Talley's Folly by Lanford Wilson

First published: 1979

First produced: 1979, at the Circle Repertory Company, New York City

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: July 4, 1944

Locale: Lebanon, Missouri

Principal Characters:

• Matt Friedman, an accountant
• Sally Talley, a nurse

The Play

The set consists of an elaborate Victorian boathouse, now gone to ruin, containing a latticework crammed with long-unused fishing equipment. Matt Friedman, forty-two, an accountant from St. Louis, enters and begins to address the audience. Although he mentions that a year ago he visited Sally Talley and spent some time at this very spot, he appears to be more interested in telling the audience that because he is not a “romantic type” of character, the technical elements of theater (lighting, sound, and set) along with the assistance of the audience are required to create the romantic atmosphere for this play. During his monologue he often lapses into seemingly irrelevant digressions that barely conceal his nervousness and volubility. Just when Matt appears completely lost in his whimsical musings, Sally, offstage, yells his name. As if by magic, the houselights dim, the special theatrical effects are added, and the drama begins.

Sally enters. She is thirty-four years old, works as a nurse at a hospital in Springfield, and lives at home with her parents. She complains that his interference with her family has precipitated a crisis she will be forced to resolve. Smatterings of exposition are revealed as they interact. Five months ago Matt had come to the hospital where Sally works and tried to see her; apparently she knew that he was there, but she refused to see him. Sally also notes that she had sent him only one letter in reply to numerous letters on his part. In her letter she had told him clearly that she had no intention of seeing him again.

Matt tries on a pair of old skates he finds stashed in the boathouse. As he simulates skating with Sally, he hums a song and says, “I’m having an old-fashioned skate with my girl.” His gambit does not work—Sally responds, “I’m not your girl,” and begins to walk away. At that moment, however, fortune smiles on Matt. When he tries to catch up with her, he falls through the floor of the boathouse and is nearly injured.

Now that Matt has Sally’s attention again, he tries to coax a favorable response from her by referring to the “affair” the two had last year. He notes that they did see each other seven times in seven days. When Sally again begins to walk away, Matt appeals to her to not run away from this encounter.

Sally admits that she needs to move away from the stifling atmosphere of her parents’ house. Matt invites her to consider the possibility that he might be in love with her, and that she might be in love with him. Then he turns to his playful nature and gift of mimicry to ask a series of rhetorical questions about this fascinating woman. He surprises her by referring to conversations he had with the patients at the hospital in Springfield while he waited to see Sally that day back in February; many of them told him that Sally had said she had a “beau.”

This moment of intimacy is broken when she sees a spot of blood on his face. When Matt fell while “skating,” he apparently scratched himself. Sally becomes the nurse, and as she dabs at his cut, they begin to interact in a more subdued manner. Matt reveals that he learned many details of Sally’s past by talking to her Aunt Charlotte. This exposition reveals Sally to have been a free spirit in a conservative family that would have preferred a traditional old maid daughter. Suddenly Sally takes charge and begins to ask questions about Matt’s life story. After several playful responses, Matt nervously launches into a strange retelling of a crucial part of his family’s history in Europe before World War I. He tells of his family’s torture and death at the hands of the French and the Germans because of his father’s knowledge of munitions. Matt, then a boy, was smuggled to America with his uncle’s family. He concludes that in order to spare a child from ever being lost to similar political machinations, he will never help bring a child into the world.

Matt’s story represents an anguished recollection of horrible events, but his telling of the story backfires. Convinced that Aunt Charlotte has shared some secret with Matt, and that Matt has told the story because he feels sorry for her, Sally repudiates him. Matt quickly explains that Aunt Charlotte told him nothing—he told her the story only because she asked him to. Sally calms down, and their conversation drifts away from personal topics.

Finally, Matt sums up his frustration:

I come down here to tell you I am in love for the only time in my life with a girl who sees the world exactly as I see it. I say to you, I am sorry, Sally, I will not have children, but if there is a life for the two of us, will you have me or not? You scream and yell bloody murder.

One last gambit occurs to him, however, before they leave. He recalls that Aunt Charlotte told him that Sally has a deep dark secret that only Sally can reveal. He probes Sally to discover her secret. She admits that she was “disappointed in love,” later adding that she contracted tuberculosis. Then her marriage to the son of a prominent businessman was called off. Matt is not satisfied; he thinks he knows why her marriage was called off—she had an illegitimate child. He presses her relentlessly until she can no longer keep the truth from him. With an emotional outburst, she admits that the tuberculosis caused an infection that rendered her infertile. When her fiancé’s family discovered that she could not provide him with an heir, they called off the marriage. Matt responds with sensitivity and love. Relieved that she has revealed her secret, Matt shows Sally that this revelation does not change his feelings for her or their prospects of life together. He does not want a family; she cannot conceive children. What matters is that they can start a life together. They decide to leave for St. Louis that very night. They kiss. Matt turns to the audience and acknowledges that romance has prevailed.

