Plays

Saying Kaddish With My Sister

Saying Kaddish With My Sister was born in the aftermath of my mother's
death in March 2001. My sister and I agreed to say Kaddish, the Jewish
prayer for the dead, for her every week for a year, and we managed it,
even cross-country and long-distance. I found our ritual, and the efforts
we had to make in order to keep it, very comforting. I wondered how
people who did not get along with their sisters, and who did not have
the comfort of this kind of ritual, would fare when a parent died.

Photo: Bob Fitch

While we were doing all this, the ongoing Intifada in Israel intensified its
violence, and then September 11th happened. The world has seemed to
be engulfed in violence more than ever these past few years. I found I
had too many things to say about grief and judgment, death and rebirth
and family, to express in a poem. At the same time, it was all still too raw
to put into an essay. I needed the mask of metaphor, and the distance
offered by fictional characters.

Some friends and I formed a playwriting group. Every week we brought in scenes and read
them to each other. Carla Zilbersmith, a singer, writer, and actor, worked on her one-woman show,
The Wedding Singer (Go see it. It is wonderful!!) Writer and performer Lisa Klein wrote a poignantly funny tale
about grown-up love among exiles, and musician and writer Kaila Flexer wrote about motherhood, marriage,
traveling in Italy, music, food, and cats. David Ford was our playwriting teacher for ten weeks, and after that we
were on our own.

By sheer coincidence, the group began meeting the week of September 11th, 2001. One of the things I wanted
to write about was the way we do violence in our most intimate relationships. Terrorists are not just "out there,"
blowing themselves up, crashing planes into buildings. Within our own families and within our own selves, we
drop bombs and blow each other up.

My play eventually took on a life of its own, which was wonderful, liberating, and scary. The two sisters are not
autobiographical, that is, they are not my sister and me, nor does the play depict our relationship. They are an
amalgam of many sister-like relationships I have been part of, or witness to, and they are also two parts of
myself; the committed spiritual pilgrim, and the rebelliously irreverent commentator.

For years I had thought about the Cain and Abel story-it is one of the
basic stories our civilization is founded on. Everywhere around us the
story continues to be enacted today. Brother kills brother, cousin
against cousin, in every country and culture in the world, and
especially in the Middle East. I wondered what would it be like if Adam
and Eve had had two daughters? I knew Sam Shepherd and other
male playwrights had written many plays where one brother killed the
other. I wanted to raise the stakes high between my sisters, but find a
different resolution.

Six months later, I had a rough draft. Two years and many cups of black tea later, after editing and critiquing
help from Corey Fisher of A Traveling Jewish Theater, I had a finished play.

A Traveling Jewish Theater mounted a staged reading of the play May 12, 2004 at the Jewish Community
Center in San Francisco. The audience was diverse, but the play reached across its specific cultural references.
Everyone who has lived in a family has struggled with grief, rage, love, and forgiveness. I was overwhelmed by
the audience response to the play. One woman commented that it was the first piece she had ever seen that
treated the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with humor. It was and is my hope that the play could be used as a voice
for peace.

I hoped ATJT would pick it up for a full production for this coming
season, but their budget constrained them to only three productions this
year. Meanwhile, I have been sending the play out to as many theater
companies as I can think of. Please contact me if you have any
connections which might lead to a production. The play is written for five
actors, four women and one man, and a simple set. Copies of the script
are available upon request.

The photos on this page are scenes from the reading. The
actors are:

Deb Fink as Rachel, sister
Susan-Jane Harrison as Lydia, sister
Naomi Newman as Lorraine Horowitz, the mother
Louis Lansman as Max Horowitz, the father
Cathleen Riddley as God