"'The Last Yiddish Speaker': Who They'll Come For First"

by Julia M. Klein 

[Deborah Laufer’s latest play, The Last Yiddish Speaker, is about anti-Semitism (I’ll add more detail on this shortly), and Julia M. Klein’s article from the section called “On The Scene” of American Theatre magazine, was posted on AT’s website (AMERICAN THEATRE | ‘The Last Yiddish Speaker’: Who They’ll Come for First) on 9 April 2024, six months after the terrorist assault by Hamas on Israel last 7 October and the start of the consequent war in Gaza.

[But, as you read Klein's article, you’ll learn that the play, written before last year’s Hamas attack, reaches back not just to the rise of anti-Semitism and Christian Nationalism in the United States in recent months and years—in April 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic acts increased 140% in 2023 over the previous year—but to 6 January 2011, and even 11 September 2001.

[According to a synopsis of the play published on playbill.com, The Last Yiddish Speaker’s tells this story:

In the years following a successful January 6th insurrection, a white supremacist regime has come into power.  Paul and his teenage daughter, Sarah, live under the radar in a small town upstate as Christian-passing, despite being Jews who fled New York City.  When an ancient[,] Yiddish-speaking woman arrives on their doorstep, Paul and Sarah are forced to decide between fleeing again or fighting for their faith, their heritage and their identity.

[Deborah Zoe Laufer grew up in Liberty, New York, a town of a little over 10,000 inhabitants in Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountains.  (She currently lives in Mount Kisco, New York, a town of about 11,000 in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City about 43 miles north of the city.) 

[She has described her childhood as living in a small town, growing up in the woods, and raising animals.  She had an early interest in theater, and a lifelong goal to be an actress and a stand-up comic.  She studied acting at the State University of New York at Purchase.  

[Laufer worked as an actress along with other subsistence jobs.  She was a member of the Polaris North Theatre Company in New York City, an actors’ cooperative, when she became pregnant with her first son.  During the pregnancy, she wrote her first play, Miniatures, and performed in it at Polaris North.  It was produced at a few small theaters after that, including the Wedge at the Hangar Theater in Ithaca, New York (2002).

[She submitted the play to the Missoula Colony writer’s workshop in Montana, where it drew the attention of playwright Marsha Norman.  Norman invited her to study playwriting at the Juilliard School, where Norman taught.  Laufer accepted the invitation and graduated from Juilliard in 2000.

[Laufer’s plays have been produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Cleveland Playhouse, Geva, The Humana Festival, Everyman, Primary Stages, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and hundreds of other theaters around the world.  In addition to full-length straight plays, she’s written dozens of short plays, and two musicals, Window Treatment, and By Any Other Name, written with composer Daniel Green.

[Besides Juilliard, Laufer’s an alumna of the BMI Lehman Engel Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop, and she’s a Dramatists Guild Council member.  She’s also a recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, the Lilly Award, the ATCA Steinberg citation, and grants and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Edgerton Foundation, the National New Play Network, and the Lincoln Center Foundation. 

[Her work has been developed by the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Theatre Lab, PlayPenn, the Cherry Lane Alternative, the Missoula Colony, LOCAL Theatre, Asolo Rep, the Baltic Playwrights Conference, and more. Her plays are published or recorded by Concord/Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, Playscripts, LA Theatreworks, and Premieres.]

Deborah Zoe Laufer’s new play, now kicking off its rolling world premiere at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre, imagines an eerily plausible fascist future.

When Seth Rozin, founding artistic director of Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company, first read Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Last Yiddish Speaker about a year ago, “I immediately thought it was important,” he recalled recently. “It was timely, a really solid play that has a great story with characters that anyone could care about, very relatable, but also with some unique magic.”

Timely indeed: The drama is set in a near-future dystopian Christian Nationalist America in which the coup of Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded, and ethnic, ideological, and religious conformity is enforced at gunpoint. Its characters are a Jewish father and daughter passing as Christian; the daughter’s initially unsuspecting boyfriend; and a mysterious older woman who embodies a millennium of Jewish history and tradition.

World events have since given the play’s conflicts an even sharper edge. With the war in Gaza, increasing public expressions of antisemitism, and the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency, The Last Yiddish Speaker is “much more than timely, but frankly urgent,” said Rozin, who also directs. “It’s a vital play, a necessary play, to remind us of the stakes when outside events poke at our biases and push people into a corner.”

A Lucille Lortel Theatre commission and a finalist in the Jewish Plays Project, The Last Yiddish [Speaker]’s InterAct bow (March 29-April 21 [2024]) is the first in a National New Play Network rolling world premiere. Additional productions are planned at Oregon Contemporary Theatre in Eugene (Oct. 23-Nov. 10) and Theatre Lab at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton (Oct. 23-Nov. 17), where Laufer herself will direct.

[According to its website (https://jewishplaysproject.org/), “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.”  Furthermore, the site states that “The Jewish Playwriting Contest seeks to discover, highlight, and nurture contemporary Jewish drama by engaging with artistic and Jewish communities throughout the English-speaking world.”

