A Night in Avignon

A Night in Avignon dramatizes one of literature's most famous obsessions: the poet Petrarch's tortured love for Laura, a married woman he has elevated into an impossible ideal. Set in Renaissance Avignon, the play unfolds over a single night of mounting temptation and revelation. Petrarch's monk friend Gherardo urges him toward virtue, while the spirited Sancia offers earthly delights. But the evening builds toward an encounter that threatens everything Petrarch has built in his imagination. Rice's language burns with early 20th-century lyricism, capturing the agony of desire sustained by absence and the terror of having that absence filled. This is not merely a romance; it is a meditation on how we destroy what we idolize by truly seeing it, on the difference between the love we perform and the love we might actually live.