Abundance
Opening Night: February 17, 2015
Closing: March 24, 2015
Theater: Beckett Theatre
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Crimes of the Heart, comes the breathtaking tall tale of Bess and Macon, two mail-order brides lured to the plains of Wyoming by the promise of new beginnings. Beth Henley’s fierce and funny adventure spans a 25 year friendship as wild and unpredictable as the untamed West itself, unearthing along the way, the dark underside of American mythology and the unbreakable bonds of female friendship.
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March 3, 2015
Was it a delayed reaction to the Reagan era, eight years of watching a cowboy president ride horses on his California ranch? Something, anyway, made the early 1990s an exceptionally rich time for unconventional westerns. Among them were Larry McMurtry’s novel Buffalo Girls, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven — and Beth Henley’s play Abundance, a small tragedy in a comic key about a pair of mail-order brides chasing survival, excitement and maybe even happiness in the Wyoming Territory. “I hope our husbands don’t turn out to be just too damn ugly to stand,” says Macon, the savvier of the two, as they wait at the stagecoach stop. Peopled with resilient oddballs mangled by life, “Abundance” had its premiere Off Broadway in 1990, at the end of a decade that started with Ms. Henley’s Pulitzer Prize for Crimes of the Heart. The Actors Company Theater’s satisfying revival is the sort of production that makes you realize how much you’ve missed a playwright’s voice. Directed by Jenn Thompson on a spare, rough-hewed set by Wilson Chin, it’s performed by a fine cast at the Beckett Theater at Theater Row, the complex where the New Group staged Ms. Henley’s play The Jacksonian in 2013.
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