Fifteen-year-old Mary realizes she has matured enough to give birth and equates herself to Virgin Mary – the “Mary who gave birth to Jesus”.  She goes through her first menstrual cycle, a sadness caused by a waning summer, and most importantly she faces what seems to be despicable behavior on part of her parents… all of this pushes Mary to solve the problem in a radical manner – she decides to kill her family . 

Her weak-willed hapless father compensates for his own insignificance by taking it out on his family. Her mother, worn out by work, projects her problems on people close to her. As if this weren’t enough, she has a cynical and selfish older brother who despises everyone around. And her younger brother steals money from their mother. What will become of them? Is it possible to imagine that they will ever change? Or would it be easier to pull the plug on this life full of humiliation and suffering they inflict upon each other? 

However, Mary doesn’t accept these thoughts overnight. The entire play is one lunch, with changing dishes, desserts and coffee, alternating between the monologues of the heroine while seated at the window and watching swallows preparing to fly south. Just one lunch… one lunch will suffice because, as Mary puts it, “all our lunches are the same”. This is how the family lives on, day in, day out. A family that is so much like many other families co-existing around. 

The play’s stage design solution would be predictable to the reader: there’s the Bremer family and there’s a real lunch in real time which lasts throughout the play; but there’s also Mary and her world, a dark and bleak world, where her family members come in the form of crude, mattress-like rag dolls. Two tables: a brightly illuminated table in the right part of the stage, with a festive layout and changing dishes, and a table in the dark on the left, with only Mary seated and white paper swallows that perch on the stage at the beginning of the play. 

There’s another character – Mary’s Shadow – which makes its presence on the white backdrop of the stage and interacts with the real Bremer family while real Mary is engrossed in her made-up world filled with faceless sinister dolls. The white backdrop, which will serve as venue for shadow play, will also be a window that Mary looks into. It is in this backdrop that Maria, as if though a window, sees telegraph poles, with swallows sitting on their wires. 

Throughout the entire play until the finale, Mary does not interact with her real family members. Even direct dialogues with them feature Mary talking to the rag dolls while her family talks to the Shadow.  However, all that Mary does with and to the dolls mirrors her reaction to speaking with her family members. The most striking feature that shows this reaction is a fight at the table when her family, in a fit of rage, start pouring tomato sauce on each other. The sauce looks like blood on their white clothes. In the meantime, she crucifies the rag dolls on telegraph poles with a carpenter’s stapler. Although in the original work Mary mentions a gun on several occasions, in the play the gun is replaced with a stapler which she uses to crucify the rag dolls on telegraph poles when passions run high. 

Maria crucifies the dolls depicting her kin on the telegraph poles, i.e. she kills them in her thoughts. However, it’s one thing to kill your family in your thoughts, but it’s quite another to actually do it in reality. Will Mary be able to perpetrate the act or will she come to her senses? Will she pull the trigger of the gun pointed at her younger brother who is about to enter the house whistling a joyous song or not? To be or not to be? The final part of the play concludes with a convergence of two worlds into which Mary divided the universe: her own world and the world of ordinary people, which includes her family members. 

Fortunately, in the play Mary moves in favor of “To Be”; when her younger brother comes in and, at the sight of the gun poised to shoot, he appeals to her with such love and pity that Mary becomes overwhelmed and, giving the gun to her brother, she cries with a sense of relief: “I couldn’t do it, Willie! I couldn’t do it!” At this minute the boundary between the two worlds which Mary constructed evaporates, and the stage fills up with mild light, with a multitude of colored swallows falling down from the sky.