Comic Drama
Characters:1 male, 4 female, 3 children (2 male, 1 female)
Exterior Set
The play is set in the coal mining country of southern Indiana. Carla, a twenty six year old high school dropout, wife, and mother, dreams of packing up and moving to escape her dreary existence. She is teased, threatened, and cajoled by her friends as they settle into an ordinary day of trading gossip, reading magazines, and prattling about sex while the children dart in and out. An ordinary day becomes extraordinary when the local mine resounds with an explosion. The play is a touching and humorous study of women who posses the courage, the humor, and the dignity to rise above the grimmer facts of their existence.
"As beguiling as it is original." -The Baltimore Sun
"The characters emerge slowly and thrillingly, like a rubbing under a charcoal pencil." -New York Magazine
"Williams...draws a remarkably accurate canvas....The colloquial dialogue is pungent and often funny." -The Washington Post