In 10 piercing new stories, Richard Bausch fleshes out the rich inner worlds of his characters and plumbs the nuances of infidelity, loss and profound loneliness. In “Donnaiolo,” a young divorcé moves back into her childhood home, with no plans other than to eat her parents’ food and smoke cigarettes in her room. In “Isolation,” a woman pines for her lover while quarantining from the COVID-19 pandemic with her husband, a situation that deteriorates when she learns her beloved has fallen gravely ill. In “Broken Home,” a Catholic school field trip takes a violent turn when the unsupervised altar boys discover an abandoned house in the woods. And in “The Widow’s Tale,” a recent widow attends a séance after her sister reports having reoccurring dreams about her late husband.

As renovations begin at the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis, life for the core members of the company seems to be falling into disarray. Their trusted director has just retired, and theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth dreads the arrival of an imperious, inscrutable visiting director. Claudette, struggling to make ends meet as an actor and destabilized by family troubles, is getting frequent calls from her ex-boyfriend --- and also the narcissistic, lecherous television actor who has been recruited to play King Lear in their fall production. Also invited to the cast is Malcolm Ruark, a disgraced TV anchor muddling through the fallout of a scandal involving his underaged niece --- and suddenly in an even more precarious situation when the same niece, now 18, is cast to play Cordelia.

When Natasha meets Michael, the stars seem to align. Although he is much older, they fall in love, and within months they are engaged. Shortly before their wedding, while Natasha is vacationing in Jamaica and Michael is in New York attending a wedding, the terrorist attacks of September 11 occur. Convinced that Michael is dead, Natasha makes an error in judgment that leads to a private trauma of her own. A few days later, she and Michael are reunited, but the horror of that day and Natasha's inability to speak of it inexorably divide their relationship into "before" and "after."