Becky Nurse of Salem (TCG Edition): A Contemporary Comedy about a Historical Tragedy - Paperback

by Sarah Ruhl (Author), Sarah Ruhl (Afterword by)

A wry, innovative reckoning with the legacy of the Salem witch trials from one of America's foremost playwrights.

Becky Nurse is an outspoken, sharp-witted tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft who's just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She's also the descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was infamously executed for witchcraft in
1692--but things have changed for women since then...haven't they? After losing her job for calling out The Crucible in front of schoolkids, Becky visits a local witch for help. One spell leads to another, and then everything really goes off the rails. A darkly comic play about a woman coming to terms with her family's legacy and finding her voice in the "lock her up" era.

Author Biography

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, poet, and essayist. Her plays include In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play (Pulitzer Prize finalist); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play (PEN/Laura Pels Award); Letters from Max (based on the book of the same title, with Max Ritvo); and Eurydice, named one of the best productions of the last twenty-five years by the New York Times, and made into an opera for The Metropolitan Opera. Her books include Smile: A Memoir, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, and Love Poems in Quarantine. She is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. She currently teaches at the Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.