Where do you go when there's nowhere to turn?
In August, 1939, reporter David Charleston, jaded by his coverage of the Spanish Civil War, has retreated to keep a lonely lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Lines of war are being drawn in Europe, and the US is still laid low by the Great Depression, but Charleston finds hopeful company in phantoms from 1849--ghosts of the hopeful immigrants whose ship foundered on the reef offshore, 50 years before the light was built. And yet, these figments from the past have a way of forcing him to turn to face the present.
A play that insists we face the world's hardships with the frankness of cynicism but respond with the courage of hope, Thunder Rock was first staged by Elia Kazan for The Group Theater in 1939. It played on the West End through the Blitz to audiences who kept gas masks under their seats. Thunder Rock's history is nearly as strange as its fiction, and its insights and demands are as penetrating now as they were 80 years ago.
