Jewish Plays Project artistic director David Winitsky in conversation with local, national, and international Jewish theater-makers at Knosh & Knowledge
PITTSFIELD – On Friday, August 16 at 10:45 a.m., Knosh & Knowledge hosts panel discussion led by David Winitsky, founder and artistic director of the Jewish Plays Project, which will be presenting a weekend of new Jewish plays and voices at the Colonial Theatre on August 16-18. This conversation with local, national, and international Jewish theater-makers is on the theme of “Making Jewish Theater in the 21st Century.”
The Jewish Plays Project identifies, develops, and presents new works of theater through one-of-a-kind explorations of contemporary Jewish identity between audiences, artists, and patrons. Explore the state of contemporary Jewish drama and the unique challenges and needs of new, culturally specific creative works. Hear how today’s artists are celebrating Jewish traditions, breaking new ground, and forging partnerships across communities to provide audiences with the possibility of hope and healing through a Jewish lens.
Also appearing on the panel will be Annette Miller, who last summer starred in the Shakespeare & Company revival of Golda’s Balcony (which enjoyed a successful transfer to Boston). She has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in regional theaters, on film and TV and was acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as Best Actor of the Season in regional theater for her performance as Gladys Green in Waverly Gallery. Alexa Derman writes adventurous plays about gender, genre, systems, and speculation. Her plays include The Creature (Runner-up, Princess Grace/New Dramatists; Finalist, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), Psychopsychotic (Honorable Mention, Relentless Award), Girlish (Fresh Ink), and I’ll Be In My Hanukkah Palace (sold-out at Ars Nova ANT Fest). Alexandra Aron is the founder of the Remote Theater Project bringing theater artists from different cultural backgrounds into dialogue to create new work (remotetheaterproject.com). With playwright Glen Berger and Frank London of The Klezmatics, she developed A Night in the Old Marketplace based on Y.L. Peretz's play; it was presented locally at MASS MoCA and at the Yidstock festival at the Yiddish Book Center.
Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation Berkshires, Berkshire Theatre Group (BTG), Jewish Plays Project, and Plays2Gather in conjunction with the BTG's Festival of New Jewish Plays. The Colonial Theatre is at 111 South Street in Pittsfield.
For more info about the Jewish Plays Project visit jewishplaysproject.org.
About the Jewish Theater Festival
The Jewish Theater Festival will showcase new Jewish plays and voices in development and will engage the Berkshires audience in some fascinating dialogue about the current state of Jewish narrative art.
Thursday 8/15 at 7 p.m.: Festival welcome and Featured Reading of "The Last Yiddish Speaker" by Deborah Zoe Laufer, Winner of the 13th National Jewish Playwriting Contest featuring Joshua Malina, Ella Stiller, Mimi Lieber and Thom Niemann.
Friday 8/16 at 10:45 a.m.: Knosh and Knowledge: Making Jewish Theater in the 21st Century, Panel featuring actress Annette Miller, director Alexandara Aron and playwright Alexa Derman.
Friday 8/16 at 7 p.m.: Performance of OOF: One Foot, or Another, a series of 4 short plays by new Jewish voices. Late night musical performance follows.
Saturday, 8/17 at 7 p.m.: Featured presentation of Tony-winner Ari'el Stachel's "Out of Character," a personal tale of growing up as a Yemeni Jew in America from 9/11 to 10/7.
Plays2Gather is dedicated to performing diverse stories in homes and non-traditional venues. For more information: www.jewishplaysproject.org/oof
BJV Interview: Wayne Firestone and David Winitsky
In June, the BJV had a chance to catch up with Wayne and David. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
First question for you, Wayne – what is Plays2Gather all about?
Wayne Firestone: We're an informal network of playmakers who have operated out of homes, stages, and unusual places because we think that playmaking can involve everybody, not just the actors and directors and playwright. We try to promote intergenerational experiences that celebrate diversity and educate about the other, particularly now during a period of modern day plagues, polarization, and anxiety. And we partnered [for the first time] with the Jewish Plays Project, which has been bringing together communities, around traditional full-length plays, to bring those short form theater together with long form theater into one big festival. That is the intersection and the vision of coming together this summer with the Berkshire Theater Group.
