Dear Sal

The poems in this series are based on Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Talley’s Folly.” The play takes place in rural Missouri on July 4, 1944 in a boathouse belonging to the Talley family. It is the ninety-seven minute courtship of Sally Talley, a nurse’s aide from a Protestant family, by Matt Friedman, an accountant and German-Jewish refugee. One year before the events of the play, the two had met and had a week-long affair, during which they’d fallen in love. However, each being the keeper of great secrets and intense private traumas, they’d decided to part ways. Over the course of the play it is revealed that Matt, unable to fully let go, had been writing and sending a letter per day to Sally before finally deciding to come back, confess his love, tell his story, and ask her to marry him. These poems come out of the rehearsal process of the play in which the author worked on the role of Matt. They were intended as a way in which to generate a greater understanding of the character, but ended up taking on a life of their own; exploring the space between actor and role, and as communion between withheld desire, perceived unlovability, Jewishness, loss of faith in the body and the spaces the body occupies, and ultimately, a tremulous sort of hope.