prominent families, but her father committed suicide during the Depression.

Finally, she reveals to Matt (and to the audience waiting to hear her secret) that an illness has left her sterile. Once her misconception that Matt is only claiming that he would never father a child in order to spare her the burden of not being able to give him one is cleared away, these two can unite.

The boathouse “folly” has always been, for Sally, a green world, a place of escape and magic. Matt and Sally leave the boathouse to return to a family and a community unprepared to accept them and ready to ostracize them, just as Matt, the stage manager again at play’s end, sends the audience out from the theater exactly ninety-seven minutes later into their imperfect world.

A dissonance exists between what Matt calls the “waltz” or “valentine” of this fairy tale the audience has been watching and the prejudice that pervades their world. Sally Talley’s folly, shared by Matt, is the courage to choose love in spite of the world’s unwillingness to dissolve barriers of class, nationality, politics, and religion.

Talley and Son

First produced: 1985 (first published, 1986)

Type of work: Play

This play in Wilson’s Talley cycle deals with father-son relationships in three generations of Talleys.

This play, produced relatively late in Lanford Wilson’s Talley cycle, actually had its first Broadway airing in 1981, when it was produced as A Tale Told. This early version of the play was not a notable success, although it received some encouraging critical attention. After it closed on Broadway, it enjoyed a continued run Off-Broadway.

Wilson has a habit of working and reworking plays that do not please him, and he reworked A Tale Told for four years, bringing it to Broadway with the new title Talley and Son. The play has a complicated plot, but Wilson provides one character, the ghost of Timmy Talley, to serve the function of the chorus in Greek plays, that of giving the audience the details that they need to follow the action.

The play opens at sunset on the fourth of July, 1944. Timmy Talley’s ghost returns to his home on a rise overlooking Lebanon, Missouri, Wilson’s birthplace. Timmy, a member of the United States Marine Corps, was granted a furlough to come home from the South Pacific, where he was stationed, to attend the funeral of his grandfather, Calvin. Ironically, the old man has rallied to the point that he sneaks out in his son’s Packard automobile for a drive. Timmy was killed before he was able to leave the battle area. His brother, Buddy, who is serving in the armed forces in Italy, having received a similar furlough, arrived home a day earlier.

The play’s first act juggles four separate lines of narrative. Most of the characters have appeared earlier in other Wilson plays relating to the Talleys, and Wilson uses Timmy, in his role as chorus, to fill in needed details.

The Talley family has secrets that are gradually revealed as the play evolves. The grandfather, Calvin, is aware that his son Eldon impregnated the family’s washerwoman, Viola Pratt, eighteen years earlier. Avalaine Pratt, the child born of Eldon’s union with Viola, is now seventeen. Calvin tries to bribe her to marry Emmet Young, a handyman whom he employs.

Avalaine realizes her parentage and demands her part of the family fortune. Eldon, who has been running Talley & Sons, is under pressure from Delaware Industries to sell the company. Calvin is in favor of selling, but Eldon is stalwartly opposed to doing so. Calvin thinks he can prevent the impending sale, but Eldon has his father’s power of attorney, and, by using it in accordance with his own preferences rather than his father’s, he can thwart the takeover.

In this play, Wilson deals effectively with crucial intergenerational relationships as well as with the dog-eat-dog environment of big business. He also shows the effect of a prolonged war on a family whose sons are involved directly in it. The play seethes with the small-mindedness of a midwestern town. It deals also with the manipulation of the little people by those in power.

Redwood Curtain

First produced: 1992 (first published, 1993)

Type of work: Play

One of the recurring themes in Lanford Wilson’s plays is the search for the father, which underlies the entire action of this play.

The play’s main character is Geri, a seventeen-year-old whose mother is a Vietnamese florist and whose father, an American GI, impregnated his lover and then disappeared. Another American soldier found Geri and took her to the United States. This soldier, Laird Riordan, and his wife, Julia, adopted Geri and raised her in California. Geri develops into a concert pianist who has a promising career before her. At seventeen, she already has a lucrative record contract with Sony.

Laird has carefully groomed Geri for the musical career that is now within reach for her. An alcoholic, Laird suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder that, in part, accounts for the heavy drinking that leads to his death just as Geri’s career is beginning to take off. After Laird’s death, Julia sets out for Europe, leaving Geri in the care of her Aunt Geneva, who lives in a sequoia forest.

