THE STORY: Divorced and living alone in a remote Oklahoma town, Lloyd welcomes a visit from his sister Eve, a hard-drinking, tough-talking carnival operator trying to make a living with what remains of a touring show that was broken up by her partner’s sudden demise. Lloyd puts on a good face, although he is disturbed by the news that his ex-wife has remarried and by the fact that his children never call him; while Eve, ever ebullient, cannot disguise the emptiness she feels at Red’s death (even though he was married to another woman), a sense of loss that the brassy young Don, who she has signed as helper and lover, cannot really assuage. Trying to reach out to his neighbors, Lloyd persuades Eve to set up her paraphernalia in his front yard, charging the local kids a nominal twenty-five cents (even for the fabled “Mooncastle” ride); but the sheriff quickly closes them down, and they don’t even take in enough to pay for the electricity. But somehow the experience becomes a watershed for both of them, as Eve decides that this will be her “farewell tour,” and Lloyd accepts the fact that what he has is all he ever will have—or could really ever have hoped for.
A touching and gently humorous study of two aging “losers” who come to accept the truth of their lives—that the best is now beyond them and, perhaps, was never really within their reach.
Commissioned by the Actors Theatre of Louisville under a Ford Foundation grant in support of women writers.
Included in the collection
Bite the Hand/Mooncastle.
