The Actress, a lovely woman with a trail of lovers who appears to be growing weary of her marriage after only six months, is played by Marla Schaffel, whose Broadway credits include "Titanic" and "Les Miserables".
The patriarch, known as the Brig, runs the family timber business, and the extended clan includes four grown children, trailing spouses, lovers and children of their own.
Their lack of pickiness was just as well, too, because on this muggy summer evening in Dogenzaka, a section of Shibuya so thick with short-stay lodgings that it is known as Love Hotel Hill, demand for rooms had far outstripped supply, sending lovers trailing from door to door in search of places to couple.
From the Enron collapse to the reality TV boom, the "toxic assets" trail to hustler-lover Ted Haggard, the 21st century -- at least according to Rich -- is being defined by Tiger-styled bamboozlement.
The Australian piece En Route was a hit in Edinburgh this summer, and now London has both Accomplice, a treasure-hunt-style performance that takes you on a secret trail around Southwark; and Lovers Walk, a gently engaging guided tour of the sites of a love affair, which layers real places with fiction in an intriguing fashion.
If they don't mean what we think they mean, the whole system fails and a long trail of unhappy music lovers are left behind.
After a hike along the newly carved Opal Canyon Trail in Duarte, nature lovers will sit down to finger-licking barbecue while listening to foot-stomping music.
The Common is also a part of the 2.5 mile long Freedom Trail which leads history lovers down a route of 16 historical sites including the grounds as an important part of America's past.
And Benjamin Black/John Banville, equally courageous, proved himself equal to the task of resurrecting Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, his novel The Black-Eyed Blonde (Mantle £16.99) putting the melancholy detective on the trail of a vanished lover and amply rewarding those fans who have chafed at the mere seven Marlowe novels Chandler left behind.
"It has been reaffirmed as a place for young people to come and engage in democratic debate, culture, sports, friendship and love," says Haffner – perhaps no more evident than in the "lover's trail" that loops around the island, complete with brightly coloured condom buckets dangling from the fence.
There she is, formidably trailing a departing lover across Sweden's stark wilderness in the video for "I Follow Rivers", a song that was remixed by the Magician and topped charts around Europe three years ago, selling 1.2 million copies (it also featured on the soundtracks for the films Blue is the Warmest Colour and Rust and Bone).
