Nyssa met Thaddeus when she took his freshman survey course in Western Philosophy. A professor and a student with unusually compatible minds, they found themselves embarked for a multi-year cruise on the deep waters of philosophic conversation. In Nyssa’s final semester, however, the tone of the voyage changed abruptly. Like the brave sailors in Moby Dick, they encountered a topic that sank them utterly. Months later, the wreckage is still floating. The second act is an alternative to the first. The characters leave from the same port, but the wind carries them to different destinations.

A shape-shifting angel invades a Bible college to punish a student for being wishy-washy. But the angel also has a lustful eye out for another student...

Let Alone Everything follows Gustave Flaubert as he struggles to write Madame Bovary. We see him negotiate with his characters, rack his brain for ideas, and beg patience of his neglected mistress, Louise Colet. Intermittently, he defends his work against an obscenity charge brought by the Imperial Prosecutor.

As Louise and Gustave exchange letters, we see him appropriate her attitudes and language to create his heroine, Emma Bovary. He becomes obsessed with Emma to the point of entering the novel himself as her lover, Rudolph. The operation succeeds too well: Emma is soon infatuated with Rudolph and requires more attention than he can give her. Early in the second act, Gustave (as himself) must fight off the prosecutor while (as Rudolph) assuring Emma of his undying love. Any slip-up would demolish him.

Gustave makes matters worse by sending manuscript pages to Louise for comment inadvertently revealing that the signet ring she gave him as a love token he’s re-gifted to his character. Furious; she invades Gustave’s study and demands the ring back. He gets rid of her, but the alternating assaults of the mistress and the prosecutor -- played by the same actor – send him further into his own imagination. Madame Bovary is practically writing itself, but the author can no longer escape it: he finds himself playing the title role. The timing couldn’t be worse: Emma has been dumped by her second lover, Leon, and is horribly in debt. Desperate for money and understanding, Gustave (as Emma) races back to Rudolph only to discover that Rudolph is now played by Louise. Flaubert’s implacable mistress has pursued him into the climactic scene of his own novel. What’s more, the confrontation has to go badly; any other outcome would violate the author’s artistic principals. When Rudolph refuses to help her, Emma swallows poison. As Emma/Gustave lies dying, the prosecutor sums up for the audience: creating literature is difficult, unpredictable and unpleasant. Reading it can lead to immorality, so why should anyone bother?

Let Alone Everything moves in and out of the trial, the novel, and Flaubert’s stormy life with Louise. While the action is fanciful, the attitudes and many of the actual words are taken from Flaubert’s letters and the oral arguments presented at Flaubert’s 1857 obscenity trial. Of the three main plots, only the trial is left unresolved. The audience must reach its own verdict on which trade-offs are permissible between art and life.

Once upon a time there was a woman who did a fantastically creative thing. She did it so quietly that not even her family knew what she was up to. Whenever she wasn’t with them or with a few close friends, she worked on her project.
She didn’t go out.
She didn’t travel.
She never married or had children.
When she died, her project was discovered. Her friends and family were astonished by its scope and depth; it seemed to address the totality of human feeling, from the loftiest spirituality to the most mischievous wit. Her project depicted every sort of action, from the tenderest love to the most abject cruelty. Her friends and family realized they had never truly known the woman who lived among them. They had been too busy with their own lives and loves to notice the monumental act of creation that happened right under their noses.
Nevertheless, they set about publishing the woman’s work. It was very difficult at first because nobody had ever seen anything like it. The woman was dead, so they couldn’t ask her questions. Scholars everywhere, even in far off lands, began to study the woman. For over a century, they quarreled and debated among themselves, seeking to understand the woman’s “what,” her “how,” and her “wherefore.”
Although she figures in the cast of characters, Zero at the Bone isn’t much about the woman herself. It’s about humans who live in proximity to someone whose unique gifts they utterly fail to recognize. It also looks at humans who struggle to calculate their debt to an artist of the past. In these ways, the play is about most of us.
It ends with a sort of oratorio that shows how the woman approached a particular set of problems in her work. This is as close as the play gets to explaining anything.

The great playwright is dead. As his household effects are being inventoried, to visitors arrive from the great beyond: Alceste, one of his orphaned characters, joins forces with Clio, the muse of history, to revisit scenes from Molière's life and career in reverse chronological order. They're especially curious about his controversial, near-incestuous marriage with a much younger woman. Armande Béjart grew up in Molière's shadow; as she comes to occupy an ever-greater part of his emotional life, she also finds her way into his acting troupe and the characters he wrote for her. They make great art together, but at what cost? Art, love and history collide in this quirky, back-to-front, dark comedy.