Talley’s Folly

The courtship of Sally Talley and Matt Friedman is recounted with warmth, humor, and poetry in Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly. When Matt returns to Lebanon, Missouri to woo Sally after a year’s absence, they are hardly a match made in Midwest heaven. She is a shy spinster from one of the town’s oldes, riches, and WASPiest families; he is a brash, rumpled Jewish accountant from St. Louis. Romance does blossom, haltingly, beneath the eaves of a ginergbread-latticed boathouse, but not before the pair confronts revelations and feelings as unpredictable and surprising as the course of love itself.