Lanford Wilson's Pulitzer winning Talley's Folly
Staged at University of Miami’s Hecht Studio Theater, February-March, 2018
Direction & Set Design by Darren Blaney
Cast: Bennett Leeds as Matt Friedman & Lily Steven as Sally Talley
Costume Design by Lily Steven
Lighting Design by Bennett Leeds
Intimacy Choreography by Laura Rikard
Production photos by Sarah Carron
Director’s Notes
The genesis for Lanford Wilson’s writing of Talley’s Folly came in a conversation with one of the actors in the Circle Repertory Company where Wilson was a founding member. Helen Stenborg, who played 64-year-old Aunt Sally in his earlier piece Fifth of July, had asked the playwright to describe what the character of her late husband, Matt Friedman, had been like when they first met. Set in 1977 in the wake of the Vietnam War, in Fifth of July, Sally has been widowed for a year, but still hasn’t decided what to do with her dearly departed’s ashes. In the course of that play, we hear from many of the people in Matt’s life, especially his nieces and nephews, about his importance to them. “Uncle Matt” is described as a mensch for the younger generation, as is Aunt Sally, who her grand-niece says “has a true political and spiritual awareness.”
Written in 1979 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, Talley’s Folly is the second play in Wilson’s Talley Trilogy. In it, Wilson takes us back three decades, to the night of July 4, 1944, a month after D-Day, when Matt and Sally first profess their love in a ramshackle boathouse on the Talley estate. Wilson intended the play to be a valentine, or as Matt says, a waltz: for the characters, perhaps for the actors who first played them, for the audience, and most certainly, for the country in which Sally and Matt’s love was born. Sally and Matt share a common view of humanity – different from their families’ – that draws them to one another despite circumstances that could potentially thwart their union. In the course of the story, we watch them both overcome huge obstacles – societal and family expectations, as well as their own fears – in an effort to connect that might be described as Olympian. Three repeated images run through the play that help reveal its greater meaning: eggs, puzzles, and worker bees.
As you watch this piece (from the vantage point of being “all out in the river”), I invite you to join Sally and Matt’s emotional journey, and allow your own protective shell to crack a bit. Get your yoke broke, as Matt might say. By the time you leave the theater, I hope these worker bees’ work will help you solve your own puzzle, at least a bit, about how to find, as Matt says, “hope… and strength in union.”
In these early months of 2018, I dare say, we the people still desperately need them.
Darren Blaney, PhD
Director & Lecturer of Theatre Arts