Examining Vietnam

Although the United States had withdrawn its last troops from Southeast Asia seven years before Talley's Folly opened in 1979, America was still trying to come to terms with the war. In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and the mass graves of as many as three million Cambodians killed by the U.S.-supported Khmer Rouge were found, raising new questions about U.S. involvement in other countries.

Many American artists, including Lanford Wilson, explored the conflict in their work. The year 1978 saw the first production of Wilson's Fifth of July, about a man who has lost both legs in Vietnam, and the release of two Academy Awardwinning movies about the war, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. In 1979, as thousands of Americans were flocking to movie theaters to see another Vietnam film, Apocalypse Now, Wilson turned his attention to Sally Talley, one of the characters in Fifth of...