The Healing Power of Storytelling
Two versions of the story of a life are presented in the narrative. There is the ritualistic deception which Morgan must tell Angus literally every day that presents a false narrative essentially answering the question “how did we get here.” The ritual is necessary because Angus can’t remember due to severe brain trauma. While working out the attempt by Miles to dramatize the story into his play, the true story of how Angus and Morgan got there is finally revealed and, despite the trauma inflicted, serves the palliative role of helping to heal a wound which has just basically been re-bandaged over every night for thirty years.
Memory, Perception and Truth
Because of the brain injury, Angus cannot remember the truth of the past. His ability to remember even the constructed fiction that has been fed him by Morgan for thirty years is flawed at best. As a result, it can be argued that Angus really has no permanent, deep-seated perception of his past either as truth or fiction. In a way, the presentation of the drama situates the audience into a role similar to that of Angus. The audience really has no idea whether the story that Morgan has been telling to Angus is a deception or the real deal and the startling reality of this is made dramatically clear by the fact that it is only because Angus is the one suddenly proposing an alternative past that the one is so willing to accept the second story as the truth. The truth of the moment, however, is that as far as the audience—or Miles, for that matter—knows, the “true story” could be just as fictional as the “fantasy” Morgan tells Angus every day.
The Exploitative Aspect of Creative Writing
Ultimately, Miles gets what he came to the farm for in the first place: a ticket into the play the theatrical collective is workshopping. After some failed attempts to translate his little playacting at being a farmer, that ticket comes not in the form of anything inherently related to farming, but to a dramatic true story. Explored more obliquely than other major themes in the play, the experience of Miles doing research down on the farm rings more than a little familiar. Fictional tales told on the stage, in books and upon the silver screen have often originated from such excursions into the real world by an artistic sensibility only there for the exploitation. Miles is finally able to redeem himself for all his miserable failures at being a farmhand, but ultimately, he leaves the farm arguably having taken far more than he contributed.
