MAN FROM NEBRASKA -- Tracy Letts

Northwestern University Press -- tpb
Evanston, IL -- ©2006 -- 89pp
ISBN: 0-8101-2347-9

Two act play.
4 M, 5 W

A luxury sedan, a church pew and visits to a nursing home form the comfortable round of Ken Carpenter s daily life. And then one night, he awakens to find that he no longer believes in God. This crisis of faith propels an ordinary middle-aged man into an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. This wickedly funny and spiritually complex play examines the effects of one man s awakening on himself and his family. [from goodreads.com]

#####

I started out NOT enjoying this play very much, but as I got through it, it grew on me a bit.

Tracy Letts has a bit of a theme running here with this play and his much more successful AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, and that would be a theme of late-middle-aged men trying to understand their lives. In many ways, one could almost see this as a pre-cursor to AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY.

Both plays (and I will try, of course, to speak more to this play directly) deal with an older man who has some interest or experience in the arts. In A:OC it's a poet and here it's a man who thinks he no longer believes in god, leaves his family to discover himself, and finds art in the form of sculpture. He's not very good, of course, but it brings him to a better understanding of himself AND a creator.

As a middle-aged artist who has let his art slide, I could identify mightily with our lonesome hero, Ken Carpenter (and yes, the name Carpenter is a wonderful symbol in so many ways as the Christian god-in-flesh was a carpenter, and as a sculptor, an artist uses many of the same or similar tools as a carpenter). His desire to find passion in life is probably understood by many men, and that passion is not necessarily a sensual or sexual passion. That passion is relayed here as sexual, artistic, and religious.

What did not ring true for me was how quickly and easily Carpenter seemed to make his break. Certainly some (if not all) of this would be made up for by the actor portraying the character.

The only other part that bothered me was how many short scenes there were. We jumped quickly and loosely and it made it difficult to keep a thread of the story together, even though the scenes really revolved around Ken. The scenes with Ken's wife, Nancy, just didn't work as well. It seemed too late to try to make the audience care about what Nancy was going through and how stalwart she was toward Ken.

Still...Letts has a great sense of theme and plot and subplot and uses his imagery very well. This is a play that takes a little getting used to, but could work on many levels.