The Shawl & Prairie du Chien

The Shawl— which opened to critical and popular acclaim in April 1985— is about a smalltime mystic out to bilk a bereaved woman of her inheritance. In Prairie du Chien a railroad car speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide punctuated by the camaraderie of a friendly card game exploding into a moment of menace.