Western Animus is a four play cycle set in Montana.

Each play takes place in one of the four seasons, and follows the changing relationship of Cora Pritchard, a queer woman born and raised in Montana, and the Nightmare Wolf, a metaphysical entity hunting the psychic landscape of the 21st century mountain west.

As the story unfolds throughout Cora’s life, each character in Western Animus struggles with identity as the traditional social norms of The West strain to accommodate climate change, intersectional feminism, and post-colonial reckoning.

The cycle uses Adrienne Kennedy’s dramaturgy as a method of critiquing theatrical narratives that uphold oppression through the settings and language dynamics of white male hegemony in the rural west, as seen in canonical plays by O’Neill, Shepard, and Letts. Western Animus seeks to pay homage to these playwrights even as it deconstructs their tropes, tilling new soil for a queer, intersectional myth of the West.