Playwright's Notes
Long Lankin’s Curse is a play
about redemption, about struggling with adversity and making life worth living.
Are we each alone in the eye of
god, compelled to fulfill a role in a vast cosmic drama whose significance comes from the past? Or do we create the
meanings of our lives by navigating forward with others day-by-day the best we can? It is a play about communication,
and the ways we isolate ourselves when we fail to listen and fail to reach out. And it is a play about the hope and
determination that can help us.
Some people
think that the meaning of our lives was established a long time ago and that it has to do with sin and sacrifice and atonement.
For them we are all victims. Even their gods and prophets are victims.
Others
try to live their lives as if they themselves can create their meaning and value through personal responsibility for their
actions guided by their feelings and thoughts. For them redemption is not about fulfilling a role that comes from the
past but about taking what the past gives us and using it to create a better future.
The
first has the benefit of connecting people with a powerful universal meaning. While it makes us small cogs in a vast
machine, it also connects us with the profound, and with an infinite force beyond space and time. It has the certainty
of the old. But it lacks the possibility of the new. The second is without the assurance of cosmic value, of blessing
from the almighty. For this it must substitute an honest and humble self-confidence, and a hopeful rather than a resigned
kind of resolve.
When Bethany, the play’s sixteen-year-old heroine,
sets out alone for the hospital to have her baby and begin the life of a young single parent she knows she’s in for
a struggle. But she refuses to see herself as a victim. She is, in a loving way, a kind of warrior, eager to go,
as she says in her final line, "Where the winds sing and the arrows fly."
