The Beat Generation is a five-act comedy by bestselling author William Cane, whose work has been compared by the New York Times to the Marx Brothers. In this play, a wealthy New Yorker is having problems convincing his fiancée to marry him because she and her mother are afraid that his interest in the Beat writers might be corrupting his judgment. When his valet brings him some hand rolled cigarettes from Calcutta, they accidentally send him back in time to 1951, where he meets William S. Burroughs and warns him that playing a William Tell game and shooting a whiskey glass off his wife's head will end in tragedy. Unfortunately, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg don’t believe the warning, and neither does Burroughs.