Matthew Maguire's Phaedra is a response to the great French drama by Jean Baptiste Racine. Like the original it is a story of forbidden love. In Greek myth, Phaedra, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, and wife of Theseus, fell in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. When the boy rejected her love, Phaedra hung herself.

"Mr. Maguire," wrote the New York Times "...had the smart, viable idea" of extending the sexual interests of the characters to explore "desire as a verb in eternal, fruitless search of an object." Maguire's play is set in the home of one of the United States' most wealthy and powerful families, where power becomes tied not only to eroticism but frightening unconscious forces that seduce and repulse at the same moment.

Maguire's Phaedra which premiered at HERE in New York, is a story of the violence of erotic desire and the destructive character of a life that attempts to bury it.