The Mound Builders by Lanford Wilson

First published: 1976

First produced: 1975, at the Circle Repertory Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Existential

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Urbana and Blue Shoals, Illinois

Principal Characters:

• Professor August Howe, the senior archaeologist of an expedition to Blue Shoals, Illinois, age forty
• Cynthia Howe, his wife, age thirty-five
• Kirsten, his daughter, age eleven
• D. K. “Delia” Eriksen, his sister, a writer, age thirty-eight
• Dr. Dan Loggins, his twenty-nine-year-old assistant
• Dr. Mary Jean Loggins, Dan’s wife, a gynecologist, age twenty-five
• Chad Jasker, the landowner’s son, age twenty-five

The Play

The Mound Builders opens in August Howe’s study in Urbana, Illinois, on a February morning. August, an archaeology professor, begins to dictate a report on the previous summer’s failed expedition to Blue Shoals, in southern Illinois. As he dictates, slides depicting scenes from the expedition are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. The slides show the lake that threatened to flood his team’s excavation, the old farmhouse where the team and their families lived, construction of a dam close to the house and their excavation, a bulldozer, and their excavation site.

As August narrates over the slides, the scene fades into the previous summer, and the lights come up on an interior: the large living, dining, and working area of the old farmhouse. Most of the play’s action takes place here, in a series of brief scenes that introduce the central characters, detail their personal lives, and follow the progress of their expedition to discover evidence of early American Indian cultures. Scenes of the summer in Blue Shoals are interrupted by interludes in which August provides commentary in order to introduce background information or heighten suspense.

In the act’s second scene, Dan and Jean Loggins arrive at the farmhouse, the archaeological team’s summer home for the previous three years. Dan Loggins, also an archaeologist, is August Howe’s junior partner; Jean Loggins, a gynecologist, is Dan’s wife. Chad Jasker, the landowner’s son and a friend of Dan, has driven them to the house and helps to carry in their belongings. Dan tells August privately that he wants to keep the pregnancy of his wife, Jean, a secret from the students helping with the dig. The next evening Chad and August arrive at the house with Delia, August’s ill sister, a well-known writer. Dan describes a difficult day at the dig. A bit of a poet, Dan believes the early American Indians built mounds for essentially the same reasons motivating builders today. “A person isn’t happy,” he says, “unless he’s building something.”

The quick passage of summer at Blue Shoals is represented in a series of short scenes separated by abrupt blackouts, like slides in a slide show. In one scene, alone with Jean, Chad asks her to go with him to see a model of the county as it will look, he says, after Jasker’s development is built. An interstate highway will soon pass close to Blue Shoals, he says, and the new dam will create a large lake. On the lakeshore, resort accommodations will be built on land owned by Chad and his father, making them rich. Jean is happy for Chad but is fascinated with the process by which rural areas can be transformed by “the signing of an energy bill in Washington.” As Jean begins to leave the room, Chad suddenly expresses his desire for her. Jean tells him to “get lost.” Later, when Chad and Cynthia Howe are alone, he asks Cynthia for money, which she gives him. Events subsequently reveal that Chad and Cynthia are lovers.

The scene shifts back to Urbana in February. Alone in his study, August attempts to organize what he calls “shards” from the expedition. He catalogs a personal tragedy, including a separation from his wife and daughter and an impending resignation from his position at the university.

One night toward the end of June, Dan and Chad return drunk from a fishing trip. Dan tells Chad that the archaeologists have found something unusual under the roundhouse they are excavating. After Chad leaves, Dan tells Jean and Delia that Chad saved him last summer from drowning. Dan goes to bed, and a short scene between Delia and Jean ends the act. Delia believes that men and women burden themselves with too much pain. She envisions how the world ends: “A sad old world of widows . . . lined up on beaches . . . looking out over the water and trying to keep warm.”

When act 2 opens, the team has made an exciting discovery beneath the roundhouse: remains of an even earlier culture. Dan believes that they may have discovered a burial mound of the Mississippian culture, which had disappeared from southern Illinois many centuries before. The rest of the act focuses on the team’s increasingly more significant discoveries. The archaeologists work under extreme pressure as heavy summer rains threaten their excavation and cause the water level of the lake to rise, further endangering their project. Chad continues his affair with Cynthia and attempts once more to seduce Jean, who again rejects him.

