The Uncurled Hand

The Uncurled Hand is a five-person drama about the past and the future crashing in on a man who is prepared to face neither one.

Zeke is a Vietnam-era draft resister living in contented self-exile in the New Mexico desert. His daughter, Reggie, a high school senior whose poetic voice he has nurtured, wants nothing more than to leave the only home she has ever known for the wider world. Certain that her friend Peter, who has just been accepted into the film program at N.Y.U., is unqualified for the job, she longs for a hero to rescue her.

This wish seems to be answered by the appearance of Jason, Zeke’s long-unacknowledged younger brother, who arrives bearing a gift, a bequest for Reggie from the grandmother she never knew with the potential to radically alter her future. Jason’s presence strains Zeke’s marriage (his wife Glory, a painter of desert scenes, is alarmed to learn after twenty years with Zeke that he has a brother) and threatens the isolation and control that are the foundations of his life.

Wanting to keep the past buried and the future at bay, Zeke teeters between violence and acceptance, and ultimately uses the words of his favorite poem as a guide.