Vase of Pompeii: A Play

On his sixtieth birthday, Monsieur Lebordin, a world-renowned scholar and antiquities expert, suffers a heart attack while alone in his one-room apartment in Paris, and is visited by the mysterious stranger Angela, who, as we find out in the course of the play, is not at all who she appears to be ... As Lebordin reminisces about his life—his loveless marriage and failure as a father, opportunities missed and roads not taken, the price of professional success—it is the Vase of Pompeii that moves center stage: brought to him years ago by a young and beautiful American millionairess to be authenticated, it embodies the gift of love he rejected and the life he did not live ... Set in 1930s France, "Vase of Pompeii" is a Symbolist masterpiece, social commentary (applying as much to our own time as to pre-war Europe) masquerading as bourgeois tragedy.