SOURCE: Adler, Thomas P. “The Artist in the Garden: Theatre Space and Place in Lanford Wilson.” In Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights, edited by Kimball King, pp. 383-95. New York: Routledge, 2001.

In the following essay, Adler survey's Wilson's full-length dramas, analyzing the visual—but not rhetorical—absence of definite places on the stage sets of a dozen plays.

In his essay “Writing for Films,” William Inge—whose plays share with several of Lanford Wilson's a distinctively midwestern setting—comments on the spatial limitations that would seem to restrict the dramatist's art: “In the theatre,” Inge asserts, “one is always confined to the dimensions of the stage. … Writing for the theatre has its own satisfactions, but mobile geography is not one of them” (1). Such overstatement—some would argue inaccuracy—is understandable if one equates serious drama with a realistic set (the traditional room...