Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. Our July play selection is DAI (enough) by Iris Bahr. In her award-winning solo show, Bahr creates eleven different characters in a Tel Aviv café moments before a suicide bomber enters. Spanning the ideological and demographical spectrum, the café's customers include an old-school Zionist kibbutznik, an American evangelical, a West Bank settler, a snooty expat living on Long Island, a Russian prostitute, a German furniture designer, and a Palestinian professor trying to prevent her son from taking the path of extremism. Thanks to the emotional depth and honesty with which Bahr portrays these characters and their individual stories, a complex portrait of Israeli society emerges. By turms humorous and tragic, DAI courageously addresses an enduring and deeply fraught conflict from a sociological rather than a political perspective, humanizing the headlines through storytelling at its most powerful and poignant. Please join us for this evening's fascinating discussion.

Here from her home in Maine is noted novelist Lily King. She follows two well-received novels, The Pleasing Hour and The English Teacher, with Father of the Rain (Atlantic Monthly Press), a new, domestically-set work that explores the father-daughter relationship with sharp insight. "Whiting Award-winner King captures with easy strokes the bold and dangerous personalities lurking inside the mundane frame of domestic drama. Her third novel, narrated by the clear-eyed daughter of an alcoholic father, follows their evolving relationship ... King's latest is original and deftly drawn, the work of a master psychological portraitist." - Publishers Weekly.