Plot Overview
The play is about Eugene and his older brother, Stanley, dealing with their parents' relationship falling apart as the brothers work together toward being comedy writers for the radio, and, eventually, television. They discover that their father, Jack, has been cheating on their mother Kate. It is obvious to the family before Jack even admits it, and they try to find ways for Kate to cope with the loss when Jack may eventually leave. Jack reveals that the woman he has been seeing is dying.
When Eugene and Stanley find a job where they can write short comedic skits for the radio, they obscurely make fun of their own family. Jack can hear the similarities between the fictional family in the broadcast and their own family, and becomes outraged. He gets into a major argument with Stanley, which turns into an argument about Jack's affair. Later, Kate holds a nostalgic conversation with Eugene, revealing how she had tried to win his father's heart when she was younger.
Eventually, Jack leaves. Stanley and Eugene move out when they get the great offers for which they'd hoped. Kate remains in the house with her father, Ben (an elderly Jewish man with socialist leanings who provides the play with most of its warmth and humor). Until Ben goes to follow his wife to Miami.
Read more about this topic: Broadway Bound
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)