While working at the nightclub, she explores love and sex with a variety of unsuitable partners of both genders and forms a friendship with a gay neighbor.
[1] Prior to staging the play at Lincoln Center the following year, Rabe added a scene and several speeches to the first act, expanding it considerably.
Directed by Joseph Papp, the cast included Madeline Kahn as Chrissy, Robert Loggia as her husband Al, Charles Durning as her father Harold, Charlotte Rae as her mother Helen, and Mary Woronov as a dancer named Susan.
[2] Papp then presented the play at The Public Theater in a production directed by Robert Hedley and starring Ellen Greene, Helen Hanft, Christopher Lloyd, Fred Grandy, and Tom Quinn.
The play was restored to its original two-act structure when it was revived Off-Broadway at the South Street Theater by the Australian Orange Tree Company in 1985.