A Limb Of Snow And The Meeting Book

THE STORIES: A LIMB OF SNOW. As outlined in the New York Post: LIMB OF SNOW, the shorter play, is the one that is simply superb; it is also totally original, unlike anything in the contemporary manner. It takes place in a cabin in the High Sierras in the 1890s, just as the gold strikes are petering out. A girl has run away from home at sixteen, cutting herself off from her family forever, to marry a young man who hopes to make his fortune gambling in the mining camps. Now they are twenty-one, she is pregnant, has already lost two infants, also a house that was washed away; the snow is piling upon a limb over the roof; it is time for something more stable. Her husband, a perpetual and likable optimist ('Don't think I ever have bad luck, just sometimes I don't have good luck') can't see it, can't stand the idea of giving up, being shrunk down to drab normality. All I can say is that the forty minutes (or so) are absolutely alive and true, not just true but subtly, persuasively true. (1 man, 1 woman.) THE MEETING. In describing the play Jerry Tallmer says: THE MEETING, at a picnic in an open field, is between an award-winning scientist at a New England college and his mistress, formerly his assistant, formerly his student, eighteen years his junior, now head of her own department at another college perhaps a day's drive away. They meet and sleep together from time to time, but it's been grating on the girl. We arrive at the situation at a familiar point; ditch your hateful wife, and marry me. The girl has also lately had a brief encounter with the scientist's nineteen-year-old son. It's what Miss Barlow does with this situation, in which the grating mounts from one to the other, that is alive and true and attention gripping from first to last. (1 man, 1 woman, plus bit part for 1 boy.)