THE STORY: Independently wealthy, a published author and tenured professor at Swarthmore College, Addie Pencke spends the Thanksgiving holiday struggling to hold together her splintered ego and her fractured family. Her capacious, book-lined home is peopled with real and imagined figures from sixty years of political activism, hard-drinking, a failed marriage and lost opportunities. Neighbors, strays, in-laws, children as they once were and as they could never be, remembered selves, all inhabit Addie’s home for the holidays. In shifting power struggles, the critic attempts to reconcile with the artist, the parent with the child, and the living with the dead.
“…[a] truly intelligent play, one that is literary and heartfelt, beautifully written…a well-crafted, moving story…a dramatic rarity in these or any times.” —New York Post.
“Mr. Lucas, the very gifted writer of
Prelude to a Kiss and
Reckless, has created an expressly theatrical…resonant metaphor for the ways memory can cripple…Certain isolated moments…remind us of what Mr. Lucas can do so well: That is, find a uniquely whimsical expression for the cataclysmic menace and hostility lurking in the prose of everyday life.” —The New York Times.
“Craig Lucas is our neighborhood Pan of darkness, charming his flocks into troubled waters with an elfin grin and a childlike penchant for whimsy.” —Newsday (NY).
