In Armitage, a small town in Pendragon County, Ohio, site of many of Nigro's plays, it's 1919. The World War is over, but Michael Ryan and his son Thomas have not been heard from. Michael's wife, Carolyn, convinced that her husband is dead, has begun an affair with her daughter Jenna's husband Nick while Jenna is in the madhouse, where Carolyn put her after Jenna stabbed Nick on their wedding night. Nick wants Carolyn's sardonic other daughter, Lexie, who won't let him touch her, but sits on the porch with him every night driving him crazy. The family continues to conceal a dark secret: that Michael is in fact the son of Greek immigrants to New York who got his original stake by murdering an old man in a pawn shop there. Nick, the brother of Michael's dead accomplice in this crime, has found Michael in Ohio and blackmailed him into a good job under him at the bank and marriage with his daughter. But with Michael gone to war, Jenna in the madhouse, Lexie driving him crazy, and Carolyn insatiable in her loneliness, Nick is slowly drinking himself to death. When Michael returns, having brought Jenna with him from the madhouse, a sequence of events is set in motion which leads them all inexorably towards the dark events of Greek tragedy. Confused, lonely, upset and angry, Carolyn feels guilty about her affair, hurt by her husband's coldness, and is further driven round the bend by her dying father's revelation that she is in fact the daughter of the village idiot. Her attempts to unravel the mystery of her origins while somehow putting her family back together are pushing her further and further towards the edge of an abyss. May be done on its own or as the middle pay of Nigro's Greek Trilogy, which also includes Iphigenia and Electra.