"Rain is like sorrow. It exposes our roots."

In this elegiac drama, playwright Kyle Bass introduces Milton Millard, a white banker who lives in a small Southern city with Dolores, his wife whom he can hardly see anymore and who endures alone the memory of loss and unrelenting trepidation. Childless, they are a late-middle-aged couple lost in a fog of what cannot be undone. Is there a way forward for either of them? Can Milton seek aid from Ruthie Mimms, an older Black woman who has profoundly and irrevocably influenced his life? The momentary escape Milton finds in the arms of a younger woman will not spare him the reckoning he must face.

Set in the 1950s, Tender Rain explores how pain, violence, and suffering rooted in an oppressive society leach insidiously into domestic lives and intimate relationships. A journey through a richly layered emotional landscape from the author of Possessing Harriet and salt/city/blues.