THE STORY: Dora Hand lives by herself in a suburb on the Nebraska prairie. She’s gone through three husbands and now seems destined to play the lonely mistress to her married milkman, Kevin—until a swan crashes into her living room window and sets Dora on a harrowing journey. She names him Bill, and to all outward appearances, Bill is a charismatic and child-like man. At first endearing himself to Dora like a pet she can train, Bill quickly learns the ropes of being human: speech, dressing, checkers, beer…and love for his mistress. All at once, Dora finds herself dangerously entangled with the swan, whose animal devotion to her threatens her already neglected lover and ultimately her sense of self.
Fierce in its poetic treatment of love, THE SWAN provides a mysterious gloss on whether or not we descended from the beasts…and what we may feel when we find them lurking in our truest selves.
“An absorbing 100-minute riff…when you wish upon a star, Ms Egloff’s play suggests, the answer to your dreams might just come crashing into your life in a form that’s very hard to recognize.” —The New York Times.
“A bewitching bedtime story for grown-ups…a psycho-sexual cauldron wherein fantasy and deprivation merge and combust. Egloff’s language alternates between the unadorned cadences of the workaday world and the lyric fancies of poets, her stage pictures shift from an implacable reality to florid dream states.” —Newsday (NY).
