crazy to come down here,’’ but says he could not help himself. ‘‘You’ve got a wire crossed or something,’’ Sally says, and Matt agrees, ‘‘A screw loose.’’ ‘‘You are one total, living loose screw,’’ Sally repeats. Later, Matt tells Sally, ‘‘Sally has decided she is an eccentric old maid, and she is going to be one.’’ Sally replies, ‘‘I’m looking forward to it.’’ She calls him ‘‘goofy,’’ and he calls her ‘‘a crazy woman.’’ Matt is right when he comments, ‘‘We are a lot alike, you know?’’

Sally, Lottie, and Matt are all alienated from the others, but the reader’s fondness for them does not grow out of sympathy. Instead, their oddness has taught them a kind of inner strength and an engaging, humorous detachment. We like them because they are not like everyone else—and because everyone else is boring, selfish, and cruel.

There is another relative from whom Sally draws courage: Uncle Everett ‘‘Whistler’’ Talley, the creator of the folly. Uncle Whistler is really the brother of Calvin, Sally’s now-senile grandfather. While Calvin was building up the family business, Whistler was building follies, or elaborate, fanciful buildings, ‘‘all over town.’’ Like Matt, Sally, and Lottie, Whistler was misunderstood by those around him. He built the boathouse because his brother would not let him build a gazebo, a ‘‘frivolity,’’ near the house, and when he wanted to build the bandstand in the park, ‘‘The town didn’t want it, but he’d seen it in a picture somewhere so he went right over and built it.’’ Sally seems to be the only one who understands Uncle Whistler, as she says:

He was not in the least frustrated. He was a happily married man with seven kids. He made toys. Tapdancing babies and whirligigs. He got pleasure out of making things for people. He did exactly what he wanted to do. He was the healthiest member of the family. Everybody in town knew him.

It was another one of Everett Talley’s oddities that earned him the nickname ‘‘Whistler’’: ‘‘he sang and whistled’’ everywhere he went. ‘‘He used to go stomping through the woods singing ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ [a secret sorrow] at the top of his lungs; nobody knew what he was singing, so they all said he was crazy.’’ If Sally could only see it, an appreciation for music is another quality that Uncle Everett shares with Sally and Matt, and another clue that Sally and Matt are suited for each other.

Music plays a symbolic role in Talley’s Folly from the beginning, when Matt repeats insistently to the audience, ‘‘This is a waltz, remember, one-twothree, one-two-three.’’ Matt is ‘‘not a romantic type,’’ but he needs the play to turn out as ‘‘a noholds- barred romantic story,’’ and the music is an essential ingredient for him. It was, after all, at a dance that Matt and Sally first met, and they went back to the Shriners’ mosque every night for seven nights to dance and be together. This evening in the boathouse, Matt tries several humorous approaches to break down Sally’s resistance, but at first has little success. As he tries to skate, Sally is impatient with him, until he ‘‘has taken hold of her and let go of the wall’’ and at the same time has begun to sing ‘‘‘Over the Waves,’ waltz-tempo, low at first, gaining in confidence.’’ The music makes him more confident, and also draws her closer; it is their first moment of real intimacy, and it lasts until Matt stops singing to say, ‘‘I’m having an old-fashioned skate with my girl.’’

A bit later, when Matt has fallen through the floor and Sally has coldly wiped away the blood, Matt draws her in again by recalling the memory of ‘‘Poor Uncle Whistler. He should see what is happening to his boathouse. He’d sing ‘Una furtiva lagrima.’’’ Matt’s appreciation of Whistler, the boathouse, and the music turn Sally toward him again. She tells Matt how much she has loved the place, and how ‘‘nobody else would come here and discover the magic of the place except me.’’ The fact that Sally has brought Matt here, and that he has passed the test by admiring the folly, should tell her, as it tells the reader, that he is meant for her.

Matt sings to Sally again after he has told the story of his past and she has pushed him away. This time he sings ‘‘Lindy Lou,’’ a song the Lebanon band played as they danced the year before. Again the music weakens Sally’s resistance, and again Matt spoils the moment by mentioning marriage.

But finally she gives in, and agrees to elope. The two people who fit nowhere else are going to start a life together. As they sit in eccentric Uncle Whistler’s boathouse, they can hear the band playing ‘‘Lindy Lou’’ in Uncle Whistler’s bandstand across the river. As Matt says, it is just like a Valentine.

