Ties

THE STORY: Invited by an old friend, who is now a faculty member, to guest-direct a student production at a small Midwestern college, Walker, whose New York theatre career has reached a standstill, warily accepts. Sharp-witted, humorously caustic and bohemian in conduct, Walker quickly shakes up the tightly knit academic community, which his candor sweeps across like a hurricane. While hard-pressed to fathom Walker's laid-back nature, the others, students and faculty alike, quickly find themselves confiding in him, and emotional attachments soon develop-principally one between Walker and his friend's divorced sister, an affair which dashes the hopes of another young professor and yet is doomed, for both, by the ghosts of past loves. In time the central questions are whether Walker will accept an offer to stay on at the college, and, beyond that, how he will deal with the possibility of another kind of love put forth by his old friend-and it is in the working out of these questions that the warmth and wit and sensitivity of this deftly written play are realized to their fullest.Sweet, Jeffrey is the author of 'Ties ' with ISBN 9780822211495 and ISBN 0822211491.