In a Northern Landscape. by Timothy Mason

The play takes place in a Minnesota farming community in the 1920s, where Samuel Bredahl, a young college student, lives with his puritanical, Bible quoting mother; his dryly academic father, who is a professor of philosophy at the local college; and his sensitive, restless sister, Emma. The setting shows a burned-out farmhouse, once the Bredahl home, and now a chilling reminder of the cataclysmic events which, as told in flashbacks, underscore the action of the play. Bored and isolated, Samuel and Emma are drawn ever more closely together and apart from their stern parents and Samuel's boorish fellow students. When Emma's cherished rabbits are torn apart by the wild dogs which roam the countryside she turns to her brother for consolation, and it is her public declaration of the love which follows that leads to the crucial events which foreshadow the play in which the outraged townspeople incinerate the Bredahl home, driving Samuel into the jaws of the wild dogs, and leaving his family to ponder their roles in these tragic happenings and the lifelong retribution which they must face as a consequence.