Lanford Wilson’s “The Mound Builders,” which won him an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting in 1975, seems even more timely in its newest incarnation. Audiences can watch the team of pot-smoking archaeologists in bell-bottoms with the same sort of curiosity they might display for Native American remains. The team worries about an incoming freeway interchange disrupting the site, which the audience already knows will be built.
The story opens with professor August Howe (David Conrad), a year after much of the play occurs, going through slides of the dig. He clues us in that his wife will become his ex-wife and that he will resign, we just don’t know how. So we start digging.
Sharing a house with August and his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), are August’s assistant Dan (Zachary Booth) and his pregnant wife Jean (Lisa Joyce). They are joined by August’s sister Delia (Danielle Skrasstad), a convalescing drug addict and former novelist, and occasionally graced by the presence of Chad Jasker (Will Rogers), the aggressive and usually drunk owner of the house and the land below.
The cast is nearly uniform in its quality, and Joyce stands out as excellent. Brookshire is the exception — she neither appears nor acts much like an archaeologist’s wife, which weakens the play.
The archaeologists often talk about the house, where the ancient Mound Builder men would “sit for hours and tell hunting stories.” After August’s sister arrives, the lake house transforms into a modern, co-ed incarnation of this ancient storytelling ritual. She sleeps or lies awake in the living room while characters filter in and out, telling her of their lives and their dreams.
Despite August’s privilege of hindsight, he doesn’t tell us what’s going to happen, and that makes it all the more gut-wrenching when we find out. The ending is powerful, if a little abrupt, and one might wish there was another moment to breathe before the cast comes back and bows. But hoping for a few more moments before the illusion is broken is simply a sign of good acting and a well-constructed world, courtesy of Jo Bonney’s unobtrusive direction.
The play ends on a note of loss and melancholy, no doubt intensified over the 40 years since it was written. Maybe all our society will leave behind are our freeway interchanges — those magnificent swirling structures reaching into the sky. Maybe someday archaeologists will ask what they were for, and Dan’s answer about the mounds will still apply: “People aren’t happy unless they’re building something.”
“The Mound Builders” is playing now through April 14 at the Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St.
A version of this article was published in the Thursday, March 28 print edition. Alexander Tsebelis is a contributing writer. Email him at [email protected].
