Who Loves You Jimmie Orrio

Moonshine and moonlight combine forces with the mildly miraculous in this Southern tale-darkly poignant and comic-of an ageless, mute woman. In a dying Tennessee trailer park in 1966, Melinda wanders through the nearby woods, dressed in a dirty white nightgown, alternately abused and neglected by her embittered mother, Jessica, whose man hunger "wilts small plants"

J.T., an unflappable 13-year-old girl, Melinda's only friend, delights in rumors that the "speechless" woman is a witch. Purveying a possibly supernatural jar of moonshine, Leonard Pager, a middle-aged black man out of place in white Cookeville, stops for dessert with Jessica and finds he has a high price to pay for a piece of pie

Just out after a year in jail, Jimmie Orrio sleeps in the next trailer. It seems Jimmie was in jail for shooting a cowboy twice over something bad the cowboy was doing to a horse. On Jimmie's trailer are the words, "I Love You, Jimmie Orrio," scrawled in red crayon. Who wrote them? Melinda has been waiting a year for Jimmie Orrio to come back. What happened a year ago?

Melinda, under the moonlight, pours sugar over her body, highlighting a hoof-shaped imprint on her forehead; it looks as though she's been kicked by a small horse. Mysteries are answered as, propelled by the potent jar of moonshine and the healing touch of an outsider, a minor miracle presents itself and shows Melinda that the dirt road outside the trailer park has always led to freedom

"Fearsomely intimatethe play's heady late spring atmosphere...the images createdtwirling in the moonlight as she [Melinda] anoints herself with sugardeliver a wallop" ~ Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle

"Jimmie is great theater" ~ Peter Lewis, Marin Scope

One ext. set

Approximate running time: 90 minutes