Watbanaland

THE STORY: Flo Stillman is a nursery school teacher, desperate to have children of her own. Her husband, Park, a bond trader on Wall Street, refuses to comply. Park carries an overwhelming secret: An affair he had with his secretary, a spirited young woman named Marilyn, already produced a baby. The child, brain-damaged, lies in a hospital incubator, the living manifestation of Park's infidelity to his wife. Now Park is terrified to procreate again, for fear of producing another handicapped infant. Flo, blissfully unaware of her husband's situation, still craves a child. She starts to compulsively adopt Third World children through late-night infomercials on TV. Soon, she is a foster mother of some renown. As she becomes increasingly obsessed with her responsibility to nurture the worlds' underprivileged, Flo's life takes a surreal turn. She experiences miraculous visits from Third World emissaries, and even endures a phantom pregnancy. Meanwhile, Marilyn's new boyfriend, Dash, a toll booth attendant with super-human genes, decides to pirate Marilyn and her ailing baby away to the Midwest, where they can begin life anew. In a series of short, interconnected scenes, alternately comic and poignant, the play weaves an intricate web of conflicting desires. Written with the narrative logic of a late-morning dream, WATBANALAND is a haunting story about hunger in its very human manifestations: sexual, physical and spiritual.Wright, Doug is the author of 'Watbanaland', published 1995 under ISBN 9780822214809 and ISBN 0822214806.