|
Babbit Cross, a poet laureate disgruntled that his composition for the inauguration of the new president has been deemed too radical and lacking the requisite optimism. Cross is thus faced with the challenging question of whether he should alter the poem to fit the tastes of his sponsor. Meanwhile, he must also deal with his unhappy, ex-student wife, Lucy and Isis, his pregnant, punkish daughter.
As his marriage unravels, poor Cross also receives lots of visitors, including his publisher Betsy (Resnick), her closeted senator husband, an opera conductor and an old friend named Nimrod Baruch, with whom the poet served in World War II.
Baruch is writing a book on women who gave their lives for the French resistance movement. And the big revelation in the show is that Baruch has found a diary from a dead French woman that contains the text of poems that Cross published as his own, just after the war. Since Cross was involved with this woman the audience is left to ponder the unresolved question of who did the writing.
|