It tells the story of an amnesiac, Claire, who awakens each morning as a blank slate on which her husband and teenage son must imprint the facts of her life.
[2][3] The play was directed by David Petrarca and featured J. Smith-Cameron (Claire), Marylouise Burke (Gertie) and Patrick Breen (Limping Man).
Directed by Angus Jackson, the cast featured Julia Mackenzie (Gertie), Katie Finneran (Claire), John Gallagher Jr. (Kenny), Matthew Lillard, and Nicholas Le Prevost.
[6] Lindsay-Abaire wrote the play while a student in the Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program.
[7] The play had a staged reading as part of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in 1998 under Artistic Director Lloyd Richards.
[10][11] Claire awakens one morning to discover that she is married to a hospital worker named Richard and has a son, Kenny, who has an attitude problem.
Claire's world (as well as that of the audience) becomes increasingly clear with each new revelation as she regains more and more of her memory and realizes she is responsible for Limping Man's deformities.
Kenny tells of how Richard worked at the hospital where Claire was staying and proposed to her on a daily basis, taking advantage of her memory loss.
"[13] In his review of the 1999 production, Brantley wrote that the play was "dark, sweet and thoroughly engaging comedy... Mr. Lindsay-Abaire blends cliched ingredients into something savory and distinctive, with scarcely a tinge of residual staleness...
"[14] John Heilpern, drama critic for the New York Observer wrote: "Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, a manic farceur with an original mind, surprises us all the way to the nut house and receives my Most Promising Dramatist Award, bummer though it is to be labeled 'promising.'"
The reviewer in The Guardian pointed to Arsenic and Old Lace and You Can't Take It with You as examples that Americans (in his opinion) had a tradition of works "in which wackiness was a sign of liberating individualism", but that "...it means little to us here.