In the longest speech of the play, Dan eulogizes a vanished member of the Mississippian culture, whom he calls Cochise. Cochise, he says, did not vanish “without a trace.” He left behind him burial mounds, remains of dwellings and tools, and enough evidence of his culture to attract admirers like Dan, who mourn his passing.

August and Dan’s team has unearthed the burial mound of a god-king, the first discovered in North America, only days before the lake would have flooded it. The team begins to collect artifacts from the mound, including the first gold ornaments known to be made by North American Indian cultures. Seeing the gold and copper beads, Chad admires August and Dan’s attempt to make something of themselves, not for money but for a reason he understands but is unable to express. The team has discovered a gold burial mask, which Dan puts on almost inadvertently.

While the team cleans and preserves gold and copper ornaments, Chad discovers that Jean is pregnant and becomes extremely agitated, perhaps because he thinks that everyone has been withholding this information from him. Chad tells the team that they will not be able to work on his father’s land next summer. Dan and he argue over the use of his father’s land, and Dan eventually tells Chad that the interstate highway on which Chad had been counting to bring vacationers and their money to Blue Shoals has been rerouted to the other side of the lake owing to the importance of the Native American monuments in the area. August and Dan have known this information for two years but kept it from everyone else, including Cynthia and Chad. When he learns this, Chad is furious, believing that he had been betrayed by the people he most respected and admired. Dan cannot convince Chad that the land has immense value as a repository of important indigenous dwelling places and artifacts. Instead, Chad howls at the loss of his dream of commercial success and abruptly leaves the stage.

Later that night, Chad returns, and Dan catches him about to leave the house with the god-king’s golden mask and other valuables. Chad then lures Dan outside, telling him that he has something to show him. The next morning, the team learns that Chad has run the bulldozer over the site, ruining the project, and has driven the machine into the lake. Moreover, Chad and Dan are missing. Telling August that Chad is “capable of anything,” Cynthia then destroys the photographic evidence of their finds. After discovery in the lake of an oar from Chad’s boat, a search for Chad and Dan is begun. Dan is missing, and Jean says, “WHY DID HE TRUST PEOPLE, WHY DID HE BELIEVE IN THINGS? . . . Vanished without a trace.”

The last scene in the play contrasts tableaux of August Howe in Urbana in February and three women—Cynthia, Delia, and Jean—in Blue Shoals in August. August says that he had imagined the house being carried off by a “great brown flood” when the lake rose; in fact, when he returned in January to see it, the house was on the same spot, half covered by the lake waters. In imagery reminiscent of the ending of act 2, the three women, alone in a house at the edge of rising waters, lament the loss of their men. The women fade into black. Motionless and speechless, microphone in hand, August cannot put his emotions into words as the lights fade on him.

Dramatic Devices

Through a variety of dramatic devices that invite the audience to interpret the play metaphorically as well as literally, The Mound Builders directs the playgoer’s attention to the struggle of the characters to find meaning and purpose in their lives as well as in the course of all human existence. The play suggests that the meaning of human existence is not inherent in events themselves, but rather must be discovered, if not made. Wilson employs three major devices to make this point: a self-conscious stylized structure, numerous parallels between the culture of the mound builders and the present culture, and symbols suggesting that time itself works against humankind’s effort to build lasting monuments to itself.

The story of the failed expedition to Blue Shoals is told in flashback, six months after its climactic event, by August Howe, leader of the archaeology team. While attempting to organize a report on the expedition from the archaeologists’ notes and his wife’s slides, he recalls the events that brought about the end of his marriage, the failure of the expedition, and the death of Dan Loggins. This frame functions as a device to summarize and organize much diverse material, but Wilson uses it primarily to foreshadow the climactic revelation of the play and its consequences, thus suggesting the role played in subsequent events by the otherwise apparently random conversations and confrontations preceding it.

