Play Description

Chicago, 1940. In the first act, Thomas, a successful playwright, his brother, Hal, with his wife, Helen, and son, Tom, wait out a storm in the playwright’s luxurious apartment. The playwright proposes to write a play just for his brother’s wife. The next afternoon, still snowbound, Thomas, Hal, and Helen visit the wealthy Pflaum-Smythes upstairs, while their high-spirited daughter, Effi, attempts to make the acquaintance of Tom, the boy, downstairs. The adults descend to witness a reading of Thomas’s new play, a story very much like that of Hal and Helen running off to Tahiti years ago, only Tom and Effi rise to play the parts. In the second act, a week later, beginning in Hal and Helen’s similar, but much less expensive apartment, Helen returns to announce that she has the lead in Thomas’s new play. The family celebrates. Late that night, Helen, who has been drinking, reveals to Tom that the price for being cast was high, followed by a couple of other revelations leading to her midnight departures for Thomas’s. At Thomas’s, Effi makes an unscheduled appearance in one of her mother’s evening gowns to demand the right to sit in on the rehearsals of Thomas’s new play. Helen arrives with Hal in close pursuit. Thomas makes a grim announcement, and all leave. Thomas sits down to work on his new script, which is subsequently enacted before us as a play within a play until Thomas’s final spoken stage direction brings the lights down.

Production Info