The work is a play within a play, with Felice and Clare (Dourif and Plummer) as a brother and sister acting team who are staging a drama in a southern town. We first see them arrive and prepare to go on, then observe them in the play itself, and then after the performance. Their intertwined emotions overlap between the private reality and the reality created on stage. All is blended—the make-believe and the high-voltage emotions of real-life experience—in a style that recalls Pirandello.

Emotional wounds remain of the violent end to the lives of their parents and what that has meant for them. Through the use of lighting, the audience is clued as to what is performance and what is reality, but one has to accept the fusion that is the author’s dramatic mix—and that is part of the point of it all.

It is clear that Clare is the more psychologically distressed, with Felice looking after her. There are repeated references to her being unable to venture outside of their locked-in status. There is dialogue about the time having come for walking out into the day. But in a sense, although Felice acts like the one in control, he is in a way also a prisoner, with the two wrapped in an emotional tangle that rages back and forth throughout the split-level drama that we witness.

This is fodder for commanding performances, especially by Plummer as she runs a gamut of emotion, sometimes angry, sometimes taunting, sometimes mischievously and comically baiting. She and Dourif make a showy team together, which gives the play its distinction, as directed by Gene David Kirk in a bleak, messy stage environment appropriately designed by Alice Walkling.