An extensive reworking of two earlier (1981) plays by John Guare about a nineteenth-century commune in Nantucket, Lydie Breeze is a two-play, six-hour cycle about four seekers who come to the island to create a special model for a better world in the ashes of the Civil War and end up as a model for the corruption of twentieth-century idealism. The result is an almost surreal saga of American life, with allegorical meditations on the contradictions and interconnectedness of all things and the chaotic nature of the universe.