Tom Ziegler

The action centers on a fictional portrayal of Fanny Kemble's farewell performance to her beloved audience. She has chosen a reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest as her swan song. As she reads, she slips in and out of the characters on Shakespeare's magical island and relives her own life as an actress, a mother, an abolitionist and a triumphant author.Fanny Kemble was a mid-19th century actress from a theatrical family in Britain. She married an American and was an early feminist, abolitionist, writer, and one of the most celebrated actresses to grace the 19th-century American stage. She argued politics with U.S. presidents. She inspired Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Henry James' Washington Square. She was the first entertainment superstar about whom newspapers gossiped; women imitated her, and men wore her likeness on neckties. After her divorce in 1849, she gave dramatic readings of Shakespeare's plays in which she performed all the roles.

The Last Resortproves that love not only can germinate but can grow and flourish even in the most deathly environments.Marjorie Kendrick a widow half paralyzed by a stroke is dumped into a posh Long Island nursing home by her son. Most of the other elderly patients she meets in the home's recreation room are kept docile and cooperative by the use of drugs. The only exception is Henry Downs who as Marjorie soon learns avoids the diet of pills by collaborating with the nursing home's management.Like most women her age Marjorie has lived her life doing as she was told. But that changes following her brush with death and as she fights her own paralysis she strives to shake off the paralysis of the others. Little by little the group comes to life until finally Marjorie galvanizes them into an all-out revolt. Even the sedentary Henry discovers that yes there certainly can be not only life but romance after 70.