Monkey in the Shade
By Steven Haworth

In Harvey, Louisiana in 1978, a man named Monkey works in the oil patch as a derrick man and lives in a bar/restaurant/boarding house called Clay and Minnie’s.  Clay and Minnie’s is run by a violent ex-con named Clay Boudreaux and his wife Miz Minnie.  Monkey is estranged from his family but works hard to send money to his ex-wife and two daughters.  One day a teenage boy named Sean arrives.  He has no money, no skills, is a college dropout, and was just kicked out of his home in Minnesota.  But he heard about the oil boom in Louisiana, and that virtually anyone could get a job, and Clay and Minnie’s was the hangout to ask for one.  Monkey tries to protect Sean as he gets more and more in trouble with Clay whose purposes are mysterious but whose violence is on display.

Forty years later in 2018, Sean, now a sometime freelance journalist whose career has gone sideways, returns to Louisiana for medical reasons.  Now 58 he has a heart condition and is receiving tests at Tulane Medical in New Orleans.  But visiting Harvey across the river he learns of the murder of Clay Boudreaux sometime in the decade after he left and decides to investigate.  However, no one’s memory is reliable, including his own, and as he gets closer to the truth he comes to realize that the shape of his life is something radically different than he supposed.

Cast
Sean: Josh Ryan
Monkey + Stream: Scott Kurz
Clay: Jack Zerbe
Minnie + Lottie + Darlene + Janice: Stephanie Anderson
Janny + Bobby: Chloe Irwin
Willie + Earl: David Sindelar
Joe + Dr. Goldfaden: Dennis Stessman
Delbert + Recherche: Eric Griffith
Stage Directions: TBD

Director: Scott Kurz
Dramaturg: Maura Krause
Designer: Matthew Deinhart
Responders: Kip Fagan, Matt Gutschick