Sally has been resisting marriage, because her inability to bear children makes her feel unsuitable or inadequate for her conventional role. What she only begins to understand by the end of Talley’s Folly is that there are different ways to be a family. Sally’s parents have primarily thought of her more as a bargaining chip than a daughter worthy of love, and withdrew from her when she was ‘‘no longer of value to the merger.’’ The fact of her oddness makes her less appealing to her family, even as it makes her more appealing to Matt and to the reader. In her own life, Sally has looked up to and drawn love from the odd ones—her grandfather’s brother Whistler and her father’s sister Lottie—not from her immediate family.

Thirty-three years later, the Sally of Fifth of July knows what it takes to make a family. Matt is gone, but they lived together happily until the day he died. In many ways, Sally has followed in her Aunt Lottie’s footsteps. Lottie did not share the politics or the anti-Semitism of the rest of the Talleys, and was able to bless the love between Sally and Matt. Now Sally blesses the love between her nephew Ken and his partner Jed—an attitude which puts her in a small minority in 1979. Just as the childless Aunt Lottie supplied Sally with the love that the ineffectual Netta could not, Sally loves and guides her own niece’s daughter Shirley, whose parents are not up to the task.

In an article entitled ‘‘The Talley Plays and the Evolution of the American Family,’’ Robert Cooperman describes two sociological models of the American family, the ‘‘family of security’’ and the ‘‘family of freedom,’’ and he concludes that in pairing Matt and Sally, Wilson rejects both models in favor of something newer. Matt and Sally are both unconventional, and, ‘‘Their dissimilar backgrounds and decision not to have children to impose a hierarchy on . . . leaves them in a non-traditional, but ultimately workable, family situation.’’ I have more hope for these two than Cooperman does. To me, the union of these unconventional people looks not just ‘‘workable,’’ but delightful, ‘‘constructed of louvers, and lattice and geegaws.’’

Source: Cynthia A. Bily, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan.

In his critical study Lanford Wilson, Gene Barnett writes of Talley’s Folly, ‘‘The familiar motif of the impact of the past on the present underlies the . . . theme of spiritual isolation making real communication difficult.’’ Talley’s Folly, one of a trilogy about the Talley family, focuses on the union of two people, both of whom must break free from their solitude in order to join their lives.

On the surface, Matt and Sally seem to have little in common. He is a forty-two-year-old European Jew who works as an accountant in St. Louis. She is a thirty-one-year-old self-described spinster who still lives in her family home in the small town of Lebanon, Missouri. However, both are harboring past traumas and what they consider to be their own inadequacies—Matt’s refusal to father children and Sally’s inability to bear children. They have developed into adults cut off from all other people. That they have found each other in the first place is almost miraculous, the work of a ‘‘mischievous angel [who] has looked down and saw us.’’ However, on the evening of July 4, 1944, a challenge still remains, and it is what drives forward Talley’s Folly: How will these two people open up to each other?

Indeed, at the heart of Talley’s Folly is the issue of identity: how people are imprisoned by it as well as how they must actively work to change the way they see themselves. Throughout the play, Matt and Sally are invited to break free from their long-held roles. The story takes place a year after Matt and Sally’s first meeting at a dance. At that time, they were able to step beyond their boundaries because of the short nature of their love affair. Sally, for instance, daringly brought Matt home for dinner. After Matt’s vacation ended, however, their individual progress took very different turns. Sally returned to her closed self, ignoring Matt’s many letters, refusing to see him when he came down for a visit, and denying her feelings for him. Matt, however, chose to reject the man he once was. As he recalls, ‘‘I said, Matt, go down, tell Sally who you are. Once in your life risk something. At least you will know that you did what you could. What do you think she is going to do, bite you?’’ Matt gives up his identity in order to gain a better one—that of Sally’s husband.

The importance of identity drives the play. It is referenced consistently up until the moment when Matt proposes marriage to Sally.

SALLY: Don’t sing to me, it’s ridiculous. And my name is not Lindy Lou. It’s Sally Talley. (They both smile.)

MATT: I know, I came down to talk to you about that.

Through the eyes of others, as a European immigrant Matt’s identity derives from being an outsider in the United States. Physically, he is different from those people who surround him. Unlike Sally, described as ‘‘light,’’ Matt is ‘‘dark’’ and wears a beard. He speaks with ‘‘a trace of a German-Jewish accent, of which he is probably unaware.’’ In Sally’s provincial town of Lebanon, he is viewed primarily in light of his religious background. Sally’s brother Buddy meets him with the words, ‘‘You’re Sally’s Jewish friend, ain’t ya? What do you think you want here? Did you ever hear that trespassing was against the law?’’ On the whole, Sally’s family, with the exception of Aunt Charlotte, wants Matt to have nothing to do with Sally. When Matt comes to the Talley house, Sally’s mother and sister-in-law ‘‘stayed up there on the screened-in porch, protected from the mosquitoes and Communists and infidels.’’ He is a man whom Sally’s father even calls ‘‘more dangerous than Roosevelt himself.’’

