re-invokes O'Neill's own muses to offer a re-conception of his artistic world, a re-enactment, and an entirely new work not so much in the style but in the spirit of the Nobel-prize winning American dramatist. Most closely allied with but with echoes as well of and , breathes new life into an epic sweep of familial history: the rise, fall, and perhaps rise again of a family of North Carolina industrialists-a family which may have bought its success by sacrificing its son to war, a family of weak men and strong women, a family that both embraces and tries to understand its tumultuous fate. is both new work and an old, speaking through the masks of the ancestors, causing them to live anew-the literary criticism of the future.