"For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again."
When the lights come up, two coffins stand against a kitchen wall. A man is building the third on the table. It's the smallest. Nobody has said a word yet.
Petersburg, Texas. A night in May, 1957. Seven years of drought have broken in a single spring, and on Monday evening the rain came with a terrible wind. A tornado. Two nights later the power's still out and the only light is a lantern on a nail over Judd Utley's table, where he planes green boards cut from the pecan tree the storm took down in his yard. Behind a door that never quite shuts, his wife sits up with their children packed in ice.
Four people. One room. Ninety minutes in real time, without an intermission and without a blackout.
His neighbor wants a reason he can put his hand on, so it can't come for his own. His pastor needs a sin, because if this was only weather, then so were the seven years he preached the drought as judgment. Judd won't confess to what he didn't do. He won't curse God either. He asks only to be told, and he keeps working while the others talk, so the box gets built in front of you board by board, nail by nail.
Hope of a Tree is a play in one long, continuous act.
