THE MAINE WOODS by Don Nigro

Next Stage Press Verified independent store

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Elena, a celebrated poet, has brought her troubled daughter Juliet, her student Rosaline, and her lover, Morgan, up to her late father’s cabin, deep in the Maine woods, to clear it out before she sells it, having not yet worked up the courage to tell her daughter, who loves the place and associates it with her missing father, Jack, who has abandoned his family and disappeared. Juliet has had drug and alcohol abuse problems, but is straightening herself out with the help of her new friend Rosaline, her mother’s favorite student, to whom Juliet has become very attached. What Elena and Juliet don’t know is that Rosaline has had an affair with Morgan, followed by a nervous breakdown and a relentless determination to destroy him for ending their relationship. Morgan begs Rosaline not to tell them, but she is having a really good time torturing him. He is forever writing but not completing a book about the mythic power of the woods as an ancient symbol of mystery and chthonic power. He loves Elena but she doesn't really believe in or trust him. She worries he's really after her daughter. Juliet worships her mother but is angry at her, would do anything to get her mother's attention, and has never felt that her mother really loved her. She has always had a serious crush on Morgan, who loves Juliet like a daughter and wants the relationship with Elena to work, but finds Rosaline more attractive than he’s willing to admit to himself. Elena loves her daughter but is emotionally unable to connect with her and was always jealous of her husband's close relationship to her. She sees Rosaline as a second daughter, more like herself than Juliet is. Sexual tension grows as Rosaline plays with the affections and desires of all three of the others, while Elena, still very angry at her dead novelist father, takes out more and more of her frustration on Morgan, who is drinking and increasingly feeling trapped. And Jack, the missing husband, moves through the play, in memory and imagination, as we begin to put the pieces of this complex puzzle together. A darkly funny and increasingly frightening webwork of explosive interrelationships that are veering towards some sort of catastrophe while something seems to be lurking in the woods all around them, waiting for them. Show more