As in its later, and substantially re-written version (entitled ORPHEUS DESCENDING), the play deals with the arrival of a virile young drifter, Val Xavier, in a sleepy, small town in rural Mississippi. He takes a job in the dry goods store run by a love-starved woman whose husband lies dying upstairs, and his smoldering animal magnetism soon draws out her latent sexual passion. As it must, their liaison sets tongues wagging, and invokes the scorn and jealousy of the townspeople, male and female alike. And, as the play probes ever more deeply and poignantly into the troubled psyches of its protagonists, a sense of inevitable tragedy grows, leading on to a denouement of overwhelming and chilling intensity.