About the Play:

Winner of the 2003 William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award

The Bells is a full-length melodrama by Theresa Rebeck. A complex and absorbing play about a group of loners and eccentrics still eking out a living in the Yukon frontier at the height of the Alaskan Gold Rush. In their midst is Mathias, innkeeper in a derelict town, who is haunted by a secret that changed the direction of his life. The Bells is a surreal exploration of the landscape, and the psyche, of murder, confronting questions of guilt and responsibility while spinning an absorbing fireside ghost story.

The Bells is set in a remote prospecting outpost in the Yukon in the waning years of the Alaskan Gold Rush. The play tracks the intertwined fates of a gregarious innkeeper, Mathias, his rebellious daughter, Annette, and a group of loners and misfits still eking out a living in a boomtown gone bust. Hard luck and hunger brought them together. One day a French Canadian bounty hunter named Baptiste arrives and begins asking questions about the disappearance of a Chinese prospector, Xiufei, eighteen years ago. A set of bells given to Annette by Xuifei when she was a little girl resurfaces, and Baptiste soon learns it's every man for himself in this vast white wilderness, where nothing is quite what it seems, and ghost stories are never taken lightly.

The Bells premiered in 2005 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

Cast: 2 women, 5 men

What people say:

"The Bells ... shows Ms. Rebeck to be a gifted writer with an expansive mind, willing to explore old terrain to find new paths." — The New York Times

About the Playwrught:

Theresa Rebeck is a leading American playwright, screenwriter and author. Her plays include Bad Dates, Omnium Gatherum (co-written, Pulitzer finalist), Spike Heels, and Mauritius, which won Boston's prestigious IRNE and Elliot Norton Awards. Her work in television includes NYPD Blue for which she has won the Peabody, the Writer's Guild, and the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar awards. She holds a Ph.D. from Brandeis University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.