Play: Abundance

Setting and Premise
Set across roughly twenty-five years beginning in the early 1860s, Beth Henley’s Abundance unfolds in the raw, wind-scoured expanses of the Wyoming Territory. Two mail-order brides, Bess Johnson and Macon Hill, arrive on the frontier burdened with hope, fear, and the promises contained in letters from men they have never met. The land, so often sold as a paradise of limitless yield, proves austere and unforgiving. Against that backdrop, the play traces the volatile, enduring bond between two women whose friendship becomes both refuge and battleground.

Plot Overview
Bess and Macon meet at a remote stage stop and pledge to look out for each other before they are collected by their respective husbands. The pair settle on neighboring homesteads. Their matches are imperfect, even perilous: one man’s gentleness slides into paralysis and neglect, while the other’s swagger curdles into cruelty. Daily life turns into a sequence of elemental trials, failed crops, brutal winters, isolation, pregnancies hoped for and lost. In letters, fantasies, and extravagant vows, the women keep alive dreams of art, travel, and love that the prairie’s scarcity jealously resists.

A catastrophe fractures their world when Bess vanishes, presumed taken by a Native band while out on the open range. Years pass. Grief, guilt, and the need to endure push Macon into choices that strain her private moral code and the tacit pact between the women. The community’s search fades; memory hardens into legend. Then Bess reappears, altered and complicated by the ordeal, and is soon swept into notoriety. A promoter packages her story as a sensational captivity narrative, and Bess tours the East as a living emblem of frontier suffering and pluck. Money, attention, and finery arrive at last, the abundance she once imagined, yet it comes with scripts to perform and truths to abridge.

As fame reconfigures their orbits, old loyalties buckle. Macon, who has kept the homestead alive by dint of grit and imagination, confronts the bitterness of labor that yields no applause. Bess, gilded by celebrity but haunted by what cannot be told, measures the bargain she has struck. Their husbands, variously weak, violent, or absent, become instruments rather than anchors, further complicating the women’s sense of self and of each other. Betrayals, of vows, of stories, of the land’s promise, accumulate. When fortune reverses and the circuit of fame sputters, the two women circle back, forced to reckon with the long ledger of their intimacy: shared jokes and secret longings, as well as compromises that cannot be unmade.

Themes and Resonance
Henley uses the frontier myth to expose the gap between advertised plenty and lived scarcity. Abundance becomes an ironic refrain, of land, of dreams, of pain, asking what forms of wealth truly sustain. The play interrogates how stories are fashioned and sold, especially women’s stories in a culture eager for uplifting spectacle. Friendship, with its ferocious mingling of devotion and rivalry, is the play’s deepest vein, portrayed as a resource that can nourish or be mined to exhaustion.

Style and Tone
The writing toggles between mordant humor and stark lyricism, balancing tall-tale exuberance with bruising realism. Time skips forward in episodic bursts, letting costume, weather, and the women’s weathered voices register change. Henley’s language is colloquial and metaphor-rich, giving the vast silence of the plains a human counterpoint. What remains at the end is not a triumph over nature but a chastened, tender acknowledgment: the truest abundance may lie in the fierce, complicated bond that survives when most other promises have blown away.