Daniel Lucas, a dedicated and qualified censor, receives a futuristic novel that reveals the mistakes of his own past and the victims he has created throughout his career as a state censor. This novel is about a man called Alfonso Morales, a character who seems to be the exact mirror image of Daniel Lucas. Lucas strives to ban the novel, which talks about what Ariel Dorfman called "the past he cannot hide and the future he cannot avoid". While doing so, and throughout the play, the significant characters in Daniel Lucas's life-his former wife, son, secretary and lover, and the director of the Moral Resources Company-keep alternating with their counterparts in the novel until it becomes very difficult to distinguish the former from the latter; they are actually played by the same actors in the play.
