An American premiere.

A World Premiere.

The moving story of an old man’s love for his dutiful grandchild. Buks’ Jonkers is a poor yet dignified war veteran who is devoted to his vegetable furrows in a remote South African province. He is anxious to shield his dreamy, restless sixteen year old granddaughter from temptations beyond the valley. She is equally anxious to be a singer in faraway Johannesburg. Her self made songs brim with the longings of youth.

In December 1940, an east-bound cross-country train carries the bodies of the great American writers Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also on board is May, who shares her seat with a charming young flyer, Raleigh. Religious and bookish, May plans to be a missionary. Raleigh has been given a medical discharge and, inspired by West and Fitzgerald, is heading to New York to be a writer. Raleigh and May discover they are from neighboring Appalachian towns, and he decides to change trains for Kentucky, promising to take May to the next Nibroc Festival. Scene Two finds May and Raleigh at the festival, but a year and half later. Unfit for war, and needing to support his parents, Raleigh has been working in a Detroit factory. May is teaching school and dating an itinerant preacher. When Raleigh confronts her, May admits her prejudices against his family. It is not until the following spring as they sit on May’s front porch, watching a lumberyard fire in the distance, that the two are finally able to resolve their differences and discover the depth of their feelings. May accepts Raleigh’s sudden proposal to elope, as the sky grows red like a sunrise.

Samuel Gentle, the groundskeeper for The Church of the Holy Comforter, has heard God’s call three times. The first was in a field off the Pamet Roads in Truro while accompanying his father on a walk; the second was in the aftermath of a terrible bus accident with his friend Inez Castillo while he was minister of a small adobe church about forty miles outside of Albuquerque at the foot of the Cebolleta; and the third was the birth of his daughter, Ariel, covered all over in a white-gold swirl of hair. Samuel has heard this voice but struggles to comprehend its mystery and his own rage and bewilderment at loss. He wants to believe that “grace enters the soul through a wound.” As Ariel grows into a child of transcendent inner beauty and strength, Samuel regains his own faith and discovers what is most holy.

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, evidence 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.

An American woman about to turn fifty is standing on a high dive at a pool in a hotel in Greece. She is on vacation with her husband and eleven-year-old son. Her son has requested that she jump off the board. She, being terrified of heights, has managed to climb to the platform and now clings to the railings as she tries to will herself to leap into the blue Greek air and down into the water of the pool. As she stands on the board, she considers her life.