Book excerpt: The setting is Sicily, the island where the gods once spent their holidays. The principals are a newlywed couple in their forties, who hope to meld the children of their previous marriages into a brave, new, postnuclear family. But in John Guare's vastly original and eerily beautiful new play, any family may be reconstructed as a tragic pantheon, enacting passion as ancient as the strata of an archaeological dig and as catastrophic as an earthquake.