Harry Evers and Marvin Ellison have been playing poker Thursday nights with their friends for years. When a disagreement breaks up the game, they decide to continue meeting and doing different things together, instead of staying home with their wives. When the wives find out that the games stopped some time ago, they are a quite upset. Just what have they been doing on Thursday nights?

During the play, which is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, backgrounds of characters are discovered during a birthday party. Harold celebrates his birthday party, thrown by six of his closest friends. He becomes increasingly morose about losing his youthful looks and claims that he no longer can attract cute young men. "Cowboy", an attractive blond male prostitute who is "not too bright",is one of Harold's presents. Alan is an unexpected party guest, Michael's allegedly straight college friend,who is in town and anxious to tell Michael something—but hesitant to do so when he sees the group. His six closest friends are: Michael is Harold's "friend-enemy",the host, and a lapsed Roman Catholic alcoholic undergoing psychoanalysis Donald is a conflicted friend, who has moved from the city to spurn the homosexual "lifestyle". Bernard is an African-American, who still pines for the wealthy white boy in the house, where his mother worked as a maid. Emory is flamboyant and "effeminite". Larry, an aggressively sexual homosexual, and Hank, who "passes" as straight, are a couple, who live together but disagree on the issue of monogamy. During the party, one humor takes a nasty turn, as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a game, where each man must call someone and tell him he loves him. Michael, believing that Alan has finally "outed" himself when he makes his call, realizes that Alan's wife is the caller when he grabs the phone away from Alan. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael in the end.

George Schneider is an author whose wife had just died. His brother Leo gives him the number of Jennie Malone, and somehow they hit it off. And just when things are moving along, the memory of his first wife comes between them.

Lou Peckinpaugh, the Cheap detective has entered a world that is half Casablanca and half Maltese Falcon. A parody of Bogart's films in which Lou goes through a series of scenes from the two movies trying to keep ahead of the police who think he killed his partner and find the black bird.

Lionel Twain invites the world's five greatest detectives to a 'dinner and murder'. Included are a blind butler, a deaf-mute maid, screams, spinning rooms, secret passages, false identities and more plot turns and twists than are decently allowed.