Publisher's Synopsis
Two one-act plays directed by Robert Altman in Los Angeles and Off-Broadway in New York City in 1981, and later filmed by Altman for ABC Arts cable television, and now revised by the playwright for this edition. Both plays dig under the myths covering American life and give voice to the perpetrators and victims of violence. In "Precious Blood," a man and a woman, both haunted by the memories and ghosts of a middle class, mid-western family, tell their conflicting stories in entangled monologues and exhume the history of rape and murder that left them each irrevocably changed. In "Rattlesnake in a Cooler" a young doctor leaves his practice and his wife to follow his childhood dream to be a rodeo cowboy. As he tells his story, he relives ill-fated quest for adventure that brought him face to face with the desperation, darkness and death on the frayed edges of the American west.
