Em and Belle, a lesbian couple, are the happy new parents of a son named Rory. Belle harvested her eggs and carried the baby, with a friend providing the sperm. However, the procedure resulted in six embryos, and the couple must now decide what to do with the remaining five. Belle wants another child, but Em demurs. Do they donate the embryos to another couple or to science, or let them be destroyed? The play visits them once a year for a decade, as they grapple with this decision again and again, their relationship at stake each time.

Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1891: Georgy Ivanitch Orlov is an indifferent government official and confirmed bachelor. When his mistress Zinaida spontaneously decides to leave her husband and move in with him, it turns his life and household upside down. His irreverent pals mock him; his maid takes to stealing everything she can get her hands on; and his strange and secretive footman, Stepan, develops feelings for Zinaida. Soon Orlov is looking for any excuse to escape his home. Meanwhile, Stepan reveals himself to be a revolutionary in disguise, spying on Orlov but now besotted with his mistress.

Seventeen-year old William Faulkner, future Nobel laureate in literature, embarks on the annual family deer hunt with his drunken, dissolute father, Murry, and overbearing grandfather, John Wesley. When Reelfoot, a decades-old bear that is the subject of much local lore, makes an unexpected appearance, Faulkner decides to hunt this legendary creature in an act that will prove his manhood once and for all.

But he has also been scribbling verse and, encouraged by his friend Phil Stone, secretly aspires to be a writer, a profession maligned by his grandfather. As the hunt proceeds, Faulkner resists John Wesley's attempts to mold him in the mythical family image and seeks to connect with his father through their mutual love of the wilderness.

Meanwhile, the family closes in on Reelfoot, and Murry attempts to sabotage the hunt in desperate reverence for the bear. In a final confrontation, Faulkner himself must decide whether or not to sacrifice Reelfoot, whom he's come to see as the spirit of the woods and the symbol of his father's stymied dreams, in order to gain his own freedom.