Becky Nurse of Salem (TCG Edition): (or: after the witches, a comedy about a tragedy)

(Paperback)

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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 our "lock her up" era.

Reviews

"A mischievous, sprightly alternative narrative to the patriarchal one handed down by American history books, by Arthur Miller's The Crucible, by the way men still talk about and treat women." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Bracing and beguiling... A wildly ambitious denunciation of The Crucible, with its sexualization of women and girls, Becky Nurse of Salem calls out the way women are taken to task for the ills of the world. Ruhl's shimmering insights gives this new work some truly bewitching moments." --Mercury News / Bay Area News Group

"A wickedly dark comedy with sinister socio-political and economic implications." --Broadway World

"Ruhl's cunningly constructed play is chockablock with political and cultural reference, laying bare mistakes and missteps made not only in our political and legal systems, but by the broader culture in terms of societal norms and the artistic reactions to them." --Talkin' Broadway

Author Bio

Sarah Ruhl's fifteen plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and her book of essays 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Eurydice, named one of the 25 best American plays of the past 25 years in 2018 by the New York Times, was developed into an opera with music by Matthew Aucoin, and performed at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021. Her most recent book, Smile: The Story of a Face, was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster. Ruhl teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.