Matt, however, does not place much emphasis on his foreignness. Tellingly, he is blindingly unaware of certain truths about himself, such as his ‘‘pronounced accent,’’ which he does not believe exists. His claims that ‘‘I have no accent. I worked very hard and have completely lost any trace of accent’’ could be interpreted in two different ways: either he truly is unaware of his accent or he subconsciously denies it, realizing that it will set him apart.

Matt’s own perception of his identity derives from his lack of interest in taking on the typical role of the adult male in American society. He sees himself as inherently unmarriageable because of his unwillingness to have children. Sally gives voice to the opinions society holds on such an anomaly: ‘‘Only something is wrong. Something is goofy, isn’t it? A single man, forty-two years old. It doesn’t make sense that a good man hasn’t made a fool of himself at least once by your age.’’

By contrast, Sally comes from a traditional small-town family. Before the Great Depression, her family was one of the richest in Lebanon. Her brother, Buddy, has managed to hold on to the family factory despite the economic troubles of the mid-1900s. Sally, however, is the black sheep of the family. According to Sally, ‘‘Everyone is always saying what a crazy old maid Emma Goldman I’m becoming.’’ Her words, immediately contradicted by Matt, show her negative self-perception. Although she demonstrates her independence and financial capability by working as a nurse and accumulating significant savings, she only dreams of escaping the confines of her family home. As Aunt Charlotte tells Matt, Sally ‘‘didn’t have much courage [to do it].’’

Even the play’s minor characters—none of whom ever appears on stage—are presented through the narrow lens of how they are perceived by others and what they represent. The insignificant sister-inlaw Olive is something ‘‘on a relish tray.’’ Brother Buddy’s real name is Kenny; according to Matt, both of these names are ‘‘absurd,’’ not proper names ‘‘for a grown man.’’ Sally’s aunt, Charlotte, is the most important of this supporting cast. She helps engineer and actively encourages the reunion between Matt and Sally. Matt also learns about Sally’s past from Charlotte; her age, for example, and her firing from Sunday school. As he tells Sally, ‘‘I’ve become great friends with your Aunt Charlotte. There’s a counterspy in your home. You’re infiltrated. I didn’t tell you. You’re ambushed. I’ve come up on you from behind.’’ His words show that Charlotte’s role is greater than that of a mere conduit of information. Sally would never anticipate Charlotte’s spy-like actions. Thus Charlotte also functions symbolically to remind Matt and Sally, along with the audience, that people have multiple layers to their personalities and their identities.

As the play begins, Matt is attempting to step outside of his self-constructed identity. However, he finds it difficult to share the real Matt with Sally. He continuously relies on other personalities and voices to share his concerns. To find out the answer to the Sally ‘‘puzzle’’—why she is avoiding him— he speaks in different accents. He even declares that he will become one of the Ozark ‘‘hillbillies’’: ‘‘I won’t be Matt Friedman anymore. I’ll join the throng. Call myself . . . August Hedgepeth. Sip moonshine over the back of my elbow. Wheat straw in the gap in my teeth.’’ Matt’s easy assumption of other personalities shows his unwillingness to let Sally see his true personality—he thinks she won’t like the real him. This creates an interesting duality, as Matt hides behind the personae of others even while he is readying himself to share his biggest secret with Sally.

The importance of a person’s speech patterns is further emphasized when Sally questions Matt about his background. ‘‘English wasn’t your first language. What was?’’ she asks, as opposed to the more standard question, ‘‘Where were you born?’’ At first, Matt tries to avoid answering. When he finally does, he refers to himself in the third person, showing his need to distance himself from the past.

What was Matthew’s first language? It doesn’t come out funny. What does it matter; he can’t talk to the old man at the cafeteria in Lithuanian any more. Not the way he would like to . . .

