Like some of Rebecca Gilman’s previous plays, her new play Swing State is set in a fictional town in Wisconsin. Indeed, reviewing this play, the critic Chris Jones called Gilman “a great poet of the Upper Midwest.” Swing State is about Peg, a recent widow who cultivates a patch of prairie, and her neighbor Ryan, a young man with drug and anger issues. When Peg tells the local sheriff that her dead husband’s toolbox has gone missing, it’s a match to dry tinder. Issues at large in Wisconsin—industry versus the environment; disappearing communities; the opioid epidemic; reactionary politics; post-Covid isolation—flare up. The production is directed by Gilman’s longtime collaborator, the esteemed Robert Falls. —Jensen Davis