A.R. Gurney

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.

An ambitious U.S. Senator reflects back on his life after the death of a woman whom he loved and kept in contact with only through correspondence.

Cash Bentley and his wife Louise lead an average upper-middle-class life in suburbia, with a nice home and two fine children. But Cash grows increasingly unsettled in his life, yearning for the glories of his athletic youth and watching them fade further in the distance with accumulating age. Louise worries about him as his difficulties with mid-life pull him further away from happiness and comfort with his family.

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.

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.