When Sally insists on learning his family history, Matt submits by refusing to draw the characters of his father, mother, sister, and himself, and instead dubs them with nondescript labels: ‘‘A Prussian and a Uke and a Lat and a Probable Lit.’’ The ensuing story of the death of his family, his parents (the Prussian and the Ukrainian) ‘‘indefi- nitely detained’’ by the Germans, after his older sister (born in Latvia) was murdered by the French, is also told from the third-person point of view. Only at its very end, after Matt has revealed his secret—that he has resolved ‘‘never to be responsible for bringing into such a world another living soul. . . . not bring into this world another child to be killed for political purpose’’—does he revert back to the first person. He asks Sally,

And what woman would be interested in such a grown Probable Lit with such a resolve? . . . Anyway, he doesn’t think about it. The day is over in a second. I spend my life adding figures. It breaks my head.

SALLY: (Very level) He does. The Lit.

MATT: Does what?

SALLY: You said ‘‘I.’’ You mean the Lit. The Lit spends his life adding figures.

MATT: Yes, well, I do too. We are much alike. We work together.

Although Matt and ‘‘the Lit’’ are alike, unlike the Lit, Matt decides to step out of the world of logic, as represented by numbers, and risk being hurt. Sally, however, resists such a change. Indeed, Matt almost constantly urges her to get her to rethink her situation. Her tenacity and her reticence is represented physically as well as verbally. Matt is wearing skates, but Sally turns to leave the folly.

MATT: Sally? Hey, I can’t run after you in these.

SALLY: Good. I’m good and sick of you running after me, Matt. (She is gone.)

MATT: Come on. (He tries to run after her.) Where do you think you are going—

Sally’s personality is best symbolized by her actions the previous February. Matt drove down from St. Louis to visit her at the hospital where she works. Matt claims that she hid from him in the closet; Sally claims that she was working in the kitchen, where visitors were not allowed. Whoever is more correct, the essential point remains the same: Sally kept herself from Matt, as she keeps herself hidden from the world. After being rejected by her fiancé and her father because of her inability to have children, Sally has come to believe that the rest of the world will reject her for this supposed defect as well. She has constructed her life around this physical disorder; it has become her most important characteristic. After Matt tells her that he will not have children, she does not even believe the sincerity of his story. ‘‘You’ve been talking to Aunt Lotttie?’’ she says. ‘‘Who else have you talked to? People in town? Have you looked in the Lebanon newspaper? The old files? I don’t know how detectives work.’’ Her choice of words, particularly her likening of Matt to a detective, shows just how much a secret she views her infertility. In her mind, her inability to bear a child defines her and renders her valueless. She has some valid reasons for feeling this way. Not only did her fiance replace her, ‘‘Dad was looking at me like I was a broken swing.’’ These men, members of the two most important families in Lebanon, surely voice the feelings of many in their community. The stigma they visit upon Sally results in her having lived the past ten years of her life under the assumption that no one would want to marry her because she cannot have children.

Although neither Matt nor Sally can give birth to new life, there still could be ‘‘a life for the two of us.’’ Keeping this in mind, it seems hardly coincidental that one of the primary images in the play is eggs. Matt shares with Sally the belief of a man he knows.

‘‘He said people are eggs. Said we had to be careful not to bang up against each other too hard. Crack our shells, never be any use again. Said we were eggs. Individuals. We had to keep separate, private. He was very protective of his shell. He said nobody ever knows what the other guy is thinking. We all got about ten tracks going at once, nobody ever knows what’s going down any given track at any given moment. So we never can really communicate.’’

At the time, Matt told the man ‘‘he ought not to [be] too afraid of gettin’ his yolk broke.’’ Now he stands before Sally, despite the ‘‘Humpty Dumpty complex,’’ to ‘‘take a big chance’’ and tell her he loves her. For Matt has learned that in order to have any chance at forging a fulfilling life with another, he must learn to reveal his secrets. After Sally follows his lead and reveals her own secret, they both come to understand that their perceptions about the world are wrong. Even worse, these perceptions have developed into misapprehensions about their own self-worth.

After Sally becomes convinced of Matt’s sincerity, she accepts his proposal. However, although Sally no longer sees herself as valueless to a man, she does not completely drop her habit of judging herself through the eyes of others. Matt wants to drive to St. Louis that evening, but she responds, ‘‘Oh, Matt, it’s absurd to be talking like that; we’re practically middle-aged.’’ Matt’s answer—‘‘So’’— demonstrates that he is reaching beyond himself. Yet, the play ends on a high note of optimism. Both Matt and Sally have demonstrated their willingness to try something new—he in his new tie and she in her new dress. Sally quickly agrees to go with him that night, and the two take the first steps of what will begin a long, successful marriage.

