A middle-aged woman leads a traveling circus act through the Midwest featuring 26 monkeys who climb into a bathtub and disappear and then reappear on her bus after the show. The impending death of one of the key monkeys causes her to wrestle with the meaning of life.

After kicking her husband out and changing the locks, a mother imagines he is still living with her, distant and uninterested in sex. Lying in bed, she conjures up old memories and imagines new ones, grappling with questions of selfhood, identity, womanhood, and motherhood. One night, her real husband returns, and she lets him back in.

A middle-aged man in a small Northern town is desperate to escape his mundane routines and imagines rash and violent actions that might give his life meaning.

Thirteen-year-old Angelle gets into a car accident when her drunken father begs her to drive home in his stead. Later, she must take the witness stand in court and decide her family's future with her testimony.

A day in the life of a businessman consists of questioning the meaning of life and closing in on a dangerous business venture in the midst of WWII.

A mid-career academic at a New England college confronts a plagiarizing frat boy and unearths her own troubled past as a graduate student navigating a male-dominated field in the process.

A depressed, middle-aged San Francisco writer gives his artificially intelligent alter ego permission to assume his personality in public, resulting in an unexpected boom for the washed-up man.

A nurse finds that she cannot shake her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality after her daughter comes out as a lesbian. After she attends to a patient who is dying of AIDS, she comes to the realization that her homophobia contradicts her role as caregiver and mother.

A baseball team manager hires his quiet next-door neighbor to install a public address system in the ballpark, but when the neighbor shows a talent for making the announcements himself, he begins to abuse the sound system.

In modern day NYC, an unmarried, fifty-something-year-old lawyer takes a year off work to contemplate her fate and plunges into an obsession with the life of the 19th century writer George Eliot—and with recreating Eliot's lifelong love affair.