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ACT ONE

The show opens with Gabe, Diana’s seventeen-year-old son, arriving home at 3:30 in the morning. She’s waited up for him anxiously for the past seven nights in a row, she tells him, imagining all the ways he might have died (“Prelude”). He tells her that she has to let him go; he’s almost eighteen. Dan, Diana’s husband, calls from offstage to ask who she’s talking to, and Diana tells Gabe to go upstairs the back way. “Just me talking to myself,” she tells Dan. Diana begins describing her “perfect loving family” (“Just Another Day”). Natalie, her daughter, enters. She is a hyper-overachiever and is still awake finishing homework. Diana tells her that she has to take it easy, and that she (Diana) is going upstairs “to have sex with your father.” Natalie thanks her for the unnecessary piece of information. Natalie reveals that the “perfect family” facade may be covering a very complicated dynamic and a feeling of collective desperation. Dan confirms this, as does Diana, as each