Trailerville

Drama. It's Labor Day weekend at the Trailerville Mobile Home Park in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. Merdelle Harris's husband of forty-one years is rapidly deteriorating with Alzheimer's. She is determined to care for him, to save him if she can. In saving Bobby she's saving her own life, she believes. There are days he doesn't know her, doesn't know himself.

Arlis Bryant lives in the trailer next door with his daughter, her three kids, and her beer-drinking, hot-tempered boyfriend. It's awful crowded in there, and the boyfriend thinks someone needs to go. Arlis has fallen for Merdelle, and his attentions are both a comfort and a torment to her. She has to choose between the man who loved her once and the man who loves her now, between the past and the future.

TRAILERVILLE, the first play by novelist John Dufresne, is all about love, in all its flavors: first love, unrequited love, unbridled passion, doomed young love, the love of parents for an adult child they don't really understand, the love that grows over time in a marriage, love that is blind to the beloved's faults (even if no one else is), and ultimately, what it means to love yourself. This may sound like a recipe for heartwarming romantic comedy, so let me note that one of Dufresne's strengths as a novelist is his ability to undercut sentimentality with black humor; that talent is in evidence here as well. But Trailerville is also a very sad play, because it acknowledges that love is messy and complicated and often hurts as much as—or more than—it heals.