THE STORY: The recently orphaned Horace Robedaux is determined to buy a headstone for his father’s grave. He goes to work on Soll Gautier’s isolated prison farm but soon discovers that his ill and senile employer is frightfully paranoid among the convict laborers who outnumber him.
“CONVICTS is a juicy slice of Lone Star gothic, wherein the fourteen-year-old Horace is discovered working as an assistant to a grizzled old cane plantation owner who oversees a labor force of black prisoners. The basis for a 1991 film starring Robert Duvall, CONVICTS is a glorious and pathetic ghost story, in which people are doomed to haunt themselves.” —The New York Times.
“A significant theatrical event…the kind of show you tell your grandchildren you saw. Cast adrift by the death of his own alcoholic father and the remarriage of his mother to a resentful man who loathes his stepson, Horace becomes a stranger in a familiar land, searching for a peace that continually eludes him. CONVICTS has the narrative sweep that you look for in major novels, coupled with the electric immediacy that only live theater can supply.” —Wall Street Journal.
