The Last Yankee

Two men, one in his late-forties, the other twenty years older, meet in the waiting room of a New England state mental health facility only to discover that they have done business together in the past. Inside the facility, each of their wives recovers from a nervous breakdown

Leroy Hamilton, a descendent of founding father, Alexander Hamilton, has spent his life as a highly skilled carpenter. His wife, Patricia, the daughter of Swedish immigrants and herself the mother of seven children, cannot reconcile what she considers to be Hamilton's deliberate under-achievement with her own family's grasping attempts at assimilation and affluence

Purposefully foregoing her anti-depression medication for a number of weeks, Patricia has begun to display a new clarity of thought that promises to shatter irrevocably the status quo of her life with Hamilton

The older, more affluent couple, share an equally tense marriage despite their prosperity. Karen Frick, though, has gone farther down the path of no-recovery than even the more frequently hospitalized Patricia

As roommates, Karen and Patricia have been sharing stories about their husbands-and the final meeting between them all, demonstrates the price and rewards of even strained marriages

REVIEWS

"a quiet, imploding depth charge of emotionTautly pertinentunlike anything else Miller has so far shown us. This is what theatre is all about" ~ NY Post

"[Miller] takes as his subject things the theater has a hard time showing: the outdoors on a glorious New England morning, and the inside of a woman's complicated mind" ~ Time

"'The Last Yankee reasserts Miller's unquestionable dominance of American drama ... No other American playwright has had his range of experience and feeling; none has combined his magisterial moral judgement with his warm and forgiving sense of humour and his ability to inhabit completely, like Shakespeare or Ibsen, every character he creates ... Miller writes with a sense of pain and laughter, with an understanding of the heart's endless struggle with the mind, which is characteristic of a writer on an unending journey of discovery'" ~ Sunday Times

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