The place is the rehearsal hall in the theatre complex of a large midwestern university. The time is 1970, and as those assembled in the hall proceed with rehearsal of a student play, a violent race riot is taking place outside the locked doors. Those besieged include the graduate student author of the play; the head of the department and the acid-tongued actress with whom he is having an affair; the alcoholic director of the play; a campy homosexual faculty member; an over-intense young student actor; and a frustrated female playwright turned stage manager. The work being rehearsed is a ridiculously sentimental parody of a Vietnam War play, and as the problems of interpreting it effectively increase, the students and faculty members break off to scuffle, fight, reminisce and to air the grievances, desires and disappointments which beset them all. What results is very funny, but it also reveals, beneath the humor, the unhappiness and sense of failure which these people feel—the knowledge of their mediocrity in retreating to the safe sterility of university theatre without ever having braved the demands and dangers of the real world—and the real theatre—beyond.