Act 1 Summary

Overtones is Alice Gerstenberg's three-act play about male and female relationships and the roles that social conventions, fear of intimacy, and rejection play in those interactions. The play is important because of the author's novel use of separate actors to portray the alter egos of the main characters.

The play opens in the anteroom of a dining room in a large hotel in 1920. A bellboy and a cigarette girl cross back and forth in their duties as a man named John Caldwell enters. John is a starving artist, indicated by his nervous disposition and slightly shabby clothes. John's wife, Margaret, follows John into the room looking tired and worn in spite of her youth. John is irritated with Margaret's obvious attempts to locate some wealthy art patrons in order to secure some work for John. Unfortunately, it is teatime and the patrons are...