HOOD RIVER — Columbia Center for the Arts presents “Book of Days,” the award-winning play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, running May 8 through May 23.
Ruth Hoch has landed the role of a lifetime: Joan of Arc in her community theater’s production of Saint Joan. Then her boss (the owner of the local cheese factory) turns up dead. Everyone calls it a hunting accident. Ruth isn’t so sure. The deeper she digs, the more she finds a town that has decided, collectively and quietly, to leave well enough alone. Neighbors look the other way. Stories don’t add up. And Ruth, cast to play a saint who died for telling the truth, has to decide whether she’s willing to do the same.
Winner of the American Theater Critics Association Award for Best New Play, “Book of Days” is among Wilson’s most gripping works, a thriller grounded in the rhythms of small-town American life, where the real danger isn’t the killer but the silence that protects them.
Critics have taken notice. Variety called it “a significant addition to the Lanford Wilson canon.” The Hartford Advocate praised it as a black comedy that “burrows slowly beneath the cheery surface of contemporary American small-town life.” The Detroit Free Press has described it simply as: “lively storytelling by one of our best playwrights.”
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