The Puzzle With The Piazza

The year is 2000, the place: the basement rec room of septuagenarian Althea Witlin. Althea’s life is about to change in a very big way. Health issues are forcing her to give up her house and move in with her sister Ina across town. Perhaps just as important: the move requires Althea to give up all of her jigsaw puzzles. Yet there is this one puzzle, described by her new friend Leif Morrell as “the mother of all jigsaw puzzles,” which she’s never had the gumption to tackle. Together, Althea and Leif decide to defy the odds and try to finish this puzzle in the hours that remain before Althea must go. They are joined by next-door neighbor Mattie, learning to be newly independent after years in a group home, and by Leif’s wife Connie, who has come face-to-face with the realization that she and Leif can’t be biological parents. Together all four members of Althea’s “puzzle platoon” push personal challenges and problems to the side as they place gondolas upon the canals of Venice and pigeons into the bright blue sky above the piazza. The play is a bittersweet comedy about tenuous family ties and the bonds of friendship that lattice and enrich the final years of our lives.