Hellhound on My Trail

Hellhound on My Trail is the first in a trilogy of plays which follows the lives of the Cassandra family. Denis Johnson’s plays explore the dysfunctional and dysphoric inhabitants of the American West: a sexual-misconduct investigator who misconducts herself sexually; a renegade Jehovah’s Witness who supports his splinter Jehovian group by dealing drugs; Mark Cassandra, a self-described “ripper and a runner” who finds himself waking up in a hotel room with a lot of questionable objects that he can’t remember at all (and there’s one bullet missing); two Agriculture employees probing the surreality of bureacracy in a hotel coffee shop full of Germans; and the one “good” Cassandra kid, Marigold, currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for sexual misconduct.