The setting is Sicily, the island where the gods once spent their holidays. The principals are a newlywed couple in their forties, who hope to meld the children of their previous marriages into a brave, new, postnuclear family. But in John Guare''s vastly original and eerily beautiful new play, any family may be reconstructed as a tragic pantheon, enacting passion as ancient as the strata of an archaeological dig and as catastrophic as an earthquake.

The setting is Sicily, the island where the gods once spent their holidays. The principals are a newlywed couple in their forties, who hope to meld the children of their previous marriages into a brave, new, postnuclear family. But in John Guare''s vastly original and eerily beautiful new play, any family may be reconstructed as a tragic pantheon, enacting passion as ancient as the strata of an archaeological dig and as catastrophic as an earthquake.