Setting the Stage

Here are the Playwright Larry Shue’s instructions from the script.

Act 1, scene 1: In the darkness, rain and thunder. As the lights come up, we find ourselves in what was once the living-room of a log farmhouse, now adapted for serve as a parlor for paying guests—middle-income summer people, mostly, who come to fish, and swim, and play a little cards at night, and to fill up on Betty Meeks’ away-from-home cooking. We might think it still a living-room were it not for the presence of a small counter with modest candy and tobacco displays, a guest register, and a bell. Also, there is about one sofa too many, a small stove and its woodbin, and a coffee-table, one which a bowl of apples rests. Thought we couldn’t know it from the first two dialects we hear, the fact is that we are in Tilghman County, Georgia, U.S.A.—two hours by good road south out of Atlanta, then pull off at Cooley’s Food and Bait and call for directions.