This dark piece focuses on several pathetic characters at the end of their run in a 1940s Mexican hotel. Shannon is the de-frocked priest, always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, contemptuous of the American tourists he is responsible for transporting between hotels and attractions. Maxine, the “stout, swarthy woman…affable and rapaciously lusty,” handily manages the hotel on her hustling, but admits that she only has a few years left “to make this place attractive to the male clientele, the middle-aged ones at least.” Even the relatively young Hannah is tired of her strange life as traveling sketch artist, accompanying her poet-showman grandfather, who is approaching the end of his life. (His last name is Coffin.)