The Mound Builders

One of the great American tragic plays. Playwright, Lanford Wilson's work holds up to the tragedies of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tenessee Williams. It reveals some important aspects of society and it is unpretty. As the world now operates,value is placed on those things of a lower order, whilst those of a higher order are devalued. We have been R.W.A. to wipe out aboriginal people, and when they are gone ,to wipe out their culture. In this case a Paleo-Indian culture that preceded arrival of Europeans into the Americas. Theatrical works such as this serve to remind us that the theater is one of the first places to uncover, to warn, and to protest.

"The Mound Builders" is both astonishingly entertaining and shatteringly profound, like all great plays. In the tale of an odd group of people--archaeologists, a drunken writer, an ambitious farmboy, a child--writer Lanford Wilson discovers the major rifts in western civilization and the human soul. A superb cast, superbly directed,ekes all the joy and all the horror from that rarest of contemporary works of art, an intelligent lay about intelligent people.

This play is primarily about a bunch of archaeologists excavating a series of prehistoric mounds in the Midwest. Unfortunately, they are battling the clock because a dam has been built and within a couple of years the area will be underwater. In addition to this time-related conflict, the archeologists are renting a house from an uneducated young local named Chad Jasker, who sees the new lake as his chance to develop his property and capitalize on an influx of recreational traffic. The climax of the play comes when the archeologists dash Jasker's hopes for a new prosperity in the region by encouraging the government to halt the filling of the lake in order to preserve the mounds.

Overall, this is a pretty mediocre play. The characters are not at all compelling, except for one notable exception - Chad Jasker, played with great success by Brad Dourif, who is best known for his later career as the voice of Chucky in the Child's Play films, as well as his Oscar nominated role as Billy Bibbitt in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Dourif's talents have been underappreciated in the past 15-20 years, mostly because of the nut-job roles to which he's been relegated by unimaginative casting directors, but he shines in this role. Watch the play just for his performance, and you won't be disappointed.