It's Only the End of the World regards a long-estranged young man who returns home for dinner one Sunday to inform his family of his illness and impending death. The play combines uniquely poetic and humorous language with a strangely disjointed dramatic structure. It's Only the End of the World, alluring in its form, is made haunting from the perspective of Lagarce's own death from HIV/AIDS complications on September 30th, 1995. Funny, probing, touching, and more than anything deeply gentle toward the imperfections of the family he was about to leave behind, Lagarce rewrote The World several times in the last five years of his life.