After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, theater professor Phillipa Maakestad returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. She faces a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband. Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.