Jan McGrath an actor, poet, and playwright. She has acted and directed in professional and community theatres for seven decades. After adapting Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for ACT’s Readers Theatre, she began writing her own screen and stage plays. These include fictional biopics of Christopher Marlowe and of the Puccinis, as well as The Parish, Home Free, Tumblin’ Down, and Outage–which received a 2014 Po’okela Playwright award. She has studied with Margaret South, Y York, and Mark Tjarks. Her most recent script, “A Wilderness of Monkeys”, imagines the story of Shylock’s wife Leah, as a decade-prequel to his story in “A Merchant of Venice” (which she did not write).