Good Heif

Maggie Smith’s Good Heif is directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde.

The play, set in a hot, dry landscape, where life is nothing but “diggin’ and eatin’ and prayin’ and sleepin’,” finds Lad who’s astonished by the arrival of his manhood. The men of the town laugh at his questions, respond with useless remedies and outsize alarm, and his Pa’s advice just won’t do. He’s forced to wonder whether the devil got into him or whether it’s just the lure of what’s “over thar?”

Against a backdrop of entrenched fear and immobility, Smith’s stimulating and provocative new drama has found a way to talk about the danger of ignorance, the necessity of change, and how instruments of community propriety hold fear in place and keep societies, even the smallest ones, in check.