Overview
Rebecca, a woman in her seventies, is writing a letter to her son, Ben,
although she speaks the letter to the audience. She tells him the
increasingly grotesque and horrible story of the very cold night in
which her cow gave birth to a calf, but because her husband Clarence
says he won't go out in the cold for a cow, the calf freezes to death,
and they are forced to engage in increasingly unhappy efforts to get the
weak cow back into the barn. But the cow keeps staggering back out to
be with the frozen calf, until Clarence, in a rage, goes out to shoot
it. But the silver lining, says Rebecca, is that now we got all the
hamburger we can eat. A complex, funny and horrifying little tale that
might explain why Ben never writes back. In Banana Man & Other Plays.