The Country

Who is the comatose woman Richard has found on the roadside?  Why has he brought her into his house?  Exactly who is telling the truth and who is lying? THE COUNTRY is a spare, well-crafted dissection of desire and despair.

Richard and Corrine now live in “the country” but their world in the play is actually isolated to their own little island of civilization on the deck downstage center. The country and the natural world are out there, enveloping the playing space, depicted by a subdued night sky and moonlight hitting the high grass upstage, but they don’t intrude into the private world of the characters. Instead, the room is lit with artificial light, with an emphasis on practicals. We embrace shadow and partial illumination. The characters are actively controlling their environment, turning lights on and off, throughout the play and it is their craving for this very sense of control and power that proves to be their undoing.