AJT's Regranting Program

Michelle Kholos Brooks

Room 2014

On Valentine’s Day 2018, a nineteen-year-old boy walked into his former high school with an assault rifle—the bullets were etched with swastikas. He killed fourteen students, three teachers and seventeen more. Some of the worst damage was done when he shot, seemingly indiscriminately, into a Holocaust History class. Room 1214 is based on interviews with Ivy Shamis, the teacher who taught that class on that fateful day. The play imagines what would happen if she had one more chance to teach in that classroom and her students got a final say. It begs the question, “Can a history teacher rewrite history?”

Jennie Fahn

BRIS AMISS! THE MUSICAL

BRIS AMISS! THE MUSICAL is a full-length murder-mystery musical farce that blends comedy, tradition, and climate change awareness. Set against the backdrop of a celebration-gone-awry, traditional customs collide with the challenges of our modern world. Through humor and wit, our heroes fall in love over the timeless value of repairing the world (tikkun olam), inspiring audiences to reflect on their responsibility toward future generations (l’dor vador), while wondering whodunnit… and who’s going to eat all these bagels?

Lisa Kenner Grissom

VILNA: A RESISTANCE STORY 

VILNA: A RESISTANCE STORY is an exciting new musical about the inspirational Holocaust story you haven't heard—the story of the heroic Jewish resistance fighters from the Vilna ghetto. This musical features characters based on the young artists of the bohemian city of Vilna, who form a secret brigade in the ghetto and find creative ways to resist. Led by a rebellious teenage girl and a young poet, the partisans narrowly escape the Nazis to the forest, where they take up arms and reclaim their beloved city. Through the power of music, their revolutionary spirit lives on. With a vibrant klezmer influenced pop score by composer/lyricist Kevin Cloud and a book by Lisa Kenner Grissom, VILNA: A RESISTANCE STORY is inspired by real life Jewish heroes Vitka Kempner, Abba Kovner, Hirsh Glick, Avram Sutzkever and others. This is a story that needs to be told—and heard!

Michele Miller

A FINAL TOAST

Jana Robbins, the well-known Broadway actress and producer, plays a powerful Jewish mother with memory problems in the world premier of "A Final Toast" by Michele A Miller, May 10 to 26 at Chain Theatre, 312 West 36th Street. The play, also  featuring Jolie Curtsinger, Joy Franz and Sachi Parker with direction by Kathy Curtiss, follows two senior women who are helped by their adult daughters to clear out their homes before moving to a Senior Living Center, where they must separate true memories from beliefs and come to terms with their relationships. Characters in the play also confront their choices to assimilate or celebrate their Jewish identity, to look the other way in response to hate or embrace a better future based on understanding and love.

Deborah Baer Mozes

THE SCRIBE

The Scribe, written and performed by Jesse Bernstein, translated from English to Hebrew. The project is to translate The Scribe into Hebrew in order to produce this work in Israel. Eventually, the work will be produced as private reading for a select audience of Israeli theatre and cultural arts colleagues. The reading will be held at the Cameri Theatre or Bar Ilan University. The Scribe by Jesse Bernstein is an anachronistic, witty, thought-provoking work. In ancient Jerusalem, under the watchful eyes of Ezra and Nehemiah, a reluctant Scribe races to codify the Torah and save his people. But before reconciling the multiple and conflicting source texts into one coherent story, the Scribe must navigate his doubt, his people’s history, and his longing for the good ole days of exile in Babylon. It’s the (maybe) true story of how “in the beginning” really began.

Noam Shapiro

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour comes to life in a new interpretation set in a contemporary midrasha, or “women’s seminary” for Jewish texts. After working for years to build a school for girls, Marta and Keren’s lives are thrown into chaos when Myriam, a rebellious student, spreads a rumor that these respected teachers are lovers. A collaboration between director Noam Shapiro and costume designer Lia Wallfish, this workshop will delve into the gender and social dynamics of contemporary Orthodox Jewish spaces and explore Lillian Hellman’s identity as a Jewish-American playwright.

