In 2000, theater professor Paul Kuritz adapted a famous short story for a student to use for her performance thesis.

The story was Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), in which the narrator goes insane during the course of the extended confinement her husband has ordered to treat her nervous exhaustion.

Adapting the piece was straightforward, Kuritz says. "I just did it and that was it." After the performance, he sent the piece to a few publishers and to friends, and heard no more about it.

Until last year. Then he received a contract in the mail from Applause Theatre & Cinema Books — a publisher to which he hadn't submitted the script. This year, Applause included Kuritz's "Yellow Wallpaper" in The Best American Short Plays 2001–2002.

As a model for his adaptation, Kuritz looked to "The Belle of Amherst," Julie Harris' 1976 stage portrayal of poet Emily Dickinson. "That was pretty much the style I wanted," he explains: "telling the story directly to the audience."

"What interests me about the story now is that I see two people who love each other doing what each thinks is best, and the result is tragedy," he says.

Kuritz is in good company in the anthology, sharing its pages with writers including Christopher Durang, Beth Henley and Joyce Carol Oates. And just how he got there may forever remain a mystery.

"Kathleen, my wife, keeps saying, 'Aren’t you interested in finding out how they got it?" He's not. "It's just a random blessing of God falling out of the sky."