Wilson's Seven Guitars opens with a funeral and ends with a murder. Death is always present in his plays; ghosts linger in houses and in the minds of the characters. Because of the play's structure, we know that the love affair between Vera and Floyd is doomed. So, the play's mystery is not whether she'll go with Floyd. To me, the mystery is which of the forces at work will prevent it.
Scene Two of Seven Guitars features the familiar duet between a needy, ambitious man and the woman he feels will make him whole. Floyd and Vera do a two-step of flirtation and recrimination, with Vera making it clear that missing her man's touch, after he's abandoned her for another woman, is a pain she doesn't want to revisit. The end of the scene shows her sweetening a bit but there's still a lot of miles between Pittsburgh and Chicago, Floyd's Promised Land.
The character of Hedley continues in the tradition of the hoodoo-mystics Wilson features so prominently in his work. Of the seven characters, Hedley, an amateur herbalist and chicken processor, is the one living closest to the earth, seems at once the most grounded and, as the audience discovers in short order, the maddest. The fateful misunderstanding that closes the play seems doubly tragic -- as two beloved characters clash, needlessly, lowers a dark pall over Hedley.
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