Ellen hasn't done a show since well before she had kids. Why she allowed herself to be roped in at the last minute to sing, play the cello and lead in Glenn's one-night-stand production of Shakespeare's As You Like It is a mystery. By the end of the first rehearsal she is floundering; by the end of the second she is in love — or at least, she has a crazy thing for Lana, an utterly relaxed actor with no apparent responsibilities. With one rehearsal to go, Ellen can't fathom her own heart, or Lana's.

Every weekday April has the 4WD waiting at the school gate well before 3:30 PM and a raft of after-school activities in hand to keep them all occupied. But seven years of long lunches with her single friend Louis and two half-days a week at the gallery have left this doctor's wife wondering if there is anything else. When Jeremy the private tutor comes into her life, and her foster daughter May comes of age, April begins to feel like a hothouse orchid, although she really longs to be a wildflower.

Finally, the new play is up and running but Ellen's problems are just beginning. Imogen, her daughter and primary theatrical asset, is tiring of the spotlight. Glenn, her co-producer with privileges, is demanding something more. Then on opening night, Lana appears. Ten years ago, she walked into Ellen's life, changed it and left. Ever since Ellen has been wondering why. Now she is also wondering what Lana wants with Imogen.

A hillside with an ocean view seems an ideal spot to spend a lonely Christmas Eve. When Jessica, a journalism major, and Beth, a high-profile politician, discover they both have the same idea, they exchange the sort of explosive little gifts that are usually left wrapped. Although barely acquainted, over the course of the day they discover that through their mutual relationship with Jeff, a Government Minister, their lives are intimately connected — a connection that leaves their shared past looking like a nightmare.

Showfolk duo Joan and Peter defer the usual pre-lunch cocktail and anxiously await their bright new young director. As they review their career high and lowlights, this exciting new project promises them a big break in the face of their comically fast-maturing professional viability. Married less to their respective spouses than to the spotlight, Joan and Peter are about to discover they have been paying no attention to what has been going on in the real world backstage.

Helena, grand dame of the Melbourne and Sydney theatre scene, thinks she has settled nicely into a restful performance regime of comedy classics in judiciously subsidised spaces. When her somewhat intense undergraduate daughter hurls an asylum seeker drama at her, Helena's professional certainties are shaken not so much by the play's contents as by its lead actor, Violet — a student who has chosen Helena as her mentor and sets about procuring her idol with disturbing intensity.

It is December 1948. While their husbands self-sacrificingly remain at work in town, Sarah and her sister-in-law Jennifer spend yet another summer by the sea, watching the children in the deep water and trying to avoid the annual judgement-by-mother-in-law at the hands of the indomitable Alice. When Henry — a man who listens — is discovered to be at the centre of this family's business, the daughters-in-law must stand firm and defy Alice, who guards their tragedy with all the calmness of the self-justified.

Athena, an Australian nurse working overseas, is raped and murdered. Her father, John, must decide whether to grant clemency to her murderer, who is facing execution by beheading. Margaret, an ex-school teacher on a career change as a junior Australian Government official, is sent in to counsel and assist the grieving man. When the situation proves predictably challenging, Margaret's daughter Nina provides a clarity of counsel so irresistibly logical it may well prove to be the most practical solution.

When internationally renowned and self-confessed soloist Rachael Marlin comes to live with Holly and James in their Salon d'Art, everyone falls madly in love with her. Only Joy, a young doctor, sounds a note of caution when she sees Rachael's effect on her fiancé Matthew, and her potential to turn their little Salon d'Art into a larger theatre of the absurd.

Max and Marion are usually the sort of friends who can go for a year without seeing each other and catch up on everything in a second once they do. In these four strange and amusing encounters, however, something new seems to be happening. Max finds himself increasingly flummoxed by his interesting friend, as Marion plays about with various scenarios in which she side-steps work, suspends the kids and liberates her life partner while making a long overdue approach towards more time under the Me Tree.