The story is simple: Mae (Alia Shawkat), a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, newly single and unemployed (she’d been dating her boss), has come home to rural Washington to stay with her widowed father, who’s being treated for a “weird, mysterious cancer.” Her mom died of cancer, too, years earlier. She’s trying to be responsible, to behave like a grownup, but being home makes her keyed-up, antsy, and she retreats into her sexual imagination for comfort. The play consists of a series of sharp, realistic dialogues broken up with bursts of surreality: Mae and her dad talking awkwardly in the garden; Mae at a local bar, sporting bright-red short shorts and showing a near-stranger her rash; and, now and then, a fantasy cowboy, who keeps threatening to tie Mae up, whether she likes it or not.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter