About the Play:

Fifth of July is a brilliant, enthralling full-length comedic drama by Lanford Wilson. A paraplegic Vietnam War veteran prepares to sell his family's Missouri homestead to childhood friends, now musicians, who want turn it into a music studio. Alternately funny and moving, it deals with a group of former student activists and the changes that have been wrought in their lives and attitudes in the years since leaving college. Acknowledged the first time round as arguably Lanford Wilson's finest play, Fifth of July was reappraised as a richly felt examination of America itself.

Fifth of July revolves around four former Berkeley undergraduates, reunited on the Talley family farm 15 years after their glory days, and focuses on the disillusionment with America in the wake of the Vietnam War. (The title itself suggests the often unexplored "day after" in all our lives; Independence Day being the Fourth of July.) The scene is a sprawling farmhouse in rural Missouri, which is home to gay Vietnam veteran, Kenneth Talley Jr, who has lost his legs in the war, and his partner, Jed, a horticulturist. They are visited by Ken's sister, June, and her teenage daughter, and by Gwen and John – the former a hard-drinking, pill-popping heiress who aspires to be a rock star, the latter her wary-eyed husband and manager. All are old friends from college days, and former activists who agitated for what they hoped would be a better world. The action centers on Gwen's offer to buy the farm, which she plans to convert into a recording center, and on Ken's Aunt Sally (the same Sally from Talley's Folly), who has come to the family homestead to scatter the ashes of her late husband. Their talk, as the play progresses, is sharp and funny and, in the final essence, deeply revealing of lost hopes and dreams and of the bitterness that must be fought back if one is to perceive the good that life can offer. The last play chronologically, but the first play he wrote in what would become his celebrated Talley Trilogy which chronicles several decades in the fictional lives of the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri, Lanford Wilson's home town.

Fifth of July premiered in 1978 by Off-Broadway's famed Circle Repertory Company and ran for 159 performances. The play made its Broadway debut in 1980 at the New Apollo Theatre and ran for 511 performances. Since then the play was revived off Broadway in 2002 by the Signature Theater Company, and has been mounted by regional, college, and community theatres.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

What people say:

"This is one of the most incredibly well-written, beautifully acted, profound and moving and often hilarious plays it has ever been my privilege to see in the American theater." — New York Daily News

"Few contemporary playwrights are as craftsmanlike and humane, or as wise as Lanford Wilson. There aren't many plays to see that are as interesting and absorbing and feeling and funny as this." — Cue Magazine

"The characters are mostly flamboyant, their dialogue crackles with laugh-inducing lines and we find ourselves dazzled by Wilson's virtuoso writing." — Hollywood Reporter

About the Playwright:

Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) was one of the most distinguished American playwrights of the late 20th century. He was instrumental in drawing attention to Off-Off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to Off Broadway, and then to Broadway, within a decade of his arrival in New York. His work has also long been a staple of regional theatres throughout the United States. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.