Bücher von Lanford Wilson

"Mr. Wilson handles the collage technique so beautifully that we leave convinced no other method would have served half so well. This reviewer liked Rimers for its fluidity, for its language, for its almost musical sense of pattern."--The New York TimesThe mystery is, who he is, who murdered him and what were the circumstances? And to solve it, Wilson looks at the outsides and insides of his tiny, Middle Western town. He looks at a middle-aging woman who falls in love with the young man who comes to work in her café. He looks at a coarse, nasty woman mistreating her senile mother, who is obsessed with visions of Eldritch being evil and headed for blood-spilling. He looks at a tender relationship between a young man a dreamy, crippled girl. But Wilson sees far more than this. He is grasping the very fabric of Bible Belt America, with its catchword morality ("virgin," "God-fearing") and its capability for the vicious. He senses the rhythm of its life and the cruelty it can impose. He understands the speech patterns of its loveless gossips, its sex-hungry boys, its compassionless preachers, its car-conscious blondes. In the end his portrait of Eldritch is full length, and the truth of its revelations will be pondered long after the stage lights have dimmed and the play has ended.

Talley and Son is the third in Lanford Wilson's award-winning trilogy of plays set in Lebanon, Missouri, focusing on the Talley family.The time is Independence Day, 1944, the place the parlor of the Talley homestead in Lebanon, Missouri. As World War II rages across the seas, the Talleys are beset with crises of a different sort. Slipping into senility, the elder Mr. Talley still has flashes of explosive lucidity, when he schemes to dispose of the local bank among heirs of his own choice, and berates his charming but spineless son, Eldon, for considering the sale of the family garment business to an eastern conglomerate. Also involved in the bickering are Eldon's long-suffering wife, Netta; their son, Buddy, who is home on leave from the Army; his vapid wife, Olive; and Eldon's sister, Charlotte, a defiantly free spirit who is suffering the fatal effects of radium poisoning. And, commenting on the action, unseen by the others, is the "ghost" of the second son, Timmy, already a casualty of the Pacific war, although the family has not yet learned of his death. In the end the petty antagonisms, scandals and selfishness which infuse Wilson's play are their own reward, and we are aware that a dynasty built by hard work and clear if conniving vision is about to be dismantled by lesser men who have inherited the property, but not the character, of their predecessors.

In Lanford Wilson's moving and powerful play, Redwood Curtain, an adolescent Eurasian girl-the child of a union between an American GI and a Vietnamese woman, adopted by a wealthy California couple and obsessive in her search for her father-is drawn to the redwood forests of northern California, where thousands of Vietnam veterans have taken refuge to escape the harsh realities of life in America.

"Lanford Wilson is the rare dramatist, witty and humorous, who sees all his characters from the inside...Balm is life itself trapped in a play."--New YorkBalm in Gilead and Other Plays features Lanford Wilson's first full-length play. It takes place in upper Manhattan at a greasy, slum diner, Frank's cafe, where drug addicts, sex works, and petty criminals come to escape their boredom and suffering.