Sand Mountain by Romulus Linney

First published: 1985

First produced: 1985, at the Philadelphia Festival for New Plays, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Type of plot: Realism; comedy

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Locale: Southern Appalachian Mountains

Principal Characters:

Sand Mountain Matchmaking

• Rebecca Tull, a young widow
• Clink Williams,
• Slate Foley, and
• Radley Nollins, her suitors
• Lottie Stiles, a wise old woman
• Vester Stiles, her grandson
• Sam Bean, the successful suitor

Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain

• Sang Picker, a mountain woman, the narrator
• The Lord, a mountain traveler
• Saint Peter, The Lord’s traveling companion
• Jack, an older man
• Jean, his young wife
• Fourteen children, played by one actor
• Prosper Valley Farmer, a greedy man

The Play

Sand Mountain is the collective title for two one-act plays, Sand Mountain Matchmaking and Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain. These plays share a common locale (Sand Mountain) and are designed to be performed by the same cast; they also relate thematically.

Sand Mountain Matchmaking is a light curtain raiser, running about thirty minutes in performance. Rebecca Tull, a nubile young widow, sits in a chair through nearly the entire play interviewing a series of suitors, each of whom dances in to a strain of mountain music. She rejects three, who represent all the known marriageable men in the district, and then is advised by a wise old mountain woman to use a charm, a spell: Each suitor must be told, “A man’s horn is times three the size of his nose.” Somewhat reluctantly, Rebecca repeats this sentence to each undesirable suitor; each then leaves in a huff. At that point, Sam Bean enters, having been attracted by word of a young woman brazen enough to say such a thing to her suitors. In a somewhat longer scene, Rebecca and Sam find that they have much in common, and the play ends with the clear implication that Rebecca has found the appropriate husband.

Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain is a somewhat longer work which, although containing much effective comedy, aspires to more profundity. It is narrated by the Sang Picker, a mountain woman who gathers ginseng root and comments upon the folkways of her fellow denizens of Sand Mountain. In her opening monologue, she establishes that her people like tall tales, especially those with a biblical foundation, and then launches into the story of why Jesus and Saint Peter once visited Sand Mountain. As she begins to tell it, the other actors enter and perform it.

The Lord and Saint Peter are thoroughly human mountain men who journey into the neighborhood seeking Sand Mountain. The Sang Picker directs them. Despite a gathering thunderstorm, The Lord rejects an invitation to spend the night with the Prosper Valley Farmer—a well-fed bourgeois. Instead, The Lord pushes on to the mountain shack of Jack and Jean, an older husband and young wife, and their fourteen children. The couple, though deeply impoverished—and currently drunk—take the two men in and share with them their meal: soup and cornbread. The fourteen children, played by one actor, fight over even this simple fare until The Lord calms them by telling them stories. Saint Peter, exasperated by these events and baffled by The Lord’s insistence upon visiting these poor people, when much better accommodations were available in Prosper Valley, also lapses into the background. The Lord, Jack, and Jean are left to drink mountain brandy (miraculously renewed in the jug each time they drink from it) and exchange tall tales—an art at which The Lord matches the mountaineers, story for story.

At first, the stories are merely humorous exaggerations, but Jack and Jean begin to act them out with exuberance. Eventually, Jean asks somewhat timidly if they might tell “Jesus Tales,” a mountain tradition of apocryphal stories of Jesus’ miracles and Saint Peter’s well-meaning stupidity. Several of these stories ensue, building up to one last story: The Lord requests that Jack and Jean tell the story of Joseph the Carpenter. This one is acted out in full by Jack, Jean, and Fourteen Children and forms the crux of the play.

“Joseph the Carpenter” begins with Joseph, a man eighty-nine years of age, considering marriage with Mary, a girl of fourteen. Joseph is skeptical, but Mary insists that she wants to marry only him. In another quick scene, Mary, now married to Joseph for over a year, tells him that she is pregnant, yet still a virgin. Comical in his disbelief, Joseph nevertheless promises not to deny parentage of the baby. Later still, Jesus is portrayed as a rebellious young boy, torn between Mary’s conviction of his divine mission and Joseph’s earthy insistence on unpretentious hard work. Finally, in a climactic scene, the young Jesus strikes his father, who then hovers on the edge of death. In an extraordinarily effective coup de théâtre, The Lord (who up to this point has been watching the portrayal) enters the action to speak the words of the young Jesus, and the reason for The Lord’s visit to Sand Mountain suddenly becomes clear: Jesus needs, through these simple mountain folk so like Joseph and Mary, to revisit his own childhood, both to say good-bye to his earthly father and to seek forgiveness for a youthful indiscretion.

