GREENE – Closing Chenango River Theatre’s highly successful third season is Lanford Wilson’s acclaimed romantic masterpiece, “Talley’s Folly.”  One of America’s best known playwrights, in the breakthrough play that established his career and won the Pulitzer Prize, playwright Wilson uses compassion and humor to show us two lively, lovable people finding the kind of love we all hope to find.  

“Talley’s Folly” is a joyous, touching and beautifully written play about the courtship of the very mid-western Sally Talley and her very out-of-place Jewish suitor, Matt Friedman.  Set in rural Missouri, on the 4th of July in 1944, Matt has arrived to plead his love for Sally, the attractive, but uncertain daughter of the Talley family apparently headed for a spinster’s life. 

Played in real time, over the course of one short evening, Matt must try to overcome Sally’s fear of emotional commitment and her certain belief that her family would never approve of their marriage.  

The tale is “a waltz ... a no-holds barred romantic story.”  Yet it is much more.  As Matt, a St. Louis accountant, woos Sally and strives to break through her protective shell, pieces of his own past are revealed.  His thoughts find expression in a decaying Victorian boathouse on a quiet river as he and Sally slowly draw together on a July evening in 1944.