Selected Shorts – “Reality Checks”

Date: March 5, 2026
Host: Meg Wolitzer
Theme: Exploring the shifting boundaries of reality through three short stories, each offering a unique take on what’s real, what’s imagined, and how we understand or escape reality – often at profound emotional cost. The episode features dramatic readings by acclaimed actors and a thoughtful conversation with Denis O'Hare about performing literature for live and audio audiences.

Main Theme and Episode Purpose

This episode of Selected Shorts dives into three literary tales that blur the line between reality and fantasy, examining how truth, perception, memory, and mortality intersect. Host Meg Wolitzer describes the program as exploring fiction’s power to “play with the idea of reality” and its ability to reflect, distort, or illuminate our experiences and hopes. The selected stories convey maternal instinct, mortality, memory, and the unreliable nature of happiness and history.

Key Discussion Points and Summaries

1. “The Leap” by Louise Erdrich

Read by: Elizabeth Reaser
Segment Start: [03:08]

Summary & Insights

• The story focuses on the narrator’s mother, Anna, once half of the blindfolded trapeze act, The Flying Avalons.

• Anna, now elderly and blind, navigates her home with the same grace she once brought to her circus performances.

• The narrator reflects on three occasions where she “owes her existence” to her mother:

  1. Surviving the Circus Disaster: Anna saves herself during a disaster that kills her first husband (and performance partner) and their unborn child.
  2. Meeting the Narrator’s Father: Anna, while hospitalized for injuries following the circus accident, learns to read and falls in love with her doctor.
  3. Rescuing the Narrator from a House Fire: In a daring, acrobatic rescue, Anna risks her life to save her daughter from a burning house, leaping from a tree limb to the second-story window.

• The story threads together love, loss, maternal courage, survival, and the uncanny overlap between past and present.

• The tone evokes both suspense and deep nostalgia, using motifs of flight, falling, and rescue.

Notable Quotes

• “There may be no more powerful instinct than a mother rushing to the aid of an imperiled child, but Erdrich shapes the story around a compelling overlap of the past and the present.” – Meg Wolitzer [01:08]
• “My mother is the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act...The catlike precision of her movements in old age might be the result of her early training.” – Reader/Elizabeth Reaser [03:08]
• “My mother once told me that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do in the act of falling.” – Reader/Elizabeth Reaser [07:48]
• “As you fall, there is time to think...I wrapped my hands around my mother’s hands. I felt the brush of her lips and I heard the beat of her heart in my ears, loud as thunder, long as the roll of drum.” – Reader/Elizabeth Reaser [20:32]
• “Every moment of suspense is earned, and it's not until her daughter is in her arms that even the mother knows that this is a story with a happy ending.” – Meg Wolitzer [20:42]

Memorable Moment

• The breathtaking rescue: Anna, nearly naked, scales a tree, leaps onto the burning house’s roof, and hangs upside-down from a gutter to reach and rescue her daughter. [17:50–20:32]

2. “Death and the Lady” by Ben Loory

Read by: Denis O’Hare
Segment Start: [23:59]

Summary & Insights

• A whimsical, surreal tale where Death appears at church and befriends a resilient, unflappable lady.
• The Lady and Death develop a quirky relationship, lunching together and eventually going for a drive and a picnic.
• Death candidly shares feelings of loneliness and the burdens of his work, while the Lady discusses family and lost time.
• Time slips strangely: Death realizes that, to him, only a week has passed, but the Lady has grown older and her family is gone.
• Death invites the Lady to see the world, promising it’s never too late. She insists on driving the borrowed convertible and, with a kiss for Death, floors the gas and drives them off a cliff, ending the story with a darkly comic twist.

