We’re going to hear stories about students and schools that abandon the status quo to follow their own, unusual, codes of behavior. In "Singin' in the Acid Rain" by Patricia Marx, performed by Katrina Lenk, it’s recess at a post-apocalyptic school. Marx talks with Meg Wolitzer about the story and her unique brand of humor after the read. The students in “The School” by Donald Barthelme, performed by Laura Esterman, are facing a difficult test; and young love is framed by larger issues in "Melvin in the Sixth Grade" by Dana Johnson, performed by Nikki M. James.
Donald Barthelme (1931 – 1989) was the author of more than 20 works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, including Come Back, Dr. Caligari; City Life; Snow White; and The Dead Father. Barthelme was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and served as director of PEN and the Authors Guild.
Laura Esterman was most recently seen off-Broadway in I’m Revolting at the Atlantic Theater. Additional off-Broadway work includes Dawn, 2,000 Years, Curtains, Cranes, The American Clock, True Love, Edith Stein, Good for Otto, The Wax, and Marvin’s Room, for which she received Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Obie awards. Esterman made her Broadway debut in 1969 with the revival of The Time of Your Life, and appeared in Broadway productions including I.B. Singer's Teibele and Her Demon, The Suicide, and Kafka's Metamorphosis with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Recent television appearances include The Blacklist and I Know This Much Is True.
Nikki M. James currently stars as Ida B. Wells in the Tony-winning musical Suffs, for which she was also nominated for a Tony Award. She originated the role of Nabalungi in the Broadway hit musical The Book of Mormon, for which she won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Her favorite theater credits include Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day at The Public, Broadway productions of Les Miserables and All Shook Up; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin with Encores!; Romeo and Juliet and Antony & Cleopatra alongside Christopher Plummer at the Stratford Theater; The Wiz at the La Jolla Playhouse; Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night with Shakespeare in the Park; Bernarda Alba at Lincoln Center; and Preludes with LCT3. Her film and television credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Lucky Stiff, BrainDead, Proven Innocent, The Good Wife, Modern Love, Severance, and Spoiler Alert. As a director, she has helmed episodes of The Bite and The Good Fight. She served as an assistant director to Michael Arden for the Broadway revival of Once on this Island and A Christmas Carol starring Jefferson Mays. Forthcoming projects include Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again.
Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection Break Any Woman Down and the novel Elsewhere, California, both of which were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, as well as In the Not Quite Dark, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, The Paris Review, Callaloo, and the The Iowa Review, among others, and anthologized in On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. Recent work includes Trailblazer: Delilah Beasley’s California. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Katrina Lenk recently starred as Bobbie in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. She previously starred as Dina in The Band’s Visit, for which she earned Tony, Grammy, and Lucille Lortel awards. Additional Broadway credits include Pulitzer Prize–winning Indecent, Once, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and The Miracle Worker. Lenk has also been featured on Apple TV+’s Little Voice, Tommy on CBS, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon, Netflix’s Ozark, and most recently, Apples Never Fall on Peacock.
Patricia Marx is a New Yorker staff writer, former writer for Saturday Night Live, and author of the novels Him Her Him Again the End of Him and Starting from Happy, both Thurber Prize finalists, as well as the nonfiction work Let’s Be Less Stupid. She and Roz Chast have collaborated on several books, including Now Everybody Really Hates Me, Meet My Staff, and You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples. She was the first woman on the Harvard Lampoon, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Marx can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.
CREDITS
“Singin' in the Acid Rain” by Patricia Marx, from The New Yorker (June 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Patricia Marx. Used by permission of the author.
“The School” by Donald Barthelme, from The New Yorker (June 1974). Copyright © 1974 by Donald Barthelme. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
“Melvin in the Sixth Grade” by Dana Johnson, from Break Any Woman Down(University of Georgia Press, 2001). Originally published in The Missouri Review. Copyright © 2000 by Dana Johnson. Used by permission of the author.
