"I Too Have Lived in Arcadia," which Lang calls a pastoral, contains a bizarre mixture of kitsch and Shakespearean poetic form. The verse is pretty fluid and the characters draw some fascinating comparisons between urban landscapes and the unwieldy structure and pathetic decline of prehistoric creatures. Chloris, a stubborn foe of science and technology, drone long-some, polysyllabic, hypnotic lists of the members of the biological categories:

...in Paleozoic seas, it was

By no means certain any Life

Except the lime-secreting algae,

Protozoa, annelid worms, and

Ancient trilobites of Proterozoic

Waters, could survive...

The effect of her monologue on an audience would probably be as incongruous as that of a theatrical experiment in which a couple exchanged the French words for various vegetables and listeners mistook them for endearments.

V.R. Lang's plays, at least, might garner a belated audience. Her keen sense of the theatrical has countered the recklessness of her peotics before--at an affecting reading shortly before her death, some of the spectators wondered if the shadows around her eyes had been deepened with greasepaint. Maybe Lurie hasn't admitted that the failure of her friend's writing to abide is less regretable than the loss of a strange improvisor of real experience.