A family kitchen. A Russian immigrant father who longs to be recognized as an American writer. A fourteen-year-old daughter fascinated by the maps lining an old steamer trunk. A mother who has learned, through experience, that safety and belonging can never be taken for granted.

Judith Kerman’s The Steamer Trunk, inspired by Lydia Rosner’s memoir The Russian Writer’s Daughter: Stories of Growing Up American, unfolds in postwar New York, as the shadow of the Cold War begins to reach into ordinary family life. Friendships become suspect. Political affiliations acquire new consequences. The question of where one belongs becomes more complicated than anyone expected.

Set in the late 1940s, the play nonetheless lands with an unsettling immediacy. Its world is specific, its characters deeply human, and its questions about home, citizenship, identity and belonging are strikingly close to questions we’re living with today.

The September 16 reading falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with Sukkot approaching. During Sukkot, we leave the security of our permanent homes and build a temporary dwelling, opening ourselves to the idea that home may be less about walls than about what, and whom, we carry with us. It is a fitting moment to encounter this play.

Works in Progress Wednesday is about being in the room while a play is becoming. The actors bring the words to life; the playwright hears the work through new voices; and the audience becomes part of the process simply by listening closely. What resonates, what surprises, what catches us off guard and what leaves us wanting more can help illuminate the road ahead.

Come spend an evening with The Steamer Trunk at this particular moment in its journey.