Laura Sheppard

ON THE ROAD TO ZION 

Yiddish Theatre Ensemble’s Yiddish Play Reading Series- On the Road to Zion by Sholem Asch. In 1905, Sholem Asch debuted his first full-length play, a symbolist drama about the diverse and varying viewpoints about the future of Jewish life at the turn of the twentieth century in Poland. In it, a family gathers from across Europe to say goodbye to their octogenarian grandparents, who are moving to Palestine to live out their final years. The family includes the traditionally religious, capitalists, Germanophiles, a Zionist, a Socialist Democrat, a secular Yiddishist, a Polish nationalist, and an artist in search of himself— and everyone has a different idea about their homeland, and the future of Jewish life and identity.

Catherine Weingarten

BAGELS ARE HOT

"Bagels are Hot" is a Jewish romcom about a woman in her 30s struggling to find love. She tries many things- Jewish social events, a matchmaker, online dating and also bagels(they're very supportive!) Our heroine Rebecca relies on her grandma and family to support her on her journey to love and finally starts to get closer when she takes a sexy bagel making class and meets an available man.

Ali Viterbi

WHO IS EVIL, WHO'S A HERO?

In 1940’s Budapest, two important Jewish historical figures rose to prominence. One was Hannah Senesh, a poet and member of the Jewish Parachutists of Mandate Palestine. At 23, she was captured by the Germans and killed. The second was Rudolf Kastner, a political fixer who helped 1,684 Jews escape during the Holocaust.
Yet of the two, Senesh is the only to enter the Jewish people’s pantheon of heroes. While she became known as a modern Joan of Arc, Kastner was convicted of having “sold his soul to the devil.” While Senesh was buried among the heroes at Mount Hertzl, Kastner was assassinated by his fellow countrymen.
History remembers Kastner as a villain, while it lauds Senesh as one of its greatest heroes. But really: who is evil, who’s a hero?
So asks the opening lyric of a new musical which tells the intersecting stories of Kastner and Senesh. With music & lyrics by Toby Singer and book & lyrics by Ali Viterbi, this musical tells an important story about guilt, accountability, and the impossible choices of war in a time of increasing antisemitism.

Hank Kimmel

May God Bless Her

A new 75-minute one-act play written by Hank Kimmel, directed by Mira Hirsch. 
Given the power of attorney, 20-year-old Hannah must decide whether to keep her ailing mother alive, as the three other characters (her distraught father, rookie hospital chaplain, and young doctor) pull her in differing ways.  The third part of a trilogy of short plays (The Chosen People) revolving around the concept of faith and fate.

 

Edward Einhorn’s Untitled Theater Company No. 61

The Shylock and the Shakespeareans

An original dark comedy by Edward Einhorn taking The Merchant of Venice and reimagining it to tackle questions of antisemitism and racism. The Shylock is a Jewish man named Jacob, living in Venice and caught in a society where the perception of him as a money-grubber trumps reality. The Shakespeareans are a band of white supremacists, bumbling and comic yet lethally dangerous. The play also includes Black and Asian characters (and a Black Jewish character) to place antisemitism in a world of overlapping discrimination, where hatred towards one minority inevitably impacts another.

Harrison Bryan

A Hanukkah Carol, or GELT TRIP! The Musical 

It's not just “A Christmas Carol for Jews” — it’s an irreverent and heartfelt musical comedy that celebrates being the best version of oneself in pursuit of making the world a kinder place. World Premiering in December 2023! For updates, tickets, and more: HarrisonBryan.com

Deborah Yarchun

And You Shall Be A Blessing

A play with music that focuses on renowned Jewish singer/songwriter Debbie Friedman (1951-2011) — whom the New York Times called the Joan Baez of Jewish music — and her fight for acceptance as a female spiritual leader, as well as her struggle for self-acceptance. And You Shall Be A Blessing unfolds through a concert, rituals, and intimate scenes that explore Debbie’s life including her struggles with depression, her abusive upbringing, and her closeted sexuality. The play follows Debbie through her years-long, sometimes public, usually private, journey to carve out space for herself as a queer, feminist, proudly Jewish woman who didn’t fit within traditional Jewish spiritual circles.

