In the end, even the creative achievements of Shakespeare and Bach must be eradicated by death and nothingness, when the earth is burnt up in the sun. But the temporality of human existence and meaning does not invalidate the quest for meaning-for even that future universe, as dead as it must be will have some meaning, in that it contains the artifacts, even in ashes, of the sometime existence of human life and consciousness. We HAVE BEEN. It was towards this (...) vision that Mahler strove. (shrink)

The author of Look Back in Anger, Inadmissible Evidence, and The Entertainer has created a brilliant dramatization of this classic about a man who retains his youth while the decay of advancing years and moral corruption appears on a portrait painted by one of his lovers.