My one-act play, “Leaving Cremona,” opens this week at the Analogio International Festival 2022!
Jozef (Nikos Vatikiotis) and Helena (Filippa Koutoupa), survivors of the holocaust and left with no home, struggle to figure out how to leave the displaced persons camp in Cremona in order to start a new life. Directed by Konstantina Nikolaidi. Translated by Smaro Kotsia.
A PRIOI Theatrical Productions: www.a-priori.gr
1. Director Konstantina Nikolaidi - founder of A PRIORI Theatrical Productions - makes it easy to collaborate from across the ocean by email! Our shared passion for doing theater permeates all and any boundaries. I’m also so fortunate that Konstantina is fluent in English.
2. Konstantina asked for my script interpretation. This is the first time I’ve been asked this question. It makes me wonder whether a playwright’s script interpretation is common practice in some countries. I haven’t come across it in the US. I’m reluctant to give my interpretation because I like complete freedom to be given to the director, actors, and designers to instill their interpretations - this is the phase where I let go the script and that the collaboration with other theater artists begins. So, instead, I provided Konstantina with my motivation for writing this play:
I can say what inspired me to write this play. I know a wonderful woman who has a very kind husband and three great daughters. When we met, her parents had already passed away. Her father, in particular, was very old when he had her and her brother. One year we had a holocaust memorial in Pittsburgh and she asked me to go with her. She said, "It suddenly occurred to me that my father had a whole family before he had us. His first family perished in the holocaust." She had never given it much thought. Her comment struck me: How did her father create a whole new family and spare them from the pain of his past? How did he manage to raise them as if they were his "only" family? In other words, my friend's family is so kind, funny, and well-adjusted that I would have never known her father had a family before this one. Many people I know who are children of holocaust survivors live with their parents' pain & anxiety and idiosyncracies.
I modeled Jozef and Helena as a couple who survived trauma and want to give a "healthy" family life to their children. I explored through them how they negotiated such a feat.
3. Directors interpret symbolism in the script - be it the characters’ names or objects in stories told within the story of the script. As a playwright, I need to keep the symbolism clear.
Filippa Koutoupa (Helena) and Nikos Vatikiotis (Jozef) star in “Leaving Cremona” at the Analogio International Festival 2022 in Athens, Greece.
4. Directors piece together characters’ motivations with various actions that happen in the play like a puzzle, so as a playwright I’ve got to keep checking back on what I wrote to ensure I keep the motivations clear.
5. Resources! While directors do their own research to understand the background and context of the script, it helps if I also provide some key resources I’ve used in my research for the play. I provide a page of props. I’ve decided now to also provide a page of a few key resources.
#analogio2022 #crossingborders #kambanellis #greekdrama
A PRIORI Theatrical Productions: www.a-priori.gr
I’m thrilled that my one-act play, “Leaving Cremona,” is among the plays being produced this week at the Analogio International Festival 2022 in Athen, Greece! It’s included in a spectacular lineup of plays addressing the theme of Crossing Borders.
Text: Judy Meiksin
Translation: Smaro Kotsia
Direction: Konstantina Nikolaidou
Performers: Nikos Vatikiotis, Philippa Koutoupa
At the end of last year, I made a commitment to say “Yes” to every theater opportunity I saw in 2020. Then COVID-19 hit, and anything we say “yes” to has to be done in a new way to ensure social distancing. One of the results of this commitment was the opp to participate in Pittsburgh’s City Theatre’s collaboration with the regional Dramatist Guild for the program, “In Their Own Voices.” Because of COVID-19, we have to video-record our reading. So, I found myself practicing the script reading as well as doing a number of “takes” to get the angle of the camera, the lighting, and the background decent!
The most difficult part with the video was angling the camera away from the reflection in my eyeglasses. I even tried to make the text on my laptop large enough to read without glasses.
With the help of my wonderful fiancee, we pulled this off!
I’m grateful & honored to be a part of “In Their Own Voices”:
I changed the title of Home Economics to A street sign in Jerusalem.
While I thought a major theme in the play was about making a home, during revision after the Zoom reading, I realized the script was about not forgetting Gabriel - not forgetting family. Naming a street after someone is certainly a sign about not forgetting the person - in this case, my aunt Mali Spighel who founded AKIM.
With the title Home Economics, I thought I was very clever. That’s the name of a course in school where women learned about cooking and being a homemaker in the old days whereas Doda Mali went to medical school - the only woman in the class - and “economics” meant she constructed her tiny living space into a home & physician’s office with her husband.
"Economics” also meant navigating the move from a hostile country to a new home (Nazi Germany to pre-State Israel), and then finding the means to establish a home for cognitively challenged adults (AKIM).
MALI SPIGHEL
Seven thousand keys for 7000 individuals to live with dignity. This is home economics. If someone were to ask Gabriel why was AKIM founded, he would say, “Because of me.”
The key to the play, however, is “don’t forget”:
MALI SPIGHEL
I instruct my family to not forget Gabi when I’m gone. Sie lieb zum Gabriel. Sie relt zum Gabriel. Be loving to Gabriel. Be nice to Gabriel.
With the title A street sign in Jerusalem we have an object, a place, and curiosity. What sign? Why is it important? What’s the story?
I learned from playwright William F. Mayfield that the title of a play should tell what it’s about, like his play, Harriet Tubman Loved Somebody. With the title, I couldn’t wait to see the production. I met Mr. Mayfield only a few times at a playwrights gathering at Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company. At one of these gatherings, he talked about how to title a play. It’s the only conversation I remember from that day. He must’ve been an incredible mentor. He passed away very young, 62, in 2012.
Thank you, Mr. Mayfield.
Playwright Judy Meiksin standing beneath the street sign in Jerusalem named after Malka (Mali) Spighel. January 30, 2018.
The first script reading we set up on video call during the covid-19 quarantine was Home Economics, a biographical play about my great aunt Mali Spighel who founded AKIM in Jerusalem, an independent-living organization for intellectually-challenged adults. In one part of the play, Aunt Mali’s family is scattered, running away from Nazi Germany. This scene takes a special meaning during this time of “sheltering-in-place” – whether we’re miles away or just in the next block, we’re unable to get together with family.
Unlike Aunt Mali’s time, though, we have video calls on zoom, What’s App, Skype, fb….
Even so, when deaths from the virus began climbing in China, then Italy, and theaters were shutting down in London & nyc to promote social distancing, I found myself calling my daughter several times a day. She lives in the UK.
More take-aways from the script reading:
1. How does the history connect with Mali’s desire that her family remember her son Gabriel when she’s gone?
2. What segues from the present to the past will make the transitions important to the audience?
3. What is the purpose of the interaction between Gabriel and his cousin?
4. What do I want the audience to know when they leave the play?
Kudos to Kim El – playwright | actor | director – for taking the lead with these questions after the reading.
Great THANK YOU’s go to Kim El and Cheryl El-Walker for splitting the roles of Mali Spighel and Ilana, to Jonathan Berry for reading Gabriel, Nik Nemec for reading Cousin, and playwright Faye Miller for reading Stage Manager.
