A Note From the Director Luna Gale is a play about American failures. Rebecca Gilman carefully renders a portrait of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a small, conservative city where the epidemic of methamphetamine abuse has pushed an overtaxed social safety net past the point of breaking. It is a system that is only maintained by the iron will and continual sacrifice of social workers like Caroline Cox, Gilman’s protagonist. But Caroline is no sentimental martyr. She is gutsy, shrewd, and pragmatic, and she skates dizzyingly close to the ethical line fighting for people who will constantly break her heart. Hers seems to be a particularly American failure: well-intentioned, under-resourced, and quixotically hopeful and hopeless, all at once, like seeing the tidal wave coming, believing a spoon will fend it off, and knowing in your soul that it won’t. There are other failures here, too, that demand an accounting. The failure of family. The failure of religion. The failure of one’s own self. Like a good naturalist, Gilman holds the mirror up to that world, not to judge or to prescribe, but simply to say, “This is so.” Whether we will do anything to change that vision, she implies, is up to us. —JESSE JOU
Luna Gale MARCH 21 AT 8PM MARCH 22 AT 4PM AND 8PM MARCH 23 AT 4PM The Studio, 217 Park Street
2018–19 SEASON