A routine that never changes can get old. So this week on Selected Shorts, host Meg Wolitzer presents three stories that shake up domestic life, teaching the characters something new about themselves and their circumstances. In “Scaffolding Man” by Jenny Allen, performed by Patricia Kalember, a woman in a drab marriage is intrigued by a “hot” stranger. In "Myrna's Dad" by Cyn Vargas, a father’s changing occupations hide a family secret. The reader is Krystina Alabado. And in “Overtime” by Hilma Wolitzer (Meg’s mom), read by Becky Ann Baker, a happy couple gets a jolt when the man’s ex moves into their apartment. After the story, Meg interviews Hilma about what gave her the idea and her writing in general.
Krystina Alabado was last seen starring as Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls on Broadway. Additional Broadway credits include American Psycho and Green Day’s American Idiot. She has performed in the national tours of Evita, American Idiot, and Spring Awakening, and off-Broadway in The Mad Ones, This Ain’t No Disco, David Bowie's Lazarus, and Camp Wanatachi. Her film and television credits include Disney’s Better Nate Than Ever, A Killer Party, Sunny Day, God Friended Me, First Reformed, FX’s Tyrant, Mecha Builders on HBO Max, Voltron Legendary Defender on Netflix, and Pantheon on AMC+. Alabado can be heard on the cast albums of The Mad Ones, A Killer Party, Goosebumps The Musical, Star Crossed, and more.
Jenny Allen is a writer and performer whose works include the fable collection The Long Chalkboard and, most recently, Would Everybody Please Stop?, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She wrote and starred in the award-winning one-woman show I Got Sick Then I Got Better. Allen’s writing has been featured in several anthologies, including Disquiet, Please!: More Humor Writing from the New Yorker and The 50 Funniest American Writers, edited by Andy Borowitz.
Becky Ann Baker has appeared on television and film in Girls, for which she received an Emmy nomination, Freaks and Geeks, Kings, The Good Wife, The Blacklist, Big Little Lies, Brockmire, Younger, Hunters, Little Voice, New Amsterdam, Billions, A Simple Plan, Lorenzo’s Oil, Sabrina, Two Weeks Notice, Nights in Rodanthe, Starbright, The Half of It, and Holler. She has performed on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, A Streetcar Named Desire, Titanic, Assassins, All My Sons, and Good People. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in Suddenly Last Summer at the Roundabout Theatre Company; Comedy of Errors, Othello, and Two Gentlemen of Verona at the New York Shakespeare Festival; Durang, Durang at the Manhattan Theatre Club; and Barbecue at the Public Theater, and virtually in TheHomeboundProject. Baker is currently appearing on Peacock in The Resort and shooting Girls on the Bus for HBO Max.
Patricia Kalember’s stage credits include The White Card, The Nerd, Losing Louie, Y2k, Don’t Dress for Dinner, Sea of Tranquility, Loose Knit, and From Above. She played the role of Gloria Steinem in Gloria: A Life in New York and Boston. She received an Outer Critics Circle nomination for her role in the original cast of The Foreigner. On television, she's had recurring roles on The Tick, Power, thirtysomething, and starred in Sisters. Other television credits include Law & Order: SVU, Power, Orange Is the New Black, Gossip Girl, Blue Bloods, Allegiance, Madam Secretary, Veep, The Good Wife, and the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge. Her numerous films include Jacob’s Ladder, Path to War, A Far Off Place, Signs, Rabbit Hole, The Company Men, Limitless, Girl Most Likely, and Run All Night. She can currently be seen on Power Book IV: Force.
Cyn Vargas is the author of the short story collection On the Way, which made Newcity Lit’s Top 5 Fiction Books by Chicago Authors, Chicago Book Review’s Favorite Books of 2015, Bustle’s 11 Short Story Collections Your Book Club Will Love, and Chicago Writers Association 2015 Book of the Year, Honorable Mention. Her prose and essays have been published in the Chicago Reader, Word Riot, Split Lip Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Midnight Breakfast, Bird’s Thumb, and elsewhere. She received a Top 25 Finalist and Honorable Mention in two of Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers Contests, is the recipient of the Guild Literary Complex Prose Award in Fiction, is a Core Faculty Member in Short Fiction at StoryStudio Chicago, Curatorial Board Member for the Ragdale Foundation, on the Board of Directors for Hypertext Studio, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago.
Hilma Wolitzer published her first short story when she was thirty-six, and her first novel, Ending, eight years later. Her subsequent novels include An Available Man, Summer Reading, and Tunnel of Love, among others; the nonfiction work The Company of Writers; and several Young Adult novels. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. She is the author, most recently, of the story collection Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.
CREDITS
“Scaffolding Man” was commissioned by Symphony Space for the collection Small Odysseys: Selected Shorts Presents 35 New Stories, edited by Hannah Tinti, published by Algonquin Books. © 2022 by Symphony Space.
“Myrna’s Dad” by Cyn Vargas, from On the Way (Tortoise Books, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Cyn Vargas. Used by permission of the author.
“Overtime” by Hilma Wolitzer, from Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Hilma Wolitzer. Used by permission of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.
