Allan Appel Photo
Actor Mitch Greenberg as the rabbi in Jonathan Caren’s Let Me Go.
The man with the maroon vest seems like an average, pleasant middle-aged guy. Then his cell phone goes off. The ring tone is the catchy “I have a little dreidel” Hanukkah tune.
“Is he in pain?” comes the question to his telephonic interlocutor.
A heartfelt conversation ensues about terminal illness, pain, and end of life care. It turns out the speaker is a rabbi. But he’s not talking to a suffering congregant. He’s talking to his wife — about the fate of their elderly cat Sam, who soon has to be put down.
That will figure with a big shmear of irony into a Yom Kippur sermon on the theme of “letting go” that the rabbi delivers later in Jonathan Caren’s play.
Welcome to the finals of the first annual New Haven “Jewish Playwriting Contest.” It drew 40 people to the 41 Broadway black box theater space behind Toad’s on Sunday evening.
The audience served not only as viewers but as deciders by popular vote delivered through texting. They picked a winner out of three finalists presented Sunday night.
Those finalists were previously culled out of 167 plays submitted from around the country.
Caren‘s Let Me Go did not prevail. The winner, Estelle Singerman by David Rush, also deals with death and the guilt of those who live on. The third play in the competition was The Karpovsky Variations by Adam Kraar.
Please Turn ON Your Cell Phones
While most theater experiences require you to turn off your phones, the Jews do it differently.
Sunday night Winitsky asked the audience to keep them on and text their predilections about the plays to a number provided, with the results appearing directly on the screen that back-dropped the actors.
How? Why, of course, exactly the way you would text how you like your bagel.
The audience got it, and a good part of the fun was the texting, not only taking in the texts of the plays as presented by talented actors in a staged reading format.
A Broader Vision Quest
All three of the playwrights featured Sunday night are widely produced; the director and founder of the Jewish Plays Project, David Winitsky (pictured), said it was a tough call. The three finalists had survived a screening by theater pros in New York, where his project is based, with the ten finalists sent to the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven for a further culling.
Why a selection by popular vote? Winitsky, whose directorial experience includes working on Broadway shows like Rent and Chicago, founded his group two years ago as a think tank to survey Jewish theater-goers and determine what’s not being met by current stage offerings.
Winitsky has on his mind issues like social justice, what it means to wear your Jewish hat in the globalized, diverse modern era. He said that since the demise of the Jewish Repertory Theater, the last Jewish-themed theater in New York a decade ago, “there no place for a Jewish context [for plays] even for the [many] Jewish folks in the theater.”
Winitsky has two young children approaching bar mitzvah age — another impetus to explore these issues anew.
He said he adores Old Jews Telling Jokes, Jewtopia and other such broad, slapstick, and sterotypical takes on Jewish stuff and styles. But, he said, “there’s just much more out there.”
To find it he established the Jewish Plays Project, soliciting plays that “grapple with the intersection of Jewish ethics and your global life.” He ruled out Yiddish content because no one in his circle knows the language. And he ruled out dealing with the Holocaust.
Bite-Sized Bits
Actors William Boland and Margaret Ladd discuss whether two pillows and a bungee cord might be a good approach to end-of-life care for her beloved mom in Let Me Go.
A concern for this theater-goer Sunday evening was not so much the popular selection of screened plays, nor the staged reading in which the plays were presented, but the choice to show only brief 20-minute snippets of each, based on which judgment was offered.
Clearly not all three plays could have been presented in full. Still.
“It’s difficult. I admit the competition format is flawed, but we do everything we can [like provide a synopsis of each play] to give it a fair shake,” Winitsky
Yale Jewish Chaplain and Jewish arts maven Jim Ponet emailed in a personal observation late Sunday night:
“The third of the three shows, Estelle Singerman,won. I voted for The Karpovsky Variations, which I thought had a greater poetic depth and subtlety than the other two. Let Me Go and Estelle Singerman are both focused on death-related issues and survivor guilt. Karpovsky, on the other hand, is driven by a sense of absence and yearning in the here and now, the search for a song that might make life livable. Interesting that the audience was taken with wild visions of the afterlife and the supernatural dished out in a cartoonish ladel.”
In June Estelle Singerman will have a full workshop production at the 14th Street Y in New York, where Winitsky said he hopes angels and investors will fall in love with the piece and pick it up for a larger audience.