This latest work from award-winning playwright John Guare, author of
House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of
history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity with his
trademark Guare imagination. In a Fifth Avenue brownstone in 1880s New
York, Ulysses S. Grant is penniless, dying of throat cancer, and
attempting to finish his memoirs while he's cajoled and pestered by
everyone from his wife and children to his publisher Samuel Clemens (aka
Mark Twain) and, via his drugged hallucinations, the emperor of Japan.
Although the memoirs are eventually completed, the audience is left
questioning their accuracy and, ultimately, the authenticity of history
itself.