Modern Drama

The Jewish festival scrolls known as the Megillot is a collection of Old Testament books that recognize that life itself—with all its joys and griefs, successes and failures, achievements and yearnings—can be a key to interpreting Scripture. In Reading the Megillot, Jeanette Mathews uses her own translations to reimagine each book as a different type of performance: Song of Songs as a Greek play, Ruth as a miniseries, Lamentations as performance poetry, Ecclesiastes as a television talk show, and Esther as a pantomime. Each script is introduced with historical and literary context and ...

Desperate to keep her teenage daughter from running with the wrong crowd again, Elsie Anderson makes the painful decision to leave Seattle for good. For her, solitude is a small price to pay for keeping Sophie out of trouble. Love is the last thing on Elsie’s mind, especially in a small town like Smithfield, Virginia. Alex Becker is the star of Smithfield's firefighting department. He may be a hero, but at night he sees a broken man in the mirror. There was a time when he believed in love, but that all disappeared after he unexpectedly lost his wife late last year. They both need a second...

King of Scotland is an award-winning, dark comedy and a free adaptation of Gogol's A Diary of a Madman. Long-term unemployed Tommy McMillan joins a government-funded retraining scheme, "Up the Ladder". This volume also contains the biting satire The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer. Set in 1780, Glasgow is booming, but the American war is looming, and the city's wealth is dependent on the import and export of American tobacco.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a mental patient tries to get help from a rabbi to smooth over family problems his manic episodes cause.