A.R. Gurney

Barney is a guy who comes home for his father's funeral. Eleanor, his brother's wife who is Barney first love meets him and they go to the club where they first met. And Barney recalls how things kept them apart like his need to act out at his father. And his fear of commitment.

Andrew Makepeace Ladd III wrote his first letter to Melissa Gardner to tell her she looked like a lost princess. They were both seven years old. For the next fifty years, through personal triumphs and despair, through wars and marriages and children and careers, they poured out the secrets of their hearts to each other. They defied a fate that schemed to keep them apart and lived—through letters—or the one most meaningful thing, their undying love for each other.

Six actors play over 50 characters across 18 scenes from different families that overlap and intertwine in a single dining room. Set in a typical well-to-do household, the mosaic of interrelated scenes - some funny, some touching, some rueful - create an in-depth portrait of a vanishing species: the upper-middle-class WASP.

Barney is a guy who comes home for his father's funeral. Eleanor, his brother's wife who is Barney first love meets him and they go to the club where they first met. And Barney recalls how things kept them apart like his need to act out at his father. And his fear of commitment.

Andrew Makepeace Ladd III wrote his first letter to Melissa Gardner to tell her she looked like a lost princess. They were both seven years old. For the next fifty years, through personal triumphs and despair, through wars and marriages and children and careers, they poured out the secrets of their hearts to each other. They defied a fate that schemed to keep them apart and lived—through letters—or the one most meaningful thing, their undying love for each other.

Six actors play over 50 characters across 18 scenes from different families that overlap and intertwine in a single dining room. Set in a typical well-to-do household, the mosaic of interrelated scenes - some funny, some touching, some rueful - create an in-depth portrait of a vanishing species: the upper-middle-class WASP.