Three men and three women portray a wide, diverse range of characters - from little boys to grandfathers, from giggling girls to housemaids - in this brilliantly structured play. The action takes place in an upper middle-class American dining-room, the hub of social family life, comprising a mosaic of interrelated scenes, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes rueful, which together create a profound study of the decaying mores of the American WASP.