The Tower (American Theater in Literature)

Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, and first performed at the Illusion Theatre in Minneapolis, The Tower is the story of a woman, fighting for her life on the operating table, who dreams (or remembers) that she is secretly rebuilding the Tower of Babel. Within the babel of her vision and the voices of the operating surgeons, the woman, Ruth, suffers a recurring nightmare of a prison cell that traps her in locations of violent confrontation: Belfast, the Gaza Strip, Johannesburg. Her only escape is to rebuild the ancient tower, once again to wrestle with God. Matthew Maguire has created a contemporary version of the Babel story as described in Genesis, a brilliant collage of the ancient world and the new, of our culture's ideals and madness.