Shepard's Pulitzer Prize winning play is set in a farmhouse somewhere in the American West, inhabited by a raving, alcoholic grandfather, a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons Tilden once an American footballer, now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, Tilden's son none of them recognises or remembers, and his girlfriend Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced. The family harbours a dark secret: years earlier the grandfather, Dodge, had buried an unwanted newborn baby in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which is dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. His act purges the family, at last, of its infamy, and suggests the possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin.