Plot
Kenneth Talley, Jr. is a gay paraplegic Vietnam veteran living in his childhood home with his boyfriend, botanist Jed Jenkins. At the beginning of the play, he is due to soon return to his former high school to teach English, but has decided not to. Visiting Ken and Jed are Ken's sister, June Talley, and her daughter, Shirley, as well as Ken and June's longtime friends, John Landis and his wife Gwen, inheritor of a large industrial copper conglomerate. John is ostensibly visiting to purchase the Talley House for Gwen to convert to a recording studio, so that she can have a career as a country singer. Unbeknown to anyone but June, John and Ken, Shirley is John's daughter, and his visit has as much to do with a desire to gain joint custody of Shirley as it does with the house. Ken, meanwhile, believes that the singing career is a way of distracting Gwen, so that John could take control of her businesses. Other visitors include Weston Hurley, Gwen's guitarist, and Ken's aunt, Sally Talley, who a year after his death still has her husband Matt's ashes in a candy box. The story culminates with a "bidding war" between Sally Talley and John Landis for the house after it is revealed to everyone that Ken planned on selling it to Landis. Sally ultimately outbids Landis and says she will give it to Jed so he can finish his gardening.
Read more about this topic: Fifth Of July
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)