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A tribute to the late L. Ray Wheeler: Collection of former DSU professor’s plays published5 min read

March 4, 2021

A selection of plays written by L. Ray Wheeler (1940-2018) were compiled for publication as Fables After the Facts: Five Plays.

Wheeler, a poet, playwright and novelist, is a professor emeriti of Dickinson State University (DSU) who taught English literature and composition, creative writing, and philosophy at the University for 44 years.

Margaret Barnhart, Wheeler’s former student and colleague, lectures at DSU and remembers her former professor fondly. “I tremendously enjoyed the challenges Ray presented in a creative writing class when I was a student (a lo-o-ong time ago). His advice and critiques to all his students helped me to see our writing more completely and clearly, and to develop stronger skills. As a colleague, I came to enjoy Ray’s wit and particularly his often-satiric barbs about issues of the day.

However, most of my connection with Ray was through his plays. I performed in two of the five plays (Blues Bountiful and Buffalo-Alyce), thoroughly enjoying the character, the rehearsal process and the productions themselves… To this day, one of my favorite acting roles is the character of Doll in Buffalo-Alyce—to me, Ray’s best play—which we performed not only at DSU, but also at the Bismarck Heritage Center for a multistate humanities conference.

Ray’s plays reflect on-going issues, some specific to our region. In a sense, they are a kind of mirror in which we can see reflections of some aspects of ourselves.”

A photo of Wheeler from the 1973 edition of DSU’s Prairie Smoke.

Fables is the first published collection of plays by Wheeler and includes plays and an introduction written by DSU alumnus Rik Walter ’86 totaling 275 pages. The plays have been produced in various theatres since 1983.

Fables was produced through retired DSU professor Dr. Dave Solheim’s Buffalo Commons Press (BCP). BCP is an independent, limited-edition publisher of works by writers from and of interest to readers in the Northern Great Plains, between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. To date, BCP has published 12 works by six authors, ranging from novels and short stories to poetry and plays. These include Bar Talk and Tall Tales, a book of short stories also written by Wheeler, and Home for Supper: Memories and Recipes, a collection of 12 stories and over 30 recipes written by Margaret Barnhart. The full collection of Buffalo Commons Press publications, including Fables After the Facts: Five Plays, can be found and purchased here.


Review of Fables After the Facts: Five Plays by Margaret Barnhart

People who knew the late Dr. L. Ray Wheeler as a friend, colleague, or teacher remember him for his acerbic wit, humor, and almost paradoxical personality. Satirist, sentimentalist, or eccentric genius, Wheeler may also be remembered through his literary legacy, including the recently published collection of five plays, Fables After the Facts: Five Plays, published by Buffalo Commons Press out of St. Peter, Minnesota.

The collection begins with a masterful introduction by Rik Walter, DSU alumnus and current New York actor, director, producer, and theater company founder. His opening words whet the readers’ appetite: “Ray Wheeler liked a good yarn and could never much abide the truth getting in the way of it. I suppose that ‘truth,’ or that which one might confuse with ‘fact,’ [. . .] just never seemed meaty enough for him to offer up as a main course. As long as the heart of the tale was served a tender medium-rare, well then, who’s to say it wasn’t nourishing, or at least filling?” Walter concludes that for Wheeler, “Story was all.” Some of Wheeler’s dramatic entrees may challenge sensitive palates, seasoned as they are with biting satire and occasional vulgarity. These plays are no Aesopian fables to charm the child reader in all of us; instead, they provoke readers to see what lies beneath the surface of basic human desires and concerns. As such, they are worth sampling. Included in this literary buffet are Blues Bountiful, Dakota III, Adagio West, Twa Corbies, and Buffalo-Alyce.

Blues Bountiful features a rural farm family living a typically hardscrabble life. When a passing shaman/diviner/salesman promises a life of wealth and ease because of what lies below the ground instead of what struggles above it, the mother and her sons take off in flights of fancy. With their heads in the clouds, it takes the deus-ex machina father to keep their feet firmly on the ground and recognize what is most important.

Dakota III takes place 90 feet below ground in a North Dakota missile launch silo. Two North Dakota farm boys, now officers in the U.S. Air Force, pass tedious hours in unusual competition with each other. Their action is interspersed with the narrative voice of a nameless Hiroshima survivor, chillingly suggesting the what-ifs inherent in the very existence of missile silos.

Adagio West presents a nostalgic tribute to a popular American archetype: the Cowboy. Buster, a 60-year old dreamer, entices his younger cohorts to follow his own dream of becoming a Renaissance Cowboy, existing “right on the skirts of everybody’s dreams.” This adagio is not entirely slow-tempo, as dynamic changes and comedic scenes keep these wannabe cowboys on their booted toes.

The fourth play of the collection—Twa Corbies, meaning “two crows”—is Wheeler’s darkest drama. Its vengeful tone and apocalyptic prediction—just deserts for society’s history of injustice, greed, and corruption—may leave readers with a bitter aftertaste. In a sense, the title characters of this play foreshadow the characters in Wheeler’s most compelling drama, Buffalo-Alyce. Two elderly sisters, neither crows nor crones, surround themselves with mementos of their past; they have “earned the right to have rough edges,” and they keep a daily agenda of tasks to complete and ideas to discuss on their way to fulfillment of a long-laid plan: to preserve dignity in their last days. Buffalo-Alyce is a tender piece, lyrical, and bittersweet rather than bitter. It concludes not with destruction, but with “an exaltation.”

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