In the first act, very successful but disenchanted architect Stephen Wheeler is lunching with his best friend from their days at Dartmouth College, rising avant-garde gay artist Drew Paley, in a trendy restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Seated at the adjoining table are Wall Street investment counselor Phoebe Kidde and her television producer brother Peter, who has just revealed he has AIDS to her.
When boisterous homeless woman May Logan enters the restaurant and creates a scene, the four diners and their frazzled waitress Ellen find themselves thrown together, and they eventually strike up an unlikely alliance.
[4] In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich said the playwright "captures the romantic sophistication of the most sublime comedies ever made in this country: those produced by Hollywood from the middle of the Depression until the waning days of World War II.
And like Carole Lombard, the heiress who adopts a tramp in My Man Godfrey, or Joel McCrea, the Hollywood director who goes underground as a hobo in Sullivan's Travels, they are driven by conscience to see how the other half lives .
If Mr. Greenberg's only achievement were to re-create the joy of screwball comedies, from their elegant structure to their endlessly quotable dialogue, Eastern Standard would be merely dazzling good fun.
But what gives this play its unexpected weight and subversive punch is its author's ability to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of either his troubling content or his effervescent theatrical form .