Turquoise Sky

Turquoise Sky is a character-driven piece, with emphasis on the psychological and psychosexual, written in the received Realist tradition of literary mode. It is a plot of decline—and hope—set in the milieu of San Francisco during the early 1970s, and is essentially about how the main protagonist, Angela Herrera, searches for a sense of self and empowerment in the midst of a power struggle with her high school sweetheart and ex-fiancé, Tony Sanchez, a returning Vietnam veteran. The heightened physical and emotional power struggle between Angela and Tony acts as a shield and a distraction from what is real between them and the real challenges they face, what they are currently both too wounded to admit to, or deal with from where they both are in their lives. Because of the intricacies of the intra-psychic issues at work, the storyline contains a host of intersecting themes including ones such as trauma, questions and issues of identity and sexuality, gender differences and power struggles, alienation and detachment, guilt and shame, and the search for love and acceptance, redemption and truth.