Source: Rena Korb, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Korb has a Master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

When Wilson began to draft the Talley family history in preparation for work on Fifth of July, he became fascinated with a Talley daughter named Sally. So reversing the order of creation, he made her a mate and began to imagine their middle-age romance. ‘‘I liked the two characters,’’ he says simply, ‘‘and I wanted to see the play.’’ Remembering the wounds, both physical and emotional, that lacerated his fictional family, he decided that, for this love story, he ‘‘should go all the way and make it the sweet valentine it should be.’’

When Fifth of July was completed and in rehearsal, Wilson made up a biography of Aunt Sally Friedman in order to help the actress playing the role to understand her, ‘‘a history for her to draw on.’’ He also devised a biography for Matt Friedman, finding in the process that the character was assuming the form of Circle Repertory Company actor Judd Hirsch. The playwright told Helen Stenborg (Aunt Sally) that if she found it helpful, she could think of Hirsch as her deceased husband whose ashes she had brought back to Lebanon. Wilson remembers that when Hirsch came to see a rehearsal of Fifth, he told the actor, ‘‘You’re in the box’’ (i.e., the urn), and so the central role of the second Talley play had been cast before the first play was even in previews.

Talley’s Folly opened in May 1979 and received almost unanimous critical raves. Harold Clurman thought it the playwright’s ‘‘most engaging play,’’ and the two reviewers for the New York Times called it ‘‘a treasure,’’ ‘‘a lovely play,’’ ‘‘a charmer,’’ and ‘‘a play to savour and to cheer.’’ The playwright himself, normally modest and objective about his own work, admits it is a ‘‘personal favorite’’ and ‘‘more perfect than anything I’ve ever written.’’ It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in the spring of 1980.

Plot: ‘‘A Very Simple Story.’’

In discussing his approach to the play, Wilson continually returns to the word ‘‘simple.’’ (‘‘I wanted to write a simple story.’’) The word is apt. Matt Friedman, a forty-two-year-old Jewish accountant from Saint Louis, has driven down to the central- A scene from a 1982 production of Talley’s Folly at Toronto’s Theatre Plus. southern Missouri town of Lebanon for the Fourth of July weekend in 1944 intent on resolving his romance with Sally Talley, thirty-one (she says) and turning spinsterish, whom he had met the previous year. After an unpleasant showdown with her family that afternoon, he woos her and wins her that night in the folly, the decaying boathouse down on the river from the Talley family home. That is the action of the play, hence the label ‘‘simple.’’

But as with other Wilson plays, the present action depends to a great extent on the past. Matt Friedman had come to the Lebanon area on vacation in the summer of 1943, met Sally Talley at a dance at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield (a landmark still there), and had driven her home to Lebanon that night and the other six nights of his vacation. At her urging, he met her family over dinner; they disliked him for his Jewishness, his lack of patriotism, and his beard. Sally’s father denounced him as ‘‘more dangerous than Roosevelt himself.’’

Since then, he has written her almost daily from Saint Louis, but she has responded only once and has not seen him since the preceding summer. He has, however, spoken by phone to Charlotte Talley (Aunt Lottie), who has encouraged his suit. As the play opens, he means to propose to Sally, the first proposal he has risked in his forty-two years. While waiting for her in the boathouse, he turns master of ceremonies and stage director, welcoming the audience and explaining the setting, lighting, sound effects, and the mood of a nation at the end of a world war.

The Folly

A ‘‘folly’’ in the architectural sense of the term is an elaborate structure, unusual and unique in design, quite expensive, and often built out of whim rather than purpose. As they pass the ninety-seven minutes of the play in the structure that gives the work its title, Matt elicits from Sally a bit of family history: that the builder was called ‘‘Whistler’’ because he whistled and sang a lot. (His signature piece was ‘‘Una furtiva lagrima’’ from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, but since none of the locals knew much about Italian opera, they merely thought him daft.) Uncle Whistler had built the boathouse and, in addition, the bandstand from which music drifts across the river on this Fourth of July evening.

The title of the play also refers to Sally’s choice of a husband. Matt, a good ten years older than she and rather alien with his faint German-Jewish accent and Semitic background, was not considered a suitable husband by her provincial and bigoted family. Yet, she and Matt go on to have a very happy marriage, and Matt does so well financially that his brother-in-law, Buddy, envies him. Since we know from information given in Fifth of July how well the marriage turned out, reference in this play to the union as ‘‘Sally Talley’s Folly’’ is ironic and meant to be.

But in 1944, the boathouse is rotting and decrepit and in need of restoration—like the family. At the same time its ruined state is a part of the romance of the place. Wilson describes it as Victorian in style, with ‘‘louvers, lattice in decorative panels, and a good deal of Gothic Revival gingerbread.’’ The wood has weathered to a pale gray, and the boathouse is overhung with maples and a weeping willow.

