Life List

Life List is a three-person drama that unfolds over the course of a Friday evening and the following day. It involves Eugene and Ruth, who have lived together, unmarried, for nearly thirty years. Eugene is a public school science teacher who once dreamed of starting a school to give poor urban children the best private education available. Ruth is a nurse who regrets not having children and is weary of her daily contact with illness.

On Friday evening, Eugene comes home excited about a newspaper report of a sighting, in Louisiana, of an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird widely assumed to be extinct. His animation on this subject starts an evening-long discussion/examination/dissection of their life together, which continually returns to the subject of abandoned dreams and their corrosive effects. The evening ends disastrously when a light-hearted moment begets an ugly revelation that threatens to divide Eugene and Ruth forever.

Into this mix walks Jamal, an African-American student of Eugene’s, who arrives at the house on Saturday morning to earn some extra credit by starting a birdwatching life list. His presence galvanizes Ruth, who mothers him clumsily and uses him to goad Eugene out of the torpor of his dissatisfied life.