FULL-LENGTH. WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS is about friendship, memory, and a crisis of conscience.

Finalist, FutureFest 2019, Dayton Playhouse
Best New Work, nominee, Dayton Most Metro

Marty O’Neill is a good cop with an ordinary life. A captain with some thirty years on the force, he is content in his job and his marriage. But, O’Neill’s contentment is shattered when he is faced with a decision that challenges everything he has always believed.

MARTY O’NEILL is about to head home at the end of the day when his assistant, THALIA, tells him there is a witness he should interview. The man, GERALD FREEMAN, was witness to an unsolved hit-and-run. But the moment Freeman walks into the office, O’Neill is troubled by a sense of recognition. He’s sure he knew Freeman in the past, but can’t quite place him.

That evening, O’Neill will remember as he pins down the resemblance between Freeman and someone else he once knew—Paul Travis. As O’Neill tells his wife, CAROL, Paul Travis was a close childhood friend with whom he long ago lost touch. O’Neill has some vague recollection of Paul having been involved in something criminal. A little research reveals that Paul was a member of a radical anti-war group during the Vietnam War, and that he went underground after a bombing. He has been missing all these years.

Still, as sure as he feels about his hunch, O’Neill cannot be certain that Freeman is really Travis—until Thalia digs up some strong evidence that they are the same man. Suddenly, O’Neill is faced with a crisis: turn in his old friend, or abandon the principles that have guided his career in law enforcement.

As the play unfolds, we discover more about the complicated relationship between O’Neill and Travis, and how the latter all but saved the former from a childhood of abuse and neglect. We discover, too, an emotional complexity that has long simmered beneath the benign surface of the O’Neill’s marriage.