Mindy Pfeffer

How To Live

Mindy Pfeffer will travel to Krakow, Poland, in July 2023 to do a reading of her new play HOW TO LIVE at the Jewish Culture Festival, with American and Polish actors. Fact and fiction intertwine in this story of survival, forgiveness, and learning from the past to move into the future. Based on the life of Maria Pfeffer Orwid, a Jewish Polish psychiatrist who lived from 1930-2009.

Dylan Seders Hoffman

Fear And Misery Of The Third Reich

GLYK, NYC's newest Yiddish theatre, plans to produce Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in an all-new Yiddish translation by collective members Dylan Seders Hoffman (2nd Year AJT Theatremacher) and Corbin Allardice (PhD Student in Jewish Language and Literature, Johns Hopkins University) in 2024. This will be the first public staging of the first translated playlet, “The Jewish Wife,” in a workshop production directed by Daria Kerschenbaum (DGSD '27) and starring Dylan Seders Hoffman. The playlet will be presented as part of an encore production of GLYK’s "Ekhte balebustes / Real Housewives of the Yiddish Stage" in August 2023.

Marc Frost

My Uncle Sam

Based on a true story, Theater Unspeakable's founder Marc Frost uncovers the truth about his own relative Sam Barton in the show "My Uncle Sam". Born in Russia in 1891, Sami Silverstein joined a wave of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who came to America seeking a better life. Growing up in Brooklyn, he took an interest in mechanics and became a test pilot during the early days of aviation. After a near-death experience, he returned to his love of building bicycles which eventually landed him on a vaudeville stage as Sam Barton of the Barton Bros. act. Marriage, family and an international career all come careening towards a spectacular yet tragic ending as he dies backstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York on the eve of World War II.

Joshua Daniel Hershfield

RISE

A rock musical, written and composed by former AJT theatremacher Joshua Daniel Hershfield, about a group of Jewish women resistance fighters during the Holocaust who organize and wage an uprising against the Nazi regime. The show is based on real events and focuses on the Kashariyot, or couriers, Jewish women who disguised themselves as Aryan, snuck in and out of the ghettos, traveled through Nazi territory, and smuggled food, messages, and weapons to the underground resistance. RISE won the Israeli Bela Zarhi Prize, was a Eugene O’Neill NMTC finalist, was showcased by the Alliance for Jewish Theatre, and premiered last year at Rochester Center Stage where Broadway World called it “a daring and important new musical” with a “superb score.” More info can be found at https://www.risetherockmusical.com/

A.R. Cohen

Next Year In Kraków!

A.R. is going to Poland to do research for a new play ("Next Year in Kraków!”) that will follow an American Jew who decides to return to Poland and reestablish her family shtetl - kind of like a reverse "Fiddler on the Roof.” Her research and play grapple with historical trauma head-on and explore modern-day Polish remembrance politics, how antisemitism has changed over time, Polish and Jewish guilt, Zionism, and the complexities of “returning.” To learn more and to support her project, visit: gofundme.com/f/next-year-in-krakow
 

Molly Heller

The Dybbuk

This musical piece is a queer, feminist re-imagining of S. Ansky's The Dybbuk: or Between Two Worlds exploring the haunting mysticism surrounding the complexity of non-male bodies, voices, and spirits as confined by a patriarchal tradition of hegemonic authority. The piece also explores the intersection of queerness and Judaism. The musical blends contemporary, feminist indie pop-rock with traditional klezmer music.

Shara Feit

TBA