American Dead July 25, 2008

In a shuttering rural town, the local drunk Lewie (Mark St. Amant, left, with Paul Dillon) mourns his sister Grace, a deputy shot down in a robbery. Her death has become lore, his brother-in-law has remarried and the sheriff has lost patience with Lewie's liquored up trespassing of their old haunts where he visits her ghost.



"American Dead" playwright Brett Neveu was raised in Newton, Iowa -- the former home of Maytag -- and his mordant two-act is a requiem for those communities whose lingering residents move, reminisce or soldier on. "It's like a western," says Neveu of the play's cracked but credible realism. "You get a sense of who these lives are."