James McLindon
Title of Play
Dead and Buried
Date and Place of Reading
July 19, 2011
Manhattan Theatre Club Creative Center
New York City
How to Access the Play
Director
Lewis Magruder
Cast
Lauren Ashley Carter–Perdue
Jason Edward Cook–Robbie
Debra Lee Daco–Stage Directions
Chandler Vinton–Bid
Playwright's Website
About the Playwright
James McLindon’s When We Get Good Again won the Playhouse on the Square’s New Works @ The Works competition and premiered there in Memphis, winning an Ostrander Theatre Award for Best Original Script. Comes a Faery, was developed at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and premiered at the New Ohio. Salvation was premiered by Hudson Stage Company, directed by Giovanna Sardelli, to critical acclaim in The New York Times. Faith premiered at Local Theatre Company in Boulder, Colorado. Distant Music has enjoyed eight productions around the country,
most recently at the Stoneham Theatre in Boston. Mr. McLindon’s plays have been developed and/or produced at such theaters as the Broad Horizons Theatre Company, Abingdon, hotINK Festival, Irish Repertory, Lark Play Development Center, Samuel French Ten-Minute Play Festival, PlayPenn, Victory Gardens, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Lyric Stage, Boston Playwrights Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and Telluride Playwrights Festival. His plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Smith & Kraus, Brooklyn Publishing, Applause Books, Next Stage Press, and Original Works Publishing.
About the Play
In this dark comedy set in a small New England town at Halloween, 18-year-old Perdue finds a job in a place most people wouldn’t even consider: the local graveyard. Bid, the taciturn ex-Marine who runs the cemetery, hires Perdue because she’s moved by her plight: Perdue has come to town to live with her aunt while searching for her missing mother. Robbie, Bid’s assistant, a fatherless boy whose knowledge of manhood has been gleaned from the pages of Maxim, launches a doomed campaign to seduce Perdue, culminating in a midnight picnic in the cemetery, but Perdue isn’t interested. Nor is she entirely truthful, as Bid soon discovers when the young woman's story begins to fall apart. Perdue is living in the homeless shelter; her mother died shortly before she arrived and is buried in the cemetery. Bid, seeing her own lost child in Perdue, offers her a place to stay. Perdue refuses, misinterpreting the offer as romantic rather than compassionate, but is too lonely to entirely keep her distance.
Perdue confides in Robbie that she has come, not to reconcile with her mother, but merely to see her face, which she doesn’t remember. Perdue hopes that her mother has left a photo of herself that will prove that she is the blond-haired woman in Perdue’s oldest memory, a woman whom Perdue knows in her heart once loved her. But there are no photos, and Perdue must decide how far she’ll go in order to learn the truth about her mother. Bid must decide how much she’ll risk to stop her. By play’s end, the characters’ search for what they’ve lost–a mother, a father, a child–ends when they find each other instead.