Lanford Wilson's Books

Lanford Wilson received the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award for Talley's Folly. He is a founding member of Circle Repertory Comapany and many of his plays have been produced on Broadway. His many awards include the outer Critics' Circle Award, an OBIE for The Hot l Baltimore, and OBIE for The Mound Builders, and a Drama-Logue Award for 5th of July, Talley's Folly, and Angels Fall.

THE STORY: The setting is a large tent, where two flower show exhibitors have sought refuge from a sudden rainfall. She (Ms. Joslyn) is visibly annoyed at the curt treatment that the judges have given her Little Soldier and makes no bones about it. He (Mr. Wasserman) is equally dismayed by the fate of his Little Tanya, but is too soft-spoken and retiring to vent his anger. They both agree that if the judges are getting soaked it serves them right, but Mr. Wasserman's attempts at friendly conversation are confounded by Ms. Joslyn's close-mouthed surliness. But gradually it develops that (a) they happen to admire each other's creations (unlike the judges) and (b) they are near neighbors-all of which leads in time to the realization that if it proved possible to combine the color of his Little Tanya with the texture of her Little Soldier a new strain of flower would result which even the most obtuse of judges would be dazzled by. Quivering with anticipation they prepare to leave, as the sun comes out, and the prospect of future glory sends them resolutely back to their test beds and potting sheds.

Deals with a group of former student activists and the changes that have been wrought in their lives and attitudes in the years since leaving college.

THE STORIES: WANDERING. First presented at the Mark Taper Forum, in Los Angeles, as part of an omnibus program entitled The Scene , and then Off-Broadway as part of Collision Course , a similar program. This brilliantly inventive short

Before Lanford Wilson became a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, with such celebrated productions as The Hot l Baltimore, Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly, and Burn This, he wrote dozens of short stories and poems, many of which take place in the 1950s, small-town Missouri where he grew up. This selection of Wilson’s early work, written between 1955 and 1967 when he was between the ages of 18 and 30, provides a rare look at a young writer developing his style. The stories explore many of the themes Wilson later took up in the theater, such as sexual identity and the rupture of societies and families. These never-before-published works—part of the manuscript collection donated by Wilson to the University of Missouri—shed light on the roots of some of America’s best-loved plays and are accomplished and evocative works in their own right.

THE STORIES: LUDLOW FAIR. In words of the Village Voice, this ...is a bedtime story about two girl roommates. Rachel is glamorous, fast-living, sometimes lost in her own self-dramatizations; Agnes is plain, matter-of-fact, her shyness masked by a kooky per

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 York

THE STORY: The place is a Manhattan loft shared by Anna, a lithe young dancer-choreographer, and her two gay roommates--her collaborator, Robby, who has just been killed in a freak boating accident, and Larry, a world-weary, caustically funny young adverti

THE STORY: Deals with the encounter between a cynical, sophisticated New York antiques dealer and the taciturn young man, her nephew and house guest, who has come to the city to study theology. As reticent and unemotional as his aunt is loquacious and brittle, the young man contends that he has undergone a mystical experience-a revelation which is as unsettling to his aunt as it is fulfilling to him. As though intimidated by his inscrutable reserve, she grows increasingly voluble, revealing in her wise-cracking chatter the defense which she has constructed to keep the world at bay-and to mask the innate sensitivity and idealism which persist despite the loneliness and futility of her existence.

A group of friends who came of age in the sixties have a reunion in an old Missouri farmhouse, where their reminiscences reveal shattered hopes, buried resentments, lost dreams, and the unhealed trauma of the Vietnam War

THE STORY: The scene is the lobby of a rundown hotel so seedy that it has lost the e from its marquee. As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during t

THE STORY: Liz Barnard is an anthropologist studying West Coast gangs for behavior similar to African tribes. Her son, Don, is a homosexual Episcopal minister whose parishioners are poor and many sick with AIDS. Liz's daughter, Barbara, is a gifted

In Book of Days, Lanford Wilson uses note-perfect language to create characters who are remarkable both for their comic turns and for their enormous depth."--BOOK JACKET.

Presented in London and New York. ...tightly written, pungent with human interest, laced through with risible bits... --Variety. ...a triumphant union of farce and near tragedy. --London Observer.

THE STORY: Geri, a seventeen-year-old, Vietnamese-American, has taken time out from a rigorous touring schedule as a piano prodigy to stay on her Aunt Geneva's Redwood plantation in Northern California. She's been coming here for years, but recentl

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 Times The 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.

THE STORY: Schuyler Browne and his friends, Josh, Ann and Mary, gather for the spring at Schuyler's family's Hampton home. Schuyler, a trust-fund kid from wealthy lineage, doesn't yet know what to do with his life. Josh, very into computers, is on

Talley's Folly" shows one evening in the courtship of two unlikely lovers, Sally Talley and Matt Friedman. Sally is from a conservative, small-town, wealthy family of bigoted Protestants, and Matt is a Jewish accountant twelve years older than Sally

The plot revolves around the sexual assault of a teenage girl and an unrelated murder trial in the town of Eldritch, exploring a community's reaction to rape, lies and murder.

Presented in London and New York. ...tightly written, pungent with human interest, laced through with risible bits... --Variety. ...a triumphant union of farce and near tragedy. --London Observer.

THE STORIES: The monologue DAYS AHEAD portrays the fraught psyche of a fastidious little man as he confronts the memory of an early love which he perceives as a dusty, crumbling wall through which he must dig. (1 man.) THE MADNESS OF LADY BRIGHT tr

THE STORY: The scene is the ornate, deserted Victorian boathouse on the Talley place in Lebanon, Missouri; the time 1944. Matt Friedman, an accountant from St. Louis, has arrived to plead his love to Sally Talley, the susceptible, but uncertain dau

THE STORY: The scene is a small mission church in a remote part of New Mexico, where a middle-aged college professor and his lovely young wife detour unexpectedly after the highway is closed because of a possible accident at a nearby nuclear faci

THE STORY: When murder roars through a small Missouri town, Ruth Hoch begins her own quest to find truth and honesty amid small town jealousies, religion, greed and lies. This tornado of a play propels you through its events like a page-turning mys

THE STORY: Two young suburban couples, friends of long standing, are suddenly aware of strains and pressures that have inexorably come into their lives. Adultery is one of these--a fact for one of the wives, an imminent possibility for one of the husbands--

Deals with a group of former student activists and the changes that have been wrought in their lives and attitudes in the years since leaving college.

THE STORY: At an archeological dig in the Midwest, a party of university scientists are unearthing vestiges of a lost Indian civilization. Heading the group is Dr. Howe, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and by a younger associate and his wife.

Book's by Lanford Wilson

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