DIRECTOR & SET DESIGNER 
The curtain rises on the first act to reveal Haugen perched on a red vinyl stool at the counter of a neon and chrome diner somewhere near the center of Kansas.
She plays Bernice, who, the audience soon learns, has been slinging hash browns, omelets and griddle cakes in this greasy spoon for all of her adult life.
As Bernice interacts with her customers who don’t actually appear as actors in the play, though from Haugen’s performance, you’d almost think they did the audience learns that this small burg
is on the verge of collapse. It is the victim of departed jobs, new highways that skip the heart of town, and an aquifer drained to a puddle by big agribusiness. It seems likely that it will soon wither up and vanish,
desiccated like the spectral neon bars of the diner’s sign which, in a particularly well-tuned bit of stage design, Bernice flips on just before her first unseen customers begin to filter in.
In Haugen’s hands Bernice is a tumult of emotions. Wistful and vacant, she falls in and out of reveries, but she’s also tough, bawdy and occasionally vicious with her customers.
She’s clearly the victim of circumstances mostly beyond her control, but her struggles are fascinating, touching and occasionally just funny.
And the same and more can be said of Lyon’s role. He plays Randall, a professor who has just been given a prestigious award and is delivering his acceptance speech.
But as it turns out, Randall’s a philosopher whose specialty lies in shattered dreams and self-loathing, and his monologue is a somewhat systematic examination of failure his own, to be precise.
Randall is a wreck. But with Lyon’s energy inside him he’s a very appealing one. Lyon swells in stature as the professor’s audience applauds his most incisive arguments, and then,
as his voice cracks into a timely squeak, he shrivels into a tired fop of an old man who’s watched a couple of sharp mistakes snatch most of his hopes away from him. 