The lighting and sound are to be very romantic, with watery reflections of sunset and moonlight on the boathouse walls. (‘‘The water runs right through here,’’ Matt tells the audience, ‘‘so you’re all out in the river—sorry about that.’’) In addition, there are the sounds of the land and the river at dusk: water, frogs, bees, dogs, and crickets. The band, playing across the river in Whistler’s bandstand, strikes up a fanfare just as Sally explains why she has not married, and a lightly swinging rendition of ‘‘Lindy Lou’’ concludes the play. To complete a nearly perfect romantic scene, Wilson conjures up the sweet odor of honeysuckle.

‘‘You live in such a beautiful country,’’ Matt tells Sally, and he promises that he will bring her back every year. The Talleys may live in a Garden, even though the race has fallen, but it is people like Sally and Matt who will bring restoration through love. The sense of evil, never strong in a Wilson play, is embodied by some of those in the house on the hill. Greed and bigotry lurk there, and evil is latent in the landscape, for snakes may be nesting under the boathouse. But the only serpents who materialize are some of the Talleys, for this is Eden after the Fall.

The folly has all the romantic atmosphere of a setting for opera or operetta. Was there a real model? No, Wilson says, ‘‘I’ve never seen the folly in Missouri or anywhere else until John Lee [Beatty, the principal designer for the Circle Repertory Company] built it for me.’’ Wilson has implied that it was partly owing to the inspired stage design that he decided to write a play about Whistler Talley.

Structure

The playwright is aware that his work is often not strongly plotted. It may be that he is most comfortable with an impressionistic structure in which the plot seems to flow naturally, very much like ‘‘real life.’’ This method proved effective for Talley’s Folly, which seems indeed very natural yet demonstrates on inspection a structural rhythm. Generally, it might be said that the conversation of Sally and Matt goes back and forth between the past, always important to Wilson’s characters, and the present, interrupted by several tangential episodes and observations. ‘‘The past’’ covers her family history, his early family background in Europe, and the beginning of their courtship the preceding summer. ‘‘The present’’ dramatizes the final stage of their courtship and their plans to elope that same evening. ‘‘Tangential episodes’’ include, for example, a scene in which Matt ‘‘ice skates’’ on the bare floor of the folly. Also woven into the play are Matt’s observations on American labor, the greed of business, and the dangers of prosperity in the postwar era. These references set the love story against the larger, darker background of social, political, and cultural issues of the mid-1940s.

Structurally, the notable feature of the play is Wilson’s use of Matt as chorus in the manner both of Wilder’s Stage Manager (Our Town) or Williams’s Tom (The Glass Menagerie). Matt addresses the audience in a three-page monologue as the play begins and briefly at its conclusion, in this way ‘‘framing’’ the evening. He immediately tells the audience that he has only ninety-seven minutes (‘‘without intermission’’) for the story and points out ‘‘some of the facilities.’’ About halfway through his long introduction, he replays very rapidly much of what he has already said for the benefit of latecomers. He comments on the ‘‘rotating gismo in the footlights,’’ which provides the effect of moonlight on water (‘‘valentines need frou-frou’’). He calls attention to the night sounds to be heard throughout the evening. He describes post-Depression America, comparing it to 1944 when the country, like the Talleys, is ‘‘in grave danger of prosperity.’’ And he tells the audience that the play they are about to see ‘‘should be a waltz, one-two-three, onetwo- three; a no-holds-barred romantic story.’’

Yet, the play begins with the houselights up, and the set is seen in the hard, white glare of the ‘‘worklight’’ that intensifies the artificiality of stage scenery. Perhaps Wilson deliberately calls attention to the contrivance and artificiality of his play to force the audience to acknowledge the unreality of some things that it might recognize the intense reality of others. Much more to the point is the suggestion that this alienation of the audience from stage ‘‘reality’’ is to cause it to be ‘‘intellectually on its guard against the snares of romantic love, and then, in spite of ourselves to force us into believing in its truth.’’ This is going to be an easy, comfortable love story with a happy ending, he seems to be warning us, so beware of sentimentality. Then as though to show his manipulative powers, he warms us with his characters and draws us into their problems so that our belief is won.

