Miracle Play by Sheldon Wolf
MIRACLE PLAY is a Native American vision quest, a journey toward faith, incorporating Lakota religion and tradition, some song and dance, and various types of story-telling. Portions of the play are in Lakota language.
We learn part way through Act One, that David Taylor, is telling his life story to his doctor. David, age 22, is a Lakota on a quest. He has received the unlikely news that he has...
MIRACLE PLAY is a Native American vision quest, a journey toward faith, incorporating Lakota religion and tradition, some song and dance, and various types of story-telling. Portions of the play are in Lakota language.
We learn part way through Act One, that David Taylor, is telling his life story to his doctor. David, age 22, is a Lakota on a quest. He has received the unlikely news that he has a rare and deadly brain tumor, a cancer that most often strikes men in their 50s. What are the odds? He has been told that he is a candidate for a dangerous experimental treatment, one which has only a miniscule chance of leaving him alive but even then perhaps in a vegetative state. What to do? Before he responds with his choice, he has asked for several days, days he spends searching for himself, searching for his heritage, and searching for an answer to the most horrific of questions about life.
David travels to an abandoned town in South Dakota, on the edge of the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, where a former 60s radical collects junk and stories as he awaits the next revolution. Two other visitors arrive that same day. One is an elderly geology instructor, an emeritus professor, returning to South Dakota on a bus tour after the death of his wife. The other is a young woman from Eastern Europe who now works for an American conglomerate that is buying all the nearby property to create a theme park, a Wild West money-making fantasy.
Four most unlikely characters meet in South Dakota. What are the odds?
Ultimately, the resolution is to create a miracle that will imbue the place with a sense of sacredness. What corporation would go up against that? And that same miracle, impossible, something beyond logic…faith… gives David the tiny shred of hope he needs.
The play happens now (in the doctor’s office) and then (in South Dakota) simultaneously.