For decades, Maya has kept silent about the abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her uncle. Now she is determined to tell her story, confront the past, and move on. But every step she takes in pursuit of closure leads her deeper into conflict with the people she loves the most. Her mother is shocked and sympathetic but resists Maya’s framing of events. How could she have known? How is she to blame? The abuse happened so long ago, why dwell on it now? In the meantime, Maya becomes increasingly vigilant and anxious in respect to her son, a college senior. He’s begun a romance with a graduate student who is his teacher. Is their relationship abusive? Does Maya have a responsibility to intervene?

Since the beginning of time, the three Furies have dedicated their immortal lives to the ancient, honorable principle of a slit throat for a slit throat. But when a young man walks into hell seeking help to avenge his father’s death—by killing his mother—they draw the line. And when he ignores their warnings against matricide and then begs for mercy, the moral order of the universe hangs in the balance. Just Deserts explores the origins of the Western (in)justice system.

(Variations on a theme by Israel Zangwill)

A century ago, the United States was embroiled in a bitter dispute over immigration. Nativists warned that a flood of new immigrants—Russian, Italian, and most dangerous of all, Jewish—posed an existential threat to American identity, while liberals fought to maintain the ideal of America as a haven for all races and cultures. Into the fray leapt “The Melting Pot,” a play by Israel Zangwill. It celebrated the metaphor of its title, and both the play—a wildly popular melodrama—and the metaphor were seized upon as powerful weapons by those fighting to defend open borders. The current play distills the immigrant love story at the heart of the original melodrama and interweaves it with the story of Zangwill’s play itself and its role in America’s early twentieth-century culture wars.

February 1692. Salem Village, Massachusetts. Tituba, her husband John, and their infant daughter live uneasily as enslaved Indians in the Puritan household of the Reverend Samuel Parris. It’s the coldest New England winter in memory, the minister’s salary has not been paid, and firewood is in short supply. To comfort herself and nine-year old Betty Parris, Tituba tells stories from her childhood, magical stories to offer an escape from the present, but they raise the suspicions of Betty’s mother, Elizabeth. In the meantime, fighting between colonists and Indians in nearby Maine is worsening. Already there are refugees from earlier Indian wars living in Salem Village, including Betty’s eleven-year-old cousin Abigail, who suffers from night terrors and a racking cough. Now, Betty begins to show the same symptoms, and rumors spread that the girls are possessed. Tituba is one of the first to be arrested under suspicion of witchcraft. In a desperate act to save herself and her family, she chooses to “confess.” Tituba’s false testimony sets the members of the Puritan community against one another. The accusations multiply, the jail cells fill, and the condemned are sent to the gallows. Ultimately, before the fury burns itself out, twenty women and men are executed for witchcraft, and several more die in jail. At the height of the panic, 150 people were packed into the jail with Tituba. Now, in the spring of 1693, only she remains, because no one has yet paid her jail fees. “Telling stories to children – is that witchcraft?” she wonders. And what if it’s true? What if she is a witch? Then she can conjure whatever ending she wants to this story.