Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“Greenberg is one of the funniest playwrights of his generation.”–Nancy Franklin, The New Yorker
A year after he disappeared on the day of his father’s funeral, Walker Janeway returns to New York. He takes up temporary residence in the unused space where thirty-five years earlier, his father Ned, and Ned’s late partner Theo, both architects, lived and designed the great house that would make them famous. Sleepless and emotionally jangled, Walker scours the old empty space for clues, evidences or keys to the tortured family history. Discovering his father’s journal hidden under the bed, he finds it as unforthcoming as his nearly silent father had been. Walker is joined by his sister, Nan, and their friend from childhood, Pip, Theo’s son, to hear the reading of Ned’s will. It is there that Walker forces the confrontation that the others need. After an evening of harrowing and sometimes comically inadvertent revelations, Walker disappears once more. This time he returns later that evening with a surprising, but to him, definitive solution to the family puzzle. We travel back to 1960, when Ned’s journal begins. We meet the parents at the same age their children are in Act One: Ned, who seems very different from the cold monster the children conjured; the charismatic and putative genius, Theo; and Lena, Walker and Nan’s mother, the delightful, troubled “Southern woman who admits to thirty.” In the guise of a love story, we are offered all the information needed to devise an alternative reading of the sad, unexpectedly romantic family story.
“[Greenberg] has mastered the art of telling a simple story with such grace and skill that it becomes startlingly new.”–Fintan O’Toole, New York Daily News
Greenberg’s plays have developed a reputation for being “intelligent, whimsical, always powerful pieces of theatre that are profound without being pretentious and that speak about the very basic longing of human beings.”–Amy Schaumberg, Drama-Logue
“Greenberg is one of the funniest playwrights of his generation.”–Nancy Franklin, The New Yorker
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