Reef Point
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Cauldron & Labrys reading
"I fortuitously read Reef Point a week after an enormous (though not unexpected) upheaval in our county. And I’m at an age where I have to adjust to life without many of the people I would most like in it. I felt guided by your old women characters’ adaptation to enormous upheavals in both the country and their lives. I think it is one of your most brilliant and wisest works."--Nina Wouk
A play about facing massive changes late in life, about legacy, about surrendering lifelong dreams, about downscaling lifestyle and recalibrating priorities. It is a play about a lost garden, and a found one.
It is 1955, and two lady’s maids—Maisie and Clem—have come with their wealthy employers back to Bar Harbor, an island resort on the coast of Maine. It has been seven years since the devastating fire of 1947, and Bar Harbor is in rapid transition from the Gilded Age watering hole for the elite to a middle-class, tourist town. The lives of the two maids, both older women and both of them “in service” their entire lives, are also facing radical change as well. The era of uber-wealthy industrialists with mansions staffed with a dozen household servants is drawing to a close.
One of the women, Clementine Walter, works for the famous landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. Farrand, 83, has made a shocking decision to tear down her family’s summer estate, Reef Point, and sell off the six acres of gardens that have been a showplace for the islanders, as well as the summation of her lifework.
The other woman’s employer, Evalyn Walsh McLean, has died, and she finds herself serving a redundant and anachronistic position in the son’s household.
As the two women struggle with enormous changes late in life, they are interrupted by the presence of the great lady herself. Mrs. Farrand, a famously private woman, has a confrontation with Clem’s friend that alters the landscape.
In the final scene, both of the women have completed their respective transitions into new lives, and the play ends with an affirmation of the landscaping credo to “make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit the plan.”
4 women, 1 man
Bare stage
One hour
A play about facing massive changes late in life, about legacy, about surrendering lifelong dreams, about downscaling lifestyle and recalibrating priorities. It is a play about a lost garden, and a found one.
It is 1955, and two lady’s maids—Maisie and Clem—have come with their wealthy employers back to Bar Harbor, an island resort on the coast of Maine. It has been seven years since the devastating fire of 1947, and Bar Harbor is in rapid transition from the Gilded Age watering hole for the elite to a middle-class, tourist town. The lives of the two maids, both older women and both of them “in service” their entire lives, are also facing radical change as well. The era of uber-wealthy industrialists with mansions staffed with a dozen household servants is drawing to a close.
One of the women, Clementine Walter, works for the famous landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. Farrand, 83, has made a shocking decision to tear down her family’s summer estate, Reef Point, and sell off the six acres of gardens that have been a showplace for the islanders, as well as the summation of her lifework.
The other woman’s employer, Evalyn Walsh McLean, has died, and she finds herself serving a redundant and anachronistic position in the son’s household.
As the two women struggle with enormous changes late in life, they are interrupted by the presence of the great lady herself. Mrs. Farrand, a famously private woman, has a confrontation with Clem’s friend that alters the landscape.
In the final scene, both of the women have completed their respective transitions into new lives, and the play ends with an affirmation of the landscaping credo to “make the plan fit the ground and not twist the ground to fit the plan.”
4 women, 1 man
Bare stage
One hour
