Up the Sandbox

Plots: A bored housewife takes refuge in a fantasy world. A young wife and mother, bored with day-to-day life in New York City and neglected by her husband, slips into increasingly outrageous fantasies: her mother breaking into the apartment, an explorer’s demonstration of tribal fertility music at a party causing strange transformations, and joining terrorists to plant explosives in the Statue of Liberty. As she loves them but more out of a sense of duty, New Yorker Margaret Reynolds has dedicated this phase of her life to the service of her somewhat self-absorbed university professor husband Paul Reynolds, the praise he receives for his research which largely goes unconsciously to his head, and their two young children, Peter, the younger of the two, still a toddler. This life is all at the expense of doing nothing strictly for herself. Her feelings are a little less hospitable toward her critical and overbearing mother, who is always trying to manipulate Margaret to convince Paul to move to New Jersey to be closer to their family, it the last thing Margaret wants to do. When Margaret discovers that she is pregnant once again, it an unplanned pregnancy, her life is shown alternately between reality and fantasy, the latter often borne out of what she would like the reality of the moment to be or something totally alternate to the boredom that she feels in being unstimulated mentally.