In this magical realism drama with comedy, family patriarch Brian has fallen ill with cancer. His son, Sean, has dropped out of college and returned to Cambridge to care for him. Complicating rather than assisting Sean’s efforts is his sister, Patty, who lives nearby but does not do well with the sick – or the living, for that matter. While children and father all hope for the reconciliation that has escaped them in the past, the strains of Brian’s illness and close quarters instead push them even further apart. Brian’s anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia are bad enough, but to his children, his refusal to accept them for who they are is his greatest failing. What’s worse, Brian’s complaints about the disappointments of his life, the greatest being Sean, infuriates both his children: Sean for obvious reasons; Patty, because, even when listing his disappointments, Brian hardly notices her.

Then Sean discovers the hoard of pain killers with which Brian intends to kill himself before the pain of his illness can overwhelm him, in part to spare his children the horrors of a prolonged deathwatch. While they ponder whether to let their father go ahead with his plan, or to intervene, Brian awkwardly tries to make amends, with dismal results, whether teaching Patty about baseball as she claims she always wanted him to, or by giving Sean advice about his former girlfriend. What his children want is to tell him in death what he never told them in life: that he loves them. For his part, Brian struggles to rise above the cynicism and bitterness of his life to reach out to his children. In this he is aided by frequent visits from the Virgin Mary, who may or may not be a Percocet-induced figment of Brian’s imagination. In the end, the only way Brian can find to end a life lived at loggerheads with the ones he loves most are a pair of two-edged parting gifts to his children: a note to Sean and the choice of Patty to be with him when he dies. At play’s end, Sean concludes that these gifts were the best Brian could do, but both his children must decide whether it was enough.