In the first scene of the play, for example, August says that he intends to “go through what is left of the wreckage of last summer’s expedition.” In the second framing scene, he refers to his wife as “ex-relation by marriage” and to his daughter as “alleged daughter.” In the fourth and final framing scene of act 1, August says, “There was no September goodbye this summer.” Early in act 2, in the last framing scene before the climax of the play, August says, “By the time the lake overran the site, it didn’t at all matter.” August’s apparent interruptions of the events of the summer thus frequently remind the audience that the events witnessed will eventually culminate by association in meanings and causation. In addition to the framing device, Wilson also foreshadows the outcome of the action by drawing numerous parallels between mound-builder culture and the present. These might represent coincidences, the action of fate, or merely plot machinations. Though their meanings are debatable, the parallels certainly add urgency and significance to ordinary human actions, motivations, needs, and desires.

Wilson’s stylized technique serves to remind the audience that what is being watched is not random behavior but a play. The lake water covering a multitude of sins at the end of this play also obliterates the past, making it appear that Dan, Chad, the roundhouse, and the burial mound have all vanished without a trace. Soon the old farmhouse will also disappear. The meaning of this place, then, exists only in human memory and in the spoken and written records made by those struggling to understand the meaning in their own lives.

Critical Context

The Hot l Baltimore (pr., pb. 1973), Lanford Wilson’s eleventh play, won two major awards, an Obie and the 1973 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play of 1973. Wilson’s next play, The Mound Builders, though not as popular, has been produced often in the United States and abroad. In addition, it has been made into a film for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Like The Hot l Baltimore, The Mound Builders received high critical praise for its complexity of thought and language. Critics were divided on its central meaning but generally found evidence in the play of a playwright of great promise.

In The Mound Builders, Wilson continued developing ideas, concerns, and techniques along the same daring lines he pursued in The Hot l Baltimore. In both plays, as well as in many successful plays in the years since, Wilson provides an authentic American base—the decaying hotel in The Hot l Baltimore, rural middle America in The Mound Builders, a small town in Missouri in his Talley family trilogy. In his plays, as well, character, not action, dominates. Events often seem ordinary and insignificant, but they accumulate meanings and can prove to be loaded with significance. Some critics have likened Wilson to Tennessee Williams, others, to George S. Kaufman, but for his focus on character rather than action, Wilson’s roots might be traced back to Anton Chekhov, whose quirky yet endearing characters also often passively accept a fate they seem powerless to change. Moreover, Wilson, like Chekhov, often employs melodramatic confrontations and climaxes to suggest meanings inherent yet unexpected in the ordinarily uneventful lives of his characters.

Wilson contributed a number of new plays to his oeuvre in the 1990’s and early twenty-first century, many of which continued the themes developed in his earlier plays. These works included The Moonshot Tape (pr., pb. 1990), Eukiah (pr., pb. 1992), Redwood Curtain (pr. 1992, pb. 1993), Day (pr., pb. 1996), A Sense of Place: Or, Virgil Is Still the Frogboy (pr. 1997, pb. 1999), Book of Days (pr. 1998, pb. 2000), and Rain Dance (pr. 2000).

The Mound Builders is representative of Wilson’s best work. In his many full-length plays and one-acts, this major American playwright eloquently states his conviction that each individual is the sum total of what he or she has been. In The Mound Builders, as in all of his best plays, characters look to the past for the values to sustain them, and, if they are lucky, discover that personal relationships in the present are their only salvation.

Sources for Further Study

Barnett, Gene A. Lanford Wilson. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Busby, Mark. Lanford Wilson. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1987.

Clurman, Harold. Review in The Nation, March 15, 1975, 315-316.

Cohn, Ruby. “Lanford Wilson.” In New American Dramatists, 1960-1980. New York: Grove Press, 1982.

Dasgupta, Gautam. “Lanford Wilson.” In American Playwrights: A Critical Survey, edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981.

DiGaetani, John L. “Lanford Wilson.” In A Search for Postmodern Theatre: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Gussow, Mel. “Lanford Wilson on Broadway.” Horizon 23 (May, 1980): 30-36.

Savran, David. “Lanford Wilson.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.

Williams, Philip Middleton. A Comfortable House: Lanford Wilson, Marshall W. Mason, and the Circle Repertory Company. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1993.