An Evening with JonBenet Ramsey

About the Book

An Evening With JonBenet Ramsey begins with a full-length play, Cowboy´s Sweetheart, which imagines the life of a murdered child as it might have evolved had she lived. The play explores the character´s psyche and her struggle to deal with the traumatic memories that haunt her. The play is followed by two essays. The first essay considers the JonBenet Ramsey case from a psychoanalytic perspective. The discussion includes a critique of the media and of the two theories that have been developed to solve the crime; a consideration of the psychological and moral issues posed by the case; and an examination of what the case reveals about American society and the American family. The second essay derives from that discussion a new view of the goal of serious theatre: the public airing of tragic secrets about our most intimate institutions--such as the family--and the effect that such representation has on an audience when it is moved to confront the buried emotional conflicts central to our society.

About the Author

Walter A. Davis, Professor Emeritus in the English Department at The Ohio State University, is the author of a number of books on literature and modern culture including Inwardness and Existence(U of Wisconsin P, 1989), Get the Guests, Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (U of Wisconsin P, 1994) and Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY P, 2001). Long active as an actor in regional theatre, he is also, as playwright, the author of The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima (1st Books Library, 2000). He is currently writing a work that develops a new theory of the psyche based on a recovery of the significance of tragic experience.