Troy, Unincorporated

A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in "Troy, Unincorporated" offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer's tragedy "Troilus and Criseyde". The tale's unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted "historic" downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the good courtly lover, suffers from the weeps, or, in more modern terms, depression. Pandarus, the hard-working catalyst who brings the lovers together in Chaucer's poem, is here a car mechanic.

Chaucer's narrator tells a story he didn't author, claiming no power to change the course of events, and the narrator and characters in "Troy, Unincorporated" struggle against a similar predicament. Aware of themselves as literary constructs, they are paradoxically driven by the desire to be autonomous creatures – tale tellers rather than tales told. Thus, though "Troy, Unincorporated" follows Chaucer's plot – Criseyde falls in love with Diomedes after leaving Troy to live with her father, who has broken his hip, and Troilus dies of a drug overdose – it moves beyond Troilus's death to posit a possible fate for Criseyde on this "litel spot of erthe".