Acts: A Screenplay

After years of terrorizing the politically difficult sect of Jews called Christians, Paul, a devout Jew and prosperous business man, decides that a disgraced young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth (whom he never met), was on to something important for the future of Judaism. He spends the next couple of decades trying to make both his fellow Jews and his gentile neighbors see things his way and meets with unending resistance.

Acts is a modernist and often hilarious retelling of the adventures of Saint Paul as told in The Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the Christian New Testament. Though told in perfectly contemporary terms (people drive cars, smoke cigarettes, and argue about feminism) it makes no apology for pretending to be happening in the first century in Palestine and the Aegean.

This volume also includes the screenplay for Hartley's critically acclaimed short feature, The Book of Life (1998) and his one play, Soon (1997), commissioned by the Salzburger Festspiele in Austria and staged in Europe and the United States in 1998 and 2001. These previous works, first instigated by contemporary events involving millennialist Christians in conflict with American law, proved to be the stimulus for Hartley's decade-long study of Saint Paul and the writing of Acts (2008).