Marion Clay

Marion Clay is the widow of a well-known New Mexico artist who is dating a younger man, Salvatore Zappala or Zappy. Her vocation in life has been to run an art gallery in Chicago where she has sold her husband's and other contemporary artists' work successfully. When the play begins, Marion is in the midst of selling her dead husband's effects so that she can leave the southwest and attend to her gallery as well as her lover's career as a professional tennis player. However, even though she is portrayed as an independent woman, she has a very maternal relationship to Zappy, indulging him as one would a child about his health and well-being.

Father William Doherty

Father Doherty is the parish priest of the New Mexico mission where the play takes place. As a mentor to Don Tabaha, the young half-Navajo studying medicine, Father Doherty tries...