From well-known playwrights and plays to ones less familiar but no less compelling, the 2013-14 New Jewish Theatre season promises to illuminate the Jewish experience through entertaining, challenging and provocative productions.

Along with the new season comes new opportunities — NJT will offer subscribers complete flexibility in date selection and a single price regardless of which night tickets are for. Subscriptions for JCC members are $155 for the five-show season and $165 for non-members. Early subscriptions are available now by calling the NJT box office at 314-442-3283.

The new season opens Oct. 3 – 20 with Neil Simon’s take on the short stories of Anton Chekhov, “The Good Doctor,” directed by NJT Artistic Associate Bobby Miller. Simon adapted nearly a dozen of Chekhov’s short stories written in the late 1800s into a series of vignettes. He weaves them into a cohesive whole filled with his trademark humor and Chekhov poignancy as many depict long suffering characters and the absurd humor underlying even the most tragic of circumstances.

In December, NJT brings David Schechter’s one-woman play “Hannah Senesh” to the stage. A young Hungarian woman with a profound sense of Zionism, Senesh immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1939. As the war heated up and Senesh learned of the plight of European Jews, she joined the Palmach and with a British unit of paramilitary fighters, parachuted into Europe behind enemy lines with a mission to save Hungarian Jews. Within hours of crossing the Hungarian border, she was arrested and would be tortured, tried and ultimately executed in November 1944. “Hannah Senesh” will run Dec. 5 – 22.

Mathew Lopez’s new drama “The Whipping Man,” which opened in New York in 2011, comes to NJT Jan. 30 – Feb. 16. Set in Richmond at the end of the Civil War and just before Passover, the holiday of freedom, the play centers on a trio of Jewish men, two of whom were once the property of the third. When a Jewish Confederate soldier returns from the battlefield to find his family home in ruins, he finds only two former slaves whom the family raised as Jews. As the three men reunite to celebrate a makeshift seder, the age-old question, “why is this night different from all other nights” takes on new meaning.

From March 20 – Apr. 6 the 1968 Arthur Miller classic, “The Price” will be featured. This tale of family dynamics unfolds as two estranged brothers meet in the attic of a brownstone after their father’s death to dispose of all of the old family furniture before the building is torn down. Laid bare are all of the old conflicts, jealousies and corrosive anger between the two as questions of the price not only of the furniture but of one’s decisions is deliberated.

The season closes with a play currently playing in New York, “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” directed by NJT Artistic Associate Edward Coffield. This comedy features five actors who for 80 minutes serve Borscht Belt-flavored gags with all the trimmings. The play will run from May 8 – June 1.

All performances are in the Marvin & Harlene Wool Studio Theatre of the JCC’s Staenberg Family Complex, 2 Millstone Campus Drive. Single tickets will go on sale in August.