num_pages: 72
description: Eros, the god of love, narrates the action of the play in haunting passages akin to the Greek choruses of ancient tragedies. We meet Penny and Philip, newlyweds who have abandoned unhappy marriages to work together on Philip's archeological dig in Sicily. They bring along their nine children, hoping to instill in them a love of antiquity and a zest for the same impassioned living they've re-discovered in middle age. What they aren't willing to discuss with the children, however, is that their marriage originally began as an illicit affair, symbolically identifying with an half-buried statue of four baboons basking contentedly in the sun. Immediately, the children announce that they knew of the affair from the start, and worse, their eldest children, Wayne and Halcy, have fallen in love and are demanding permission to have sex. Forbidden to continue the relationship, the children escape during an earthquake that separates the two families. Penny and Philip find them just as they are making love on a hilltop. Fleeing his parents, Wayne climbs a cliff and accidentally falls to his death. Philip, his spirit broken, returns to the States for the funeral, but Penny stays behind. The play ends with Penny basking in the Sicilian sun, meditating with the deeper understanding of what the four baboons statue has come to symbolize to her: There they sit, blinded by the very sun they worship, yet drawn again and again, regardless of pain, to its life-giving warmth.
language: English
title: Four Baboons Adoring the Sun
titlecomplete: Four Baboons Adoring the Sun
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.