The Houseguests

The fuddy duddy pair of guests are easy targets for their hosts' scathing hostility, but beneath their middle-class aspirations lurk hidden passions

Gale desperately declares love for Vera, but emotions confuse the highly verbal and intellectual Vera, who ultimately prefers Gale to play the submissive to her dominating contempt

Manny, in turn, convulses from the memory of the abuse he received as a child after Vera's husband, John, mocks the women's supposed lesbianism by seducing her

The loathsome Vera proposes an insane contest of misery in which she tastes each of the others' tears; the bitterest, she says, will win her hand. Manny "wins" and Vera proposes that they swap mates for six months and meet back at her unfinished winter house

Act Two takes place six months later in January, and the four have been affected by more than the punishing weather. Each has been stricken with a debilitating accident or disability: Vera is in a body cast; Manny is partially deaf; John is a multiple amputee from a car accident, and Gale is blind and half-mad

There is nothing to eat, nothing to drink but bottled water, and no facilities in the unfinished, snow-bound skeleton of a house. In the Jacobean extremity of their suffering, and having proved that life is nothing but a bitter joke, the two couples repent their evil ways and skeptically pray for love to return and once again grace their lives