Contrasting the kindness and loyalty of psychiatric patients with the avarice and vanity of "respectable" public figures, it calls into question conventional definitions of sanity while lampooning celebrity culture.
Fairy May (a plain girl who has difficulty telling fantasy from truth) sees herself as a person of great beauty.
Jeff (a concert pianist and military veteran) believes that he was horribly scarred in the war, even though he survived the plane crash that killed all his men without a scratch.
Hannibal (a statistician who lost his reason after being replaced by an electronic calculator and not finding work again) believes himself to be a concert violinist, even though he cannot play the violin.
Mrs. Paddy, who had been told by her husband to "shut up" years before, rarely speaks except to shout out protracted lists of things she hates (including electricity, which she has given up for Lent) She believes herself to be a great artist, though her painting style is simplistic.
Ethel's three stepchildren, Titus (a U.S. senator), Lily Belle (a self-proclaimed ingenue), and Samuel (a judge), had been shocked to find out that their stepmother had set up a memorial fund with her money in order to help average people pursue their dreams.
She then reveals to Miss Willie, her nurse, and Dr. Emmett, her doctor, that she has hidden the money that her stepchildren tried to take from her.
She reveals the sad history of her unpleasant "brood," when the stepchildren themselves arrive, trying to pry from her the whereabouts of the Savage fortune.
She deceives each of them by giving fake locations for the fortune, and they are each sent on a wild goose chase in which they end up humiliating themselves.
They return and convince Ethel to reveal the fortune, which is in the form of half-million dollar negotiable bonds.
Jeff and Florence both falsely confess to taking the bonds, perhaps in an attempt to protect whomever they believe to be the guilty party.
Miss Willie reveals that she is Jeff’s wife and works at the Cloisters in hopes that he one day remembers her.
Ethel, empowered, takes the bonds and leaves the Cloisters, having a final vision of her five new friends as happy and fulfilled.
Jeffrey: (20s-30s) Once a military pilot, Jeff was shot down in the war, surviving a crash that killed all his men.
The other patients say that Mrs. Paddy stopped talking when her husband told her to "shut up" one day, and she hasn't spoken since.
He has been sent so many threatening letters that he is listed by Western Union as a "tangible asset"; Titus is the least popular senator in congress.
The events of the play are centered around her and her decision to hide the money which she has inherited from her late husband from her greedy stepchildren, to give away to those less fortunate or to fulfill others' random, yet important lifelong dreams.
She dislikes her stepchildren, but learns to love the residents of The Cloisters, accepting their own realities and delusions with an open-mindedness that others on the outside do not.