Matt

Of the two roles, Matt’s is the more complex, for he is a many-sided character. Basically, his is a tragic conception of life because of the personal horrors attendant on his youth in prewar Europe. Yet, he can encourage Sally to take a risk and ‘‘live for today.’’ He believes in reason and communication. ‘‘I have great powers of ratiocination’’, he tells her, and this helps him to see not only that she is in love with him, but that there is ‘‘something to tell’’ that only she can tell. He can take ‘‘no’’ for an answer but not evasions.

Matt knows he is not a ‘‘romantic type,’’ but his mathematical mind (he knows the multiplication table up to seventy-five times seventy-five) tells him his own worth, and hers. He is a mimic, attempting a comic German accent with the same confidence as he ‘‘does’’ Humphrey Bogart or a Missouri farmer. Although he makes fun of Sally’s Ozark accent, he denies his own English is accented. He is also very witty and droll (‘‘Olive! Olive! I could not think of your sister-in-law’s darn name! . . . I knew she was on a relish tray.’’

Matt’s most important scene comes when Sally asks him if he has ever been married. In answering, he tells the story of his life, almost as a fable, in the third person, perhaps to distance himself from the wounds of his youth. Briefly he explains how his parents, one Prussian and the other Ukrainian, were ‘‘indefinitely detained’’ by the Germans, after his older sister, born in Latvia, was murdered by the French. He himself, born in Lithuania, came via Norway and Caracas to America. Because of the loss of his family through war, no allegiances or causes can make any claims on him. He resolved ‘‘never to be responsible for bringing into such a world another living soul . . . to be killed for a political purpose.’’ He has grown to middle age, thinking no woman would be interested in marrying a man who would never sire children, not because he could not but because he would not. Thus, Matt’s resolution has kept him in a shell.

The most important image associated with Matt is found in a story he tells Sally: ‘‘This guy told me we were eggs,’’ he begins, and we must not knock against each other or we will crack our shells and be of no use. Since we are isolated in our shells, we never really communicate. ‘‘I told him he ought not to be too afraid of gettin’ his yolk broke.’’

Matt returns to the egg metaphor in his proposal to Sally: ‘‘We all have a Humpty Dumpty complex.’’ When he takes the risk and proposes, Sally puts him off. With only two or three of his ninetyseven minutes to go, he looks to the sky exclaiming, ‘‘Eggs! Eggs! Eggs!’’ He is annoyed at their terror of cracking the shell but hoping they both will find courage to do just that. In the minutes that follow, both of these curious ‘‘eggs’’ crack, and their marriage lasts thirty-two years, ending with Matt’s death in 1976.

Sally

In his courtship of Sally, Matt has one factor very much in his favor: she does not like living at home, for she considers most of her family to be ‘‘hypocrites and fools.’’ But she would never consider marrying Matt just to get away and has given him no encouragement. She answered only one of his many letters and then only to tell him not to write. Apparently she accepts what people are saying about her, that she is turning into ‘‘a crazy oldmaid Emma Goldman.’’

Nevertheless, Sally manages to escape the stereotype of the lonely, frigid spinster who secretly yearns for romance and sexual fulfillment by genuinely trying to put off Matt, while, at the same time, revealing in unintentional and subtle ways that she is attracted to him. Second, there is the pathos, even tragedy, of a revelation made approximately a decade before that she must face again in order to give Matt the explanation he insists on and deserves: that she is barren and therefore cannot imagine that Matt or anyone else would want to marry her. This most painful moment is the emotional climax of the play. We are touched by her personal tragedy, but we also know that paradoxically her sterility is the key to a long and loving relationship with Matt. Because she is inadequate in a way that is unimportant to him, they seem indeed made for each other. When she realizes he has not deliberately tailored his story to conform to hers, she is ready to accept him.

Talley’s Folly is a notable achievement for Wilson. The dramatic structure is compact although the plot is not very strong. The characters are two of his best, one coming from the playwright’s Missouri background and the other created from an entirely different social and cultural context. The setting is functional to the story. The familiar motif of the impact of the past on the present underlies the deeper theme of spiritual isolation making real communication difficult. Talley’s Folly has been truthfully described as Wilson’s ‘‘best crafted work,’’ and with its wide audience appeal, it has been his most popular play. It is a major achievement and falls short of matching Fifth of July only in the modesty of its aims.

Source: Gene A. Barnett, ‘‘Talley’s Folly,’’ in Lanford Wilson, edited by Warren French, Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 118–24.