It is here among the redwoods of the play’s title that Geri puts her concert career on hold to search for her biological father. She has little information about him, although she does remember her birth mother telling her that he had one brown and one blue eye.

The redwood forest near Geneva’s house is home to a contingent of homeless war veterans who survive on their meager disability checks. Among this motley throng is Lyman Fellers. Because he has one brown and one blue eye, Geri is convinced that he is her father, although he actually is not.

Nevertheless, Geri pursues him relentlessly. Lyman, who just wants to be left alone, is the only one of the homeless veterans whom the audience meets, but he comes to represent all such veterans. Geri eventually redeems him somewhat unconvincingly by playing Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedies” for him.

Wilson introduces into the play one of his favorite topics—the rape of the land by an industrial society. Lumber companies unconscionably destroy centuries-old redwoods for quick profits. For Wilson, such destruction represents the destruction of familial roots as well. Wilson, in much of his work, introduces gardens and plants, which he contends can be saved only by artists. He uses them as props to shed light on the role of artists in society.

Redwood Curtain was not well received on Broadway. Because he did not want his audiences to be distracted at any point in its development, Wilson insisted that the play, long on diatribe and short on action and more than two hours in length, be presented without an intermission.

In addition, Redwood Curtain was pieced together from two of Wilson’s shorter, earlier plays. The joining of the two stories was, in this case, not seamless. Despite these reservations, Redwood Curtain is an important play in the Wilson canon because it reveals some of the artist’s most consuming social concerns.

In 1995, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) presented a two-hour adaptation of the play on prime-time television. This version was better received than the Broadway version had been.

Day

First produced: 1995, as part of By the Sea by the Sea by the Beautiful Sea (first published, 1996)

Type of work: Play

This play served as one act in a three-part drama by Wilson and two other playwrights as an experiment in collaboration.

Members of the Bay Street Theatre Festival Committee in Long Island’s Hamptons hatched the original idea for By the Sea by the Sea by the Beautiful Sea. The community, the heart of which is Sag Harbor, is home to many writers, actors, and other celebrities. The committee proposed involving three of the area’s most notable playwrights—Terrence McNally, Joe Pintauro, and Lanford Wilson—in a collaborative effort that would eventuate in three one-act plays having to do with the sea and the beach. The plays would all take place on one day, respectively in the morning, at noon, and at sunset.

Wilson’s contribution to this collaborative effort is the middle play, “Day.” Pintauro wrote “Dawn,” and McNally wrote “Dusk.” The great challenge was to have a unified work rather than merely three one-act plays. The authors gathered to decide what the setting of each play would be, and they finally decided that the beach would become the unifying setting. After it was decided that dawn, day, and dusk would be times of the plays, the three playwrights drew straws to determine which time frame each would use. Each play was to have three characters, two women and one man, but they were to play different roles in the plays, each of whose characters was different.

Originally, one of the plays took place at a lifeguard station, one on a dock, and one on a stretch of beach. Finally, however, to increase the unity of the production, it was decided that all of the plays would take place on a stretch of beach and that there would be no identifying references to actual places so that the beach in each play would have a universality.

Pintauro’s play begins in the very early morning and continues until dawn. It is about a sister, a brother, and the brother’s wife who come to the beach to spread the ashes of their dead mother. Wilson’s contribution takes place during the lunch hour and involves a man who does landscaping, his girlfriend, and a mysterious woman writer. McNally’s contribution takes place at sunset and involves two woman vying for the attention of one man.

Wilson’s play is unique in the trio because it begins with a clean slate and is heavily plot-oriented. The audience knows nothing about Ace, his male character, so his whole story is unfolded without reference to any past history. Such is not the case in the other two plays. Writing within the one-act format, Wilson has to develop his play quickly, as do the other two collaborators.

The women characters in the three acts contrast sharply to each other. Mace, the writer, is reserved and, on the surface, more proper than Bill, Ace’s girlfriend. She also appears to be better educated. Ace himself is reserved and enjoys being alone, but not to the extent that Mace does.

At one point, Bill engages in a shouting match with Ace, during which all three characters talk heatedly and simultaneously. They get into a discussion about the immigration of Latins to the United States. Ace points out that a twenty-seven-year-old pharmacist from Columbia works with him planting trees and doing landscaping for the affluent because he can make more money doing that than he can ever hope to make in Colombia pursuing his profession.

This experiment was extremely creative in its conception. It also was remarkably creative in its execution on Broadway under the splendid direction of Leonard Foglia.