The play takes place in 2008 on Daniel Hale’s dairy farm near the Catskills along the Delaware River and by a front-lawn memorial for his son Marcellus, who was killed in Iraq.  On Memorial Day, as his family and friends gather to remember his son, Daniel lets his wife know he’s going to lease the mineral rights of his 600-acre dairy farm to a gas company.  The farm is too expensive to operate and more work than he can handle.  Moreover he wants to remake the farm the way his son would have wanted, and be released from the guilt he feels for driving his son away from home. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law want to keep the farm going in memory of Marc, and they confront him and the landman, who offers a very favorable lease.  The landman, who knew Marc in the Army, promised to take care of his father and mother if anything happened to him, but realizes that by leasing the natural gas rights, he will destroy his friend’s family.  In the middle of the night, angry that his friend has given him a task that seems impossible, and knowing that the barn is falling down and can’t be rebuilt without the money from the lease or fire insurance, he sets the barn on fire.  Daniel, awakened after drinking heavily Memorial Night, is convinced that Marc has returned and set the fire and imagines that he sees and hears Marc in the flames.  He is taken to the hospital with a stroke and dies.  At the family memorial for Daniel, they remember what made the farm important to him as a young man and how he loved the land and cultivated it for its own sake and know that that is what Marc would have wanted as well.