Ryan Patrick Welsh

Wainwright Jackson and his wife Janelle have a happy marriage, two children, and a modest three bedroom house. They work hard, want for little, and ask for nothing. Like most American families, they’re doing just fine. That is until their youngest child is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and the Jackson family finds out just how difficult it can be to navigate through a broken healthcare system and exactly how thin the veneer of a modern middle-class life really is.

The play is set in rural Michigan over the Christmas holiday where a family comes together and must sort through decades of resentment, jealousy, insecurity and the wrongs of younger versions of themselves. Last of the Wild Buffalo is about how we identify ourselves, the masks we wear, and the people we hurt along the way. Each character is deeply flawed yet yearning for closeness. Tensions rise as everyone in the house exposes the skeletons in each other’s closets.
RUNNING TIME:
105 MINUTES
TIME:
The present.
PLACE:
Rural southern Michigan, probably not far off the I-94. Specifically, the childhood bedroom of JACK and
QUINN.
SCRIPT NOTES:
- The symbol ( / ) indicates that the next line of dialogue should begin and overlap the current line
of dialogue.
- If a word(s) appears in [brackets], that word is unspoken.