Dear struggling young American playwright,

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Davis sets her play in northern California’s isolated Anderson Valley in 1955. We know it’s 1955 because news of Emmett Till’s murder is in the current issue of Jet magazine. We know it’s Anderson Valley because Davis’s characters utter bits of Boontling, a highly idiosyncratic dialect peculiar to the region. Though we’re well into the buttoned-up Eisenhower era, the town’s whorehouse is so highly respected that Schoolch, the local schoolteacher, can pass his days sipping tea with the establishment’s madame, Madame, and still keep his job. Racism has apparently gone on holiday, too: Madame happily welcomes the town’s only African-American adult, Logger, as a regular. In fact, Logger and Madame were once lovers, and may be lovers again, and that raises not a single eyebrow.

According to Logger the town was integrated a few decades ago, before excessive logging denuded the local terrain and black workers moved on. Like every resident we meet, he reports no history of racial tensions there. (In reality, the valley-area community of Navarro was divided into mostly white Mill Town and mostly Italian Dego Town).

For almost the entire 70-minute first act of Bulrusher, Davis does little but demonstrate her characters’ immutable character traits. Madame is always a stern pragmatist hiding a broken heart. Bulrusher is always a headstrong ingenue. Schoolch is always a taciturn cipher with a heart of gold. Logger is always a lovelorn goof with a penchant for brushing women’s hair. Boy, a white teenager who does nothing but write songs and woo Bulrusher, is always a plucky romantic.

Davis plants Bulrusher alone beside the Navarro River a good half-dozen times, giving her purple musings like, “Anything you’re scared of, the river holds for you,” and, “Forgiveness is an insect that may one day suck me dry.” Her monologues tell us little we don’t already know—or, for that matter, need to know.

Through 11/25: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Uptown Hull House Center, 4520 N. Beacon, 773-561-3500, congosquaretheatre.org, $30-$40.