In this longer one act, it's the night of December 31, 1899, in the parlor of the Flowers Boarding Hotel in Armitage, a small town in east Ohio. Hugh Rose is very worried because his wife is about to give birth in a room down the hall. Doc Braine is drunk, and Hugh doesn't trust him. His last child came out sideways, and Hugh has a bad feeling about this one. Meanwhile, his brother James is having his own nervous breakdown, convinced that the world is going to end at midnight, and wracked with guilt over his conviction that he is the father of the teenager Vonnie Wolf's baby, and that he's at least partly responsible for the murder of her father. The village idiot, Loopy Rye, keeps banging on the piano, the fireworks are about to start, Doc Braine is troubled that Vonnie keeps walking around naked in the hotel at night, and Hugh is terrified that Zinnia, the town gossip, will overhear his brother's tortured confessions and spread them all over town. And the not very bright Proctor brothers from the fireworks factory might just be about to set the town on fire. Another in Nigro's long series of plays about Pendragon County, Ohio.
Published in Don Giovanni & Other Plays.