On this poignant note, everyone goes to sleep for the night, but the play has a comic denouement: The Lord gives his hosts a gift the next morning by decreeing that what they first begin that day will last all day; they begin pulling clothes from a washtub and end up with a sumptuous wardrobe. The Prosper Valley Farmer, supported by Saint Peter, demands equal treatment, and Jesus reluctantly pronounces the same decree. The Farmer, however, leading the other Prosper Valley citizenry, decides that before beginning to pull coins from their purses they should all step into the woods and urinate—a process that will then continue all day. The Sang Picker offers a summary comment, and the play ends.

Dramatic Devices

Sand Mountain Matchmaking is full of presentational devices that, while removing the action from a realistic context, add to its comic delight. The musical phrases that introduce each character invite dance steps with each entrance. The blocking suggested in the stage directions keeps Rebecca and each of her suitors in two chairs facing the audience during most of the play. Romulus Linney describes his work as “a formal interview play” and asks that “business and movement . . . be kept to a minimum.”

Similarly, the structure of Why the Lord Come to Sand Mountain is carefully calculated to hold the audience at a distance until the last possible moment, when the play’s thematic complexity comes into focus with a single theatrical stroke. The Sang Picker narrates the story of The Lord coming to Sand Mountain; within that tale, Jack and Jean act out the story of Joseph the carpenter; within that play, Jesus suddenly begins to play himself, thus charging the play-within-a-play-within-a-play with spiraling layers of meaning.

Linney calls for long journeys to be suggested by the actors’ circling of the stage. Actors sit with their backs to the audience until, on cue, they turn to join in the action. The passage of an entire night is accomplished by the seated actors simply dropping their heads in a few moments of “sleep.” These presentational devices combine to establish the play as fantasy and to keep the audience from empathic involvement until the critical moment.

Perhaps most interesting are the several ways that these apparently dissimilar plays are linked into a single theatrical event. Since much depends upon a warm acceptance of the uneducated mountain people as salt-of-the-earth humanity, Linney introduces them in a comic vein and only gradually moves into greater depth of character development. Thus, the lightness of the first play effectively prepares the audience for the complexity of the second, just as the comic elements in the second play lead up to and away from its moment of emotional purgation. Unfamiliar vocabulary and sentence structures are introduced in a comic mode in the first play and then are used with greater power in the second. The reappearance of actors in similar roles in the second play effectively reinforces both its seriousness and the distancing quality of role-playing. In short, these two plays are linked in ways that cause them to reinforce each other and to build effectively to a single climactic moment. Although either could be performed separately, the impact of each would be lessened by this separation. There is meaningful artistry in their juxtaposition.

Critical Context

Romulus Linney’s plays have not been performed very often or very effectively in New York, and thus he has been described in The New York Times as “perhaps the most underrated, underrecognized American playwright today.” However, his plays have been produced with notable frequency at regional professional theaters and in amateur theaters around the United States, and his aficionados rapidly increased by the end of the twentieth century. Sand Mountain is typical of one genre of Linney’s work, for he lived for a number of years in North Carolina and has written several plays centered upon Appalachian people, their humor, and their religion. Perhaps the best known of these is Holy Ghosts (pr. 1971, pb. 1977), which spellbindingly portrays a storefront church full of snake handlers and develops its audience’s sympathetic appreciation of the sincerity of their mutual love and caring despite the bizarre lack of sophistication in their theology. Also depicting rural southerners, A Woman Without a Name (pr. 1985) portrays a nearly illiterate woman whose process of self-education and liberation turns upon the destruction of all of her children, indomitable will clashing excruciatingly with maternal love. His Mountain Memory: A Play About Appalachian Life (pb. 1997) chronicles the lives of an Appalachian family between 1776 and 1995 as they experience changing times, constantly struggling to hold onto their land and their dignity in the face of great evil and temptation.

Other Linney plays include his first, The Sorrows of Frederick (pb. 1966, pr. 1967), based on the life of Frederick the Great, The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks (pr. 1972, pb. 1973), offering a postwar look at the same location in which James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) is set, Childe Byron (pr. 1977, pb. 1981), depicting a conversation between a deceased Lord Byron and his daughter Ada, and Two (pr. 1990, pb. 1993), winner of the National Critics Award. He is the recipient of the 1999 Award of Merit Medal for Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as two Obie Awards—one in 1980 and the other in 1992 for Sustained Excellence in Playwriting.

Sources for Further Study

DiGaetani, John. “Romulus Linney.” In A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Linney, Romulus. Interview with Don B. Wilmeth. Studies in American Drama 2 (1987): 71-84.

Moe, Christian H. “Romulus Linney.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Schlatter, James F. “Story-teller in the Wilderness: The American Imagination of Romulus Linney.” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South (Winter, 1994): 63-75.

Tedford, Harold. “Romulus Linney on ‘Sublime Gossip.’” Southern Theatre 38 (Spring, 1997): 26-32.

Wilmeth, Don B. “Romulus Linney.” In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.