What happens when the small town you grew up in slowly changes right before your eyes? When the trains no longer stop, when the downtown stores shutter, and when the people you never really noticed now want respect?

Darlene, the Birnbaum family’s longtime African-American housekeeper, has been invited to one last lunch by the son and daughter of Ben, the leader of the town’s small Jewish community, to give her a few mementos as they clean out his house, the largest in town, after his recent death. Darlene’s husband, Sam, had worked in Ben’s downtown clothing store for years, and bought it when Ben retired, just as times were getting rough. When their bookish and sheltered son, Dwayne, returns to town, his bright athletic future at Penn State dashed by gunfire, anger finally flashes and old debts are repaid, as the play comes to a startling conclusion.

A drama with generous humor, Grand Union traces 40 years in a small central Pennsylvania railroad town, going back and forth in time, from the town’s heyday to its hardscrabble present.