Notable Quotes

• “Afternoon, Miss, he says with a smile. If you don't mind, she says. I'm actually a ma'am.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [24:30]
• “My career has to come first, you know. I understand, the lady says with her best understanding nod. I have a cousin like that.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [25:32]
• “Things are different now, what with everyone gone...Maybe time moves differently for you.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [28:07]
• “Well, says Death, it's never too late. We can go, and if you want, you can drive.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [29:30]
• “I do, says the lady. But first a kiss. So Death leans in and they close their eyes and they kiss. Then she floors it off the cliff.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [31:40]

Memorable Moment

• The Lady smiling calmly, asking Death for a kiss before launching the convertible off a cliff—a wry take on cheating Death, or perhaps embracing it. [31:40]

3. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz

Read by: Denis O’Hare
Segment Start: [33:03]

Summary & Insights

• The narrator dreams he is watching his parents’ courtship unfold as a silent film in a darkened theater, set in 1909 Brooklyn.
• The narrative blends memory, dream, and cinematic metaphor, with the narrator both witness and unwilling participant.
• As he watches his parents’ romance and eventual engagement, he is wracked with foreboding, grief, and the urge to change the past—to stop the union he fears will only yield “remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”
• The story moves between scenes of budding love and mounting anxiety. The narrator repeatedly disrupts the film, weeping and shouting for his parents to reconsider, only to be shushed and finally dragged out by an usher.
• The final lines reveal the narrator awakening on his own twenty-first birthday, the drama of parental legacy and personal destiny unresolved.

Notable Quotes

• “It is always so when one goes to the movies. It is, as they say, a drug. My father walks from street to street… he thinks about himself in the future and so arrives… in a state of mild exaltation.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [33:20]
• “Suddenly I begin to weep. The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theater is annoyed and looks at me with an angry face and, being intimidated, I stop.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [36:59]
• “Then, with awful daring… he asks my mother to marry him…And she, to make the whole matter worse, begins to cry… And it was then that I stood up in the theater and shouted, don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare [43:50]
• “You can’t carry on like this. It is not right. You will find that out soon enough. Everything you do matters too much.” – Reader/Denis O’Hare, as the usher [51:25]

Memorable Moment

• The narrator’s desperate interruption: Standing in the theater, shouting at his parents’ film selves not to marry, overwhelmed by the sense that fate—and reality—are traps. [43:50–44:40]

Interview: Denis O’Hare on Performing Short Fiction

Conversation Start: [54:32]

Key Insights

• O’Hare discusses the distinctions between reading aloud for a live audience vs a microphone. With live audiences, he responds to feedback, whereas with a microphone, shaping the sound is more solitary and internal.
• He reflects on modulating his voice for different stories and characters: “For me, it was about keeping it just a little above my narrative voice and a little below my narrative voice. They’re almost literary, but they’re pushed toward character.” [56:03]
• On style: Every story “has a world,” and the performer must adapt—comparing the spare, fairytale-like sentences of Ben Loory to the long, winding sentences of Delmore Schwartz.
• Actors collect observations from life—gestures, voices, mannerisms—to bring authenticity to performances.
• “There's no right answer. No, there's just taste. My taste, your taste, the director's taste, the audience's taste, and everyone's taste is different. And all you can do is make a guess.” [58:19]

Notable Quotes & Host Reflections

• “Every moment of suspense is earned, and it’s not until her daughter is in her arms that even the mother knows that this is a story with a happy ending. This is such an adroit piece of writing, as graceful and full of spectacle as an acrobatic act.” – Meg Wolitzer on “The Leap” [20:42]
• “I really liked it, so thank you. And it was so great to talk to you.” – Meg Wolitzer to Denis O’Hare [58:28]
• “Three stories in which ideas of reality are tested… when there's a disjunction between what is hoped for… and what is really going on.” – Meg Wolitzer [59:03]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:08] – Start of “The Leap” by Louise Erdrich
• [20:42] – Host reflection on “The Leap”
• [22:51] – Introduction to Ben Loory and “Death and the Lady”
• [23:59] – Start of “Death and the Lady”
• [31:53] – Start of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz
• [54:32] – Interview with Denis O’Hare: Acting and story performance

Conclusion

The “Reality Checks” episode weaves together tales in which reality is continuously tested, transcended, or reframed—by memory, fantasy, or the overwhelming drama of life. Performed by actors who bring subtlety and compassion to each story, the episode underlines fiction’s unique power to let us safely traverse the perilous edges between what is and what could be.

For more stories and performances, visit selectedshorts.org.