Book of Days
Even so, we don’t go see a production of Hamlet for the thrill of the chase. We go to get a glimpse of God’s law at work. Because, in a Shakespearean context, when a divinely ordained king is killed, more than just the political order is thrown out of whack: the whole universe is shattered. (Hence the wild and uncanny weather that always accompanies the Bard’s regicides.) The point of the show isn’t to ferret out the culprit but to watch how God inevitably picks up the pieces, discarding a few while assembling the rest into a new order. How He restores harmony. How He puts things right. Hamlet’s less a whodunit, really, than a kind of cosmic procedural. The kind designated by the word tragedy.
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Likewise Book of Days. Set in mythical Dublin, Missouri–a “clean… quiet…wide-awake…prosperous town” with four bars, five churches, and 4,780 souls–this 1998 script by Lanford Wilson plays in many respects like a conventional murder mystery. Local mogul Walt Bates, owner of the cheese factory on which Dublin’s economy depends, seems to have been the victim of a freak duck-hunting accident; but his bookkeeper, Ruth Hoch, begins to suspect foul play. Inspired to boldness by her role as the title character in a community-theater production of Shaw’s Saint Joan, Ruth follows the clues to their source and makes her conclusions unambiguously clear despite the opposition of an array of vested interests.
And rendered even creepier by Wilson’s hypersincere treatment of the material. I’ve always thought there was a careful, plodding quality about Wilson’s plays. As fluent as he can sometimes be, he’s hardly poetic. He doesn’t go in for leaps or bold strokes–or irony, for that matter. In Book of Days, metaphorical equations–like that between Ruth and Saint Joan–are made in a forthright, workmanlike way, as if to say, OK, here’s the next thing you’ll need to know if you’re going to get my point. The approach is so unassumingly midwestern that the almost Manichaean menace the play conveys only really hits you in retrospect, after the last homey “Good night” and “Safe home” from the citizens of Dublin. But then it hits you hard. Book of Days may constitute the very best possible use of Wilson’s peculiar talents.
