Someone From Assisi

In this play about the Deadly Sin of Lust, Saint Francis, almost blind and toothless and nearing the end of his life, revisits Assisi, where he encounters Pica, a young girl with the same name as his mother; Mother Clara of Saint Damian''s Convent; and Mona Lucrezia (now a mad woman) with whom he had a love affair when he was a wild, willful young man known as Francis the Frenchman, and she was a young married woman. Saint Francis still seeks expiation for the "load of sin" with which he has offended God. The play poses questions about the true meaning of love-and, as Wilder wrote, about "the ideas of the Erotic as Destroyer and the Erotic as Creative."