SOURCE: “Trying Them Out Off Broadway,” in America, Vol. 163, No. 18, December 8, 1990, p. 453–54.

In the following review, Torrens provides a positive assessment of Abundance.

Abundance by Beth Henley, author of Crimes of the Heart, proves ample to the imagination, intriguing in its Victorian-homespun language (“We're to wed,”“I cherish rings,”“We'd drink plentiful”), and abundantly theatrical. Produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club and staged inventively by Ron Lagomarsino, its scene is set in an anti-heroic Wild West. Abundance beings with taped music of two fiddlers, one slightly dissonant with the other, to prepare us for a prairie saga a bit off-kilter. This fiddling recurs during every scene change—whenever one of the two halves of the stage revolves, allowing glimpses of mountain scenery on the drop at stage rear.

As Abundance opens, two mail-order brides await their husbands along the slat wall of a prairie main street. One, Bess...