Last Looks Book

THE STORY: After more than thirty years in their comfortable summer home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Ray and Delia Morrow are preparing to sell the house and move to New Mexico. They summon their grown children to sort out the sharing of a lifetime's accumulation of possessions, but their return brings an uncomfortable juxtaposition of cherished memories and a sometimes harsh present. Son Guy, a hard-driving commodities broker now living in Chicago, is divorced and drinking more than he should; daughter Val, also divorced and raising two children, laments her failed marriage; while Clair, the egghead of the family, puts career ahead of anything else. And there is Howard, a now successful local businessman who cannot shake his self-consciousness despite his material possessions and whose adoration of Val has never dimmed. While old rancors and joys are revived, so are present needs and frustrations, but always with humor, compassion and a leavening irony. And, in the end, there is also a sense of unity and understanding - the inescapable knowledge that while the bric-a-brac in the attic can be disposed of, a family, for better or worse, is forever.A touching, funny and poignantly revealing study of a family dealing with a crucial point in their lives - the time for giving up the ancestral home and dividing cherished possessions among children now grown up and apart - and facing problems of their own. First produced by Center Stage, in Baltimore, Maryland. Families are messy, maddening, endearing, nurturing, comical and lonely places to spend a life, or part of one‚¬¦playwright Grace McKeaney goes a long way toward capturing their rich and ambivalent nature. - Washington Post.