As part of its fifteenth annual tour, the Missouri Repertory Theatre’s staging of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly was crisply directed by James Assad, a former MRT member who returned from a teaching stint in New York City, and starred Jeannine Hutchings as Sally Talley and David Schuster as Matt Friedman. The high quality of the cast did full credit to Wilson’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning play. Set in the Talley family’s Victorian boathouse in Lebanon, Missouri on July 4, 1944, the romance begins with Matt walking into the auditorium while the house lights are still up, as though to make an announcement. He sits on the pit apron and conversationally begins filling in the drama’s background in a casual, neighborly tone. Soon his dialogue becomes tinged with a Yiddish accent (later we learn that he was born in Lithuania) and suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of the action of the play.

The plot is simple. On a trip to St. Louis Sally met Matt and they were attracted to one another. Now Matt, a forty-two-year-old Jewish accountant from the big city, has come to a small, reactionary rural community to ask the thirty-one-year-old spinster to marry him. There are problems, the least of which is the resistance by Sally’s family. More important is what is expressed as the eggs metaphor— the ‘‘Humpty Dumpty Complex’’—they are both ‘‘afraid to be cracked.’’ Matt’s family has been destroyed in European warfare and in the world that he sees around he finds no place for children. Sally has had a bad experience in love and is unable to bring herself to take another chance.

Matt and Sally attempt to communicate, but both are fearful of the pain that might result from a relationship and, therefore, are hesitant to divulge information that might pinpoint their areas of vulnerability. Ultimately Sally reveals the details of her unhappy love affair, culminating in the exposure of her vital secret: her fiance broke their engagement when it was determined that a disease had left her unable to bear children. She had been unwilling to admit this to Matt, at least in part because she did not want to disappoint his desire for children. Since he does not want children, their needs and desires can mesh, and the play ends with them running off to get married.

Interestingly, 5th of July, which takes place during the Vietnam War era, was written before Talley’s Folly. In telling the story of Sally as a sixtyseven- year-old widow, Wilson became interested in the character to whom she had been married, and Matt (patterned after actor Judd Hirsh) and Talley’s Folly resulted. It is only natural, then, that the stronger character is Matt, and Schuster’s portrayal was just right. His accent conveyed a sense of foreignness, but it was not intrusive; his timing and his subtle combination of intelligence and emotion made Matt an attractive character. As Sally, Hutchings had a less demanding role, but she played it adroitly, never overshadowing Matt, yet letting the sensuality, humor, and intellect of her character show through her plainness.

The set, which arrived in a truck on the afternoon of the performance, was excellent. The boathouse, supposedly built by Sally’s uncle in 1870, was typically Victorian in construction, with lattice and gables, but now fallen into disrepair. Capturing the freedom and independence of the two lovers who meet there to work out their lives, it also reflected their fragility and strangeness in a world of conservative, prejudiced rednecks whose off-stage presence is constantly felt.

Talley’s Folly is particularly attractive to a southwest Missouri audience, and those who walked out of a production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead last year raved over this play, the second of a projected series of works tracing the Talley family history. Two other plays in The War in Lebanon series, 5th of July (the first segment) and A Tale Told, have already been mounted, but audience reaction to Talley’s Folly indicates that for midwesterners Wilson has successfully returned to his Missouri roots to ‘‘tell . . . what this country is really all about.’’ Wilson once claimed that he ‘‘set out to write a valentine,’’ and this love story appeals to the kind of people about whom it was written—individuals with great strength and integrity who are involved in day-to-day human relationships, not in solving abstract, intellectual problems. The questioning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern makes no sense to an audience secure in their beliefs and established in their world, while the familiarity of Wilson’s characters and situation makes his play appealing.

Talley’s Folly is a good theatrical vehicle, not great drama. In many ways it illustrates the typical strengths and weaknesses present in the rest of Wilson’s canon: it reveals insight into human nature, yet it is not meant to be anything other than entertaining. Unlike Harold Pinter or David Mamet, Wilson rarely goes below the surface to determine what meanings underlie his characters’ actions; he is satisfied with presenting predictable, emotional, character-based melodramas.

Recent criticism has claimed that plays such as Talley’s Folly, Crimes of the Heart, The Great Grandson of Jedediah Kohler, and The Dining Room fail because they are nothing more than ‘‘regional romanticism.’’ In the long history of the theatre there is no doubt that this is an accurate assessment. However, it is also a shortsighted one, for the history of the theatre contains more plays like Talley’s Folly than it does plays like Old Times. And this is as it should be. We savor the great plays when they appear, but in middle America it is perhaps the lesser works that keep the theatre alive. On aesthetic grounds Pinter may be preferable to Wilson, but Wilson is better than no theatre at all.

Source: Steven H. Gale, Review in Theatre Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, March 1983, pp. 124–6.