My Antonia

This faithful adaptation brings the wonderful romantic novel's profoundly human characters and its expansive view of 19th century American frontier life vibrantly to the stage. The play celebrates Antonia's story and her extraordinary delight in the happenings of daily life. It moves from the raw hardships of her immigrant family's first year as settlers on the plains through her joyful and rebellious youth to her fulfillment as a farm wife and mother.

"No romantic novel ever written in America is one half so beautiful as My Antonia."
-H.L. Mencken

In the late nineteenth century, a fourteen-year-old immigrant girl from Bohemia and a ten-year-old orphan boy arrive in Black Hawk, Nebraska, and in teaching each other form a friendship that will last a lifetime.

Willa Cather (1876-1947) was born in Virginia but moved to Nebraska at the age of eight. This new home dramatically colored her fiction, and Cather became known for her portraits of a Midwest that is both rugged and fragile, demanding much of its inhabitants but vulnerable to destruction by the forces of modernization sweeping the country. Cather's portrait, in My Ántonia, of an Eastern European immigrant settled in Nebraska creates a lasting image of the pioneer woman, worn down but not defeated by the difficulties of her life. In A Lost Lady (1923), Cather depicts what are often described as "the stages of a woman's moral decline" as she enters the modern world, but this reading overlooks the novel's great sympathy with Marian Forrester, a woman whose spirit simply cannot be crushed by the materialism invading her small Nebraska town. Cather dipped off of the literary radar screen for a number of years, but she has been resurrected recently by critics interested in her portraits of submerged and hidden sexuality.