Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In the following essay, Bily examines Wilson's uses of parallels in The Mound Builders to show the connections between Dan and Chad, characters who seem on the surface to be dissimilar.

Lanford Wilson's The Mound Builders is a play about time and human attempts to outrun it. All of the characters dig into the past—literally and figuratively—to find materials with which to build a future, and in their attempts they get in one another's way and prevent one another from achieving their goals. Since everything in the play is filtered through August's consciousness, his personality and his struggles are easy to see. As August understands it, he has lost his life's work because of his own deception and because of a conflict between two young men, one good and one evil. Wilson, however, indicates...