Perkins is a professor of English and American literature and film. In this essay, Perkins examines Gardner's focus on the power of the imagination in the play.

In an interview with Hettie Lynne Hurtes for her article in Back Stage West, Gardner remembers growing up with people who would "sit and yell about Trotsky and about wars long since fought that were very vivid to them." These men, he recalls, still cared; "against all evidence to the contrary they had not given up an image of a better world. If they didn't argue about Lenin, they argued about the egg salad—both with equal passion." Gardner reincarnated these people from his past into the lead character in his play, I'm Not Rappaport, which first appeared on Broadway in 1985. The play focuses on eighty-year-old Nat Moyer who meets Midge Carter, an equally aged black man, every day...