Overview
In this funny, moving and thought provoking play, at the turn of the twentieth century, President William McKinley finds himself sitting on his front porch in Canton, Ohio, drinking lemonade with a guest who looks oddly familiar, but whose face he can't quite place. McKinley is the beloved Republican figurehead, impossible to dislike, who allowed himself to be maneuvered into a disastrous and totally unnecessary war, and has spent his political career as the caretaker for the powerful business interests and political criminals who actually run the country. His guest is an intense and strange young man who tries to show him what an evil, imperialist nightmare he is presiding over, but McKinley sees the century to come as one of peace, prosperity, and the domination of the world by American business. A powerful vision of two very different ideas about what America is or should be.
Published in the collection Curse of the Wolf Man and Other Plays