PROMISED LAND

Promised Land is a tragic love story set in the present day in a small town south of the Mason-Dixon line. Hunter, a waitress at Applebee's who dreams of touring the country on a never-ending road trip, meets Hank, a simple, emotionally wounded construction worker, at the Palace bar. As their romance evolves, we come to understand their desperation and the struggles of the families they live with. Hunter sleeps on a cot in the living room of her older sister Mary's house with Mary's boyfriend Mike and their infant daughter in a family situation going nowhere. Mike has lost his job and, pressured by Mary to support their family, enlists in the military. Hank lives with his alcoholic, abusive father, Wayne who is unable to come to terms with his own failings and rails against Hank for straying from the path Wayne raised him to follow. Hank and Hunter plan to escape but are trapped in an emotionally vacuous landscape and subject to the heartbreak of hope and alienation.

"I wanna know America, Hank," expounds the young protagonist Hunter. "I wanna know it so deep that when it starts to show its ugly face I can rest knowin' I've seen its heart."

Promised Land is also celebration of the role of the artist, the free-thinking, free-feeling individual who uses his medium to hold a mirror to contemporary society. In the tradition of Sam Shepard and Clifford Odets, Sam Riley writes about America out of conviction for the exhilarating potential of the theater as a conduit for social change. Inspired to counteract the transgression of our societal values from rugged individualism to complacent consumerism, Riley lays a bold path toward serious examination of American culture with Promised Land.