A Night Near the Sun, Real Rain Productions, at TinFish Theatre. In great legends the hero slays the villain and claims the princess. But it doesn’t work that way in real life. Murderers, even those with the best intentions, are no longer honored and rewarded.
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Don Zolidis’s A Night Near the Sun, being given its world premiere, both relies on and subverts those legends. The hero is a lonely boy raised in isolation by a mother who believes him to be the spawn of space aliens. Its villain is a pathetic old man who engages in chat-room confabulation and petty drug mongering. And the princess is a teenage waif seeking refuge from her dysfunctional parents in the arms of a young romantic who writes poetry but doesn’t recognize T.S. Eliot’s lines when he hears them. This is no Camelot, just an economically depressed farm community near the Illinois-Wisconsin border.