Dramatic Devices

The play’s opening scene presents a number of challenging dramatic devices. When the audience enters the theater and surveys the stage setting, it sees upon the stage a dilapidated Victorian boathouse amid waist-high weeds. Despite the romantic possibilities of the setting, the opposite effect is emphasized at the opening. Lanford Wilson specifies that “all this is seen in a blank white work light; the artificiality of the theatrical set quite apparent. The houselights are up.” In other words, most of the magic of the theatrical experience—its ability to transport an audience from one time and place to another—is purposely withheld at the opening of the play.

When Matt enters, the conventions that audiences are accustomed to experiencing in the theater are immediately disrupted. He addresses the audience directly, not as in the conventional monologue, which addresses questions of plot and motivation, but as if he were greeting members of the audience in the lobby before a performance begins. In fact, the first thing he tells the audience is how long the play will last; the audience may well wonder, “Has the play begun?” Wilson wants the audience to understand that it must be an active participant in the overall drama of the play. Matt appears alone before the audience in order to present himself as he is, to gain its confidence, and to exact a promise that the audience will help him generate an atmosphere of romance so that he can win Sally’s hand. For his part, he promises to keep the schedule, use the “facilities” of the theater for all they are worth (the special effects of lighting, music, and so on), and to keep Sally onstage until she yields to his proposal.

As soon as Sally’s voice is heard offstage, however, Matt the stage manager becomes Matt the character. The transformation is accompanied by the theatrical magic that the audience expects from a romantic play—suddenly the houselights dim, and the illusions of theatrical magic appear: the reflection of a sunset on the river and the sounds of water running and birds singing. The drama begins in earnest, and Matt and Sally begin to dance the elusive “waltz” that Matt refers to at the opening. Each time their dance appears about to end abruptly, some accident or idiosyncratic response reinvigorates the dialogue, and the dance resumes. Meanwhile, the spell cast by their interaction and revelations of character causes the audience to become willing participants in the drama. Matt acknowledges the audience’s role when, at the end of the play, he turns to the audience and, as if winking, says, “And so, all’s well that ends . . . right on the button. Good night.”

Critical Context

Wilson’s plays often are characterized by themes derived from experiences in two contrasting worlds: the urban and the rural. In his plays with urban settings, characters live on the edge of existence and are trapped in decaying surroundings. The Madness of Lady Bright (pr. 1964, pb. 1967) portrays a woman’s descent into madness. Balm in Gilead (pr., pb. 1965) portrays a ragged group of the dispossessed who spend time in a small inner-city café. The award-winning The Hot l Baltimore (pr., pb. 1973) presents a similar collection of individuals, who live in a decaying hotel near a railroad station.

When Wilson utilizes rural settings, his characters are often so bound up in their hypocritical, guilt-ridden, dysfunctional family relationships that they are blind to the potential beauty and simplicity of the world around them. The Rimers of Eldritch (pr. 1966, pb. 1967) examines a town’s response to a dark secret, and The Mound Builders (pr. 1975, pb. 1976) exposes conflicts between those who would preserve the past and those who would destroy it for the sake of blindly following the god of development. These plays reflect Wilson’s ambivalence toward his own Midwestern roots.

Wilson often resolves these tensions by finding hope in the possibilities of life-sustaining human relationships. The relationship between Matt and Sally in Talley’s Folly exemplifies this hope. This play, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, represents Wilson’s ongoing interest in rural Midwestern settings, particularly those of his native Missouri. It is one of three plays that re-creates the lives of the Talley family from Lebanon, Missouri. The Talley family appears initially in 5th of July (pr., pb. 1978), which portrays events that take place in 1977. In this play Wilson explores themes that also reverberate in Talley’s Folly: betrayal by members of a family, the narrow-minded and repressive aspects of some Midwestern values, the redeeming quality of human relationships, the life-affirming virtues associated with honesty and hard work, and the special, creative qualities of one family member that balance the iniquities of other family members.

Talley and Son (pr. 1985) adds to the story of the Talley family by focusing on the events that occur while Matt and Sally are discussing their future on that July 4 evening in Talley’s Folly. The play explores the moral and psychological decline of the Talley family, whose actions are characterized again by betrayal, revenge, and gross materialism.

Wilson’s main characters often are misfits or free thinkers, who do not share the narrow-minded values of those in power. Most important, they are individuals. They know what they believe in, and they act on their beliefs. His plays from the late twentieth century include 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).

Sources for Further Study

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

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

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 a Postmodern Theater: 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.

Schvey, Henry I. “Images of the Past in the Plays of Lanford Wilson.” In Essays on Contemporary American Drama, edited by Hedwig Bock. Munich: M. Hueber, 1981.

Wilson, Lanford. “An Interview with Lanford Wilson.” Interview by John C. Tibbets. Journal of Dramatic Theory andCriticism, Spring, 1991.