So, David – tell me about Jewish Plays Project.
David Winitsky: Jewish Plays Project is a new play development company working to develop the pipeline of contemporary 21st century Jewish plays, working with writers to develop them, and advocating to get them onto the best stages. We've collected about 2600 plays from writers in 34 states and 10 countries so far. Each year, we whittle that down to a group of six finalist plays that we're working on with communities around the country. I'm very proud to say that of the 59 plays that we have actively developed, 39 of have gone on to production in New York, LA, and London, and around the country.
You’ll be discussing the state of Jewish theater in the 21st century. Have specifically Jewish stories ceased to be part of mainstream theater productions? Is it something that requires, an intervention by a group like yourself to get the ethnic story out?
DW: think what we've seen is that the story that we tell on stage has gotten very stuck in a mid-20th century moment. We tell a lot of Holocaust stories, a lot of World War II stories, a lot of immigration stories. Even just in the last couple of years, think about the things that the prominent Jewish play that have been just on Broadway. For example, Leopoldstadt, entirely a World War II, mid-20th century story. When you look around the country at the things that get produced in regional theaters, when people want to produce a Jewish plate, they are going to typically default to something that is older, either from the 20th century or even before that. The stories we're telling on stage need to catch up with where we are as a community. The Jewish story that's happening right now is much more focused on contemporary issues of social justice, like economic justice and racial justice, and the Middle East. Those are the things that we're living in our day to day lives.
WF: The other thing that's been stuck in the 20th century is the form. One of the reasons we've partnered and given a venue or a platform for younger and intergenerational types of audiences with a short form, a 10-minute play, the OOF Contest “On One Foot.” Younger generations may not sit for a three-hour play – they're not as interested in that form. We think as part of a festival, people of different ages, different backgrounds, Jewish and non-Jewish, will choose different formats and types of settings in which they can be exposed to Jewish ideas and Jewish culture that may not necessarily be offered on Broadway or even Off-Broadway these days.
Given your global perspective on what's going on in the Jewish theater world, what would you say are Jewish themes that are either shared or not shared among Jews in different parts of the Diaspora and in Israel? What are the different preoccupations of the playwrights?
DW: The question that I get asked the most is ‘Well, what really is a Jewish play?’ At some level, it’s like asking, ‘What is a Jew?’ We all have a lot of different interpretations of what this whole Jewish thing means. In a moment of great change in the world, people are being called back to these questions of moral and ethical and communal values to say, Hey, what is really important right now? How do we find our way through right now? That feels like something that people are really thinking about. I will say theater is not necessarily a rapid response art form. It takes the whole time for creators to process and figure out stories and the plays that they want to make. What I've been seeing over the last five years or so is really a deeper questioning going past an Ashkenazi, Northeast American POC. Ours is a much more diverse tapestry. How do we understand that – and how does it ultimately help us?
WF: There's no question that Jewish memory, as opposed to history, let's say, is actively bubbling in a lot of the plays. Wherever the playwrights are from, they're imagining a Jewish world that includes both the past, the present, and the future, and sometimes mixing that all together, which I find exciting. If you've seen one Jewish play, you've seen one Jewish play. Each one is like a fingerprint. They're very different. They reflect the identity of the playwright. They reflect the circumstance in which the playwright is writing in. The one thing they all have in common is conflict.
David and I were amazed that literally from the first conversation that we had with Kate Maguire and the team at BTG, there was interest, synergy, and a desire to do something that was beyond what they were already doing with Young Frankenstein. We were very clear, certainly since October 7, that our desire was not merely to entertain to maintain, but to elevate. That now is not the time to retreat, but to actually lift up the present and take the opportunity to do something that could help people heal, help people reflect, help people process what's happening in the world, not by having a seminar, but by doing the things that theater does well: comedy, tragedy, music, And you're going to see all of those elements.