BATHED IN MOONLIGHT AND STEEPED IN HOPE BY JOSEPH WHELAN Talley’s Folly begins with a bit of meta-theatre. Jason O’Connell as the St. Louis accountant Matt Freidman enters the stage to have a little chat with the audience. He wants to share his plan for the evening, which can be summed up in one word–romance. Matt has driven 200 miles to Lebanon, Missouri, to visit Sally Talley. He is early 40s, she is early 30s. He’s Jewish. She’s Bible belt. They met a year ago and have not seen each other since. It’s July 4, 1944. Matt’s taking a risk. He knows it. He’s in love for the first time in his life and he’s understandably nervous. He’s a man who wears the same tie to work every day. A little assistance with the finer points of romance would be useful, and so he conjures moonlight, a gently flowing river, music (a waltz), and a grand folly of a Victorian boathouse, all louvres, lattice, and geegaws, itself in need of some TLC. “Valentines need frou-frou,” he says. The stage is set, quite literally. The play unfolds in real time, 97 minutes (or thereabouts) according to the script, as this unlikely and mismatched couple endeavor to navigate their way to an understanding of each other’s heart. Like the river beside them, the currents of conversation carry them to unexpected emotional shoals and to the realization that the true folly may be the facades they have built around
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JASON O'CONNELL AND KATE HAMILL IN TALLEY'S FOLLY. PHOTO: BRENNA MERRITT.
themselves. A full moon may be romantic, but its light does not discriminate. Love and sorrow, hope and hurt are revealed in equal measure. A river, too, may contain hidden depths, likewise with Wilson’s deft handling of subtle intrusions from the world beyond the deteriorating boathouse. The date
“Love and sorrow, hope and hurt are revealed in equal measure.”
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JASON O'CONNELL AND KATE HAMILL IN TALLEY'S FOLLY. PHOTO: MICHAEL DAVIS.
is significant, July 4, 1944, one month after D-Day and the same month as the liberation of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, the first camp to be liberated. In the hospital where she works as a nurse’s aide, Sally tends wounded soldiers recently returned from battle. The callous casualness of the Talley family prejudice and Matt’s half-joking references to notorious histori-
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cal and literary anti-Semites are grim allusions to the atrocity unfolding thousands of miles away, never directly mentioned, but present at a discomforting remove. It’s like a sudden chill up the spine on an otherwise warm romantic evening. Wilson avoids overplaying the impact of these external intrusions on Matt and Sally’s con-
“This is a waltz, remember, onetwo-three, one-two-three. There was a time–or, all right, I think it has to be: Once upon a time– there was a hope throughout the land.” –Lanford Wilson versation. He keeps sharp focus on the moonlit night, the music drifting across the river from a distant band shell, and the two individuals hovering between loneliness and possibility. But the inferences are deliberate in the text and their resonance in 2020 probably more profound than the playwright ever imagined when the play premiered in 1980. “Jews will not replace us,” shouted white supremacists in Charlottesville in August 2017. A year later in Pittsburgh, a gunman killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue, and in April of 2019, another life was lost to violent attack at the Chabad of Poway in California. Strikingly, and unsettlingly, a poll earlier this year by the Pew Research Center found that fewer than half of Americans could give the correct answer as to how many Jews perished in the holocaust.
In America 2020, the canvas of hatred is broad and the links between virulent anti-Semitism and antiBlack and anti-immigrant prejudices are evident and have been noted by numerous commentators, including Gary Rosenblatt in The Atlantic and Isabel Wilkerson in her recent book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. It is a necessary discussion today, but runs outside the immediate scope of Talley’s Folly. Lanford Wilson always maintained that the play was a simple love story, a Valentine, as Matt says in his opening monologue. Indeed, Wilson inserted the monologue after completing the play to make absolutely clear to the audience his intentions, like Matt’s, were steeped in hope: “This is a waltz, remember, one-twothree, one-two-three. There was a time—or, all right, I think it has to be: Once upon a time—there was a hope throughout the land.”
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