[Founded in 1998, the National New Play Network (https://nnpn.org/) is an “alliance of nonprofit theaters that champions the development, production, and continued life of new plays.”  The Rolling World Premiere is NNPN’s program for developing and producing new plays across the country.  Each RWP supports three or more theaters that choose to mount the same new play within a 12-month period, allowing the playwright to develop a new work with multiple creative teams in multiple communities.]

“I like to write about what it’s like to live in the time we’re in, and the time we’re in is shifting so quickly,” said Laufer, who lives in Mount Kis[c]o, N.Y. “I keep saying history rewrites my plays faster than I can.”

The Last Yiddish Speaker takes place in the fictional upstate New York town of Granville in 2029, in a world where Jews, gays, and others deemed outsiders are banished or killed, dissent is punished, and a recent edict forbids women from attending college. A frustrated Sarah, now known as Mary, and her more circumspect father, Paul, are at loggerheads about how to survive without losing themselves in the process.

The play’s surveillance state calls to mind George Orwell’s 1984 [1949], as well as the totalitarian regimes Orwell both satirized and prefigured. Laufer’s counterfactual premise also evokes Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here [1935] and two other novels later adapted for television: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America [novel, 2004; HBO miniseries, 16 March-20 April 2020], in which the isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and ushers in fascism, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle [novel, 1962; Amazon Prime Video streaming series, 2015-19], which imagines an America conquered by the Axis powers of World War II.

Laufer’s 90-minute one-act is among a spate of recent dramas and musicals dealing with antisemitism and the varieties of Jewish response, some epic in scale. Broadway has featured Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical Leopoldstadt [on Broadway, 2 October 2022-2 July 2023; 2023 Best Play Tony and 2023 Outstanding Play Drama Desk Award], Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic [9 January-3 March 2024], and Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s Harmony: A New Musical [13 November 2023-4 February 2024], a tribute to the 1920s and ’30s German sextet the Comedian Harmonists.

Laufer mentions another similarly themed play, The Ally, by Itamar Moses [b. 1977; playwright, author, producer, and television writer], who happens to be a member of one of her three writing groups. Premiered this winter by New York’s Public Theater [27 February-7 April 2024], The Ally puts a progressive Jewish professor in the crosshairs of disputation about the Middle East.

But Laufer (whose plays include End Days [premièred at Florida Stage (West Palm Beach), 2007], Leveling Up [premièred at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, 2013], and Informed Consent [premièred at Geva Theatre (Rochester, New York), 2014]) said that the initial spark for The Last Yiddish Speaker wasn’t political at all: It was a podcast she heard about a Hawaiian bird on the verge of extinction.

“I was so moved by being the last one who speaks your language, or being the last of your species,” Laufer said. As with stories of “people being lost in space, it’s the loneliest feeling in the world.”

Laufer said her plays tend to emerge “from four or five things that I’ve been obsessing about.” In the case of The Last Yiddish Speaker, which she called “probably the least hopeful” of her works, those obsessions did include some political concerns, namely rising antisemitism and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Last Yiddish Speaker is also a response to her first professional production, The Last Schwartz [premièred at Florida Stage, 2002], about the Jewish “fear of assimilation and how it tears families apart.   

“There is a criticism of Jews in the heart of that play,” said Laufer, who was raised in rural upstate New York “with a certain paranoia” about being Jewish. “I’ve evolved in the last 20 years. I feel more protective of my Judaism.”

Trained as an actor at SUNY [State University of New York] Purchase, Laufer also has worked as a standup comedian and a director. At a conference in Missoula, Mont. [the Missoula Colony writers; workshop of the Montana Repertory Theatre], Marsha Norman [b. 1947; playwright, screenwriter, and novelist] read a play Laufer submitted [Miniatures] and told her, “You know, you’re a playwright.” On her invitation, Laufer enrolled at the Juilliard School, where Norman headed the playwriting program. “It was the most amazing thing,” Laufer said, “and it changed my life.”

Laufer’s most successful play to date, End Days, inspired in part by 9/11, is a comic family drama featuring a collision between science and religion, as incarnated by the physicist Stephen Hawking [1942-2018; English; director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge] and Jesus. It has received about 90 productions, she said.

In an earlier version of The Last Yiddish Speaker, the eponymous character of Aunt Chava was a more realistic figure—a woman in her 90s. A writer colleague told Laufer, “There’s something missing—it’s not a Deborah Laufer play.” Now Chava is 1,000 years old, a magical element that, to Laufer, makes the show “reverberate in a much larger way.” InterAct’s Chava is portrayed by Stephanie Satie, who coincidentally played Tevye’s daughter Chava in the original Broadway national tour of Fiddler on the Roof [1966-70].

Citing Rozin’s directorial input, Laufer described The Last Yiddish Speaker as comprising three love stories: “between a father and daughter, a boy and a girl, and then this old woman who’s passing on Judaism to this young woman.”

Continued Laufer, “I really see this play as Our Town [Thornton Wilder, 1938]—if there were a really dark backdrop. There still needs to be all the innocence and simplicity and joys and problems of living in a small town. All those things have to be just as alive in the play as the backdrop, which is so dark. I keep saying, ‘It’s Grover’s Corners [New Hampshire (fictional), population 2,642 in 1901-13]—let’s not lose that. It’s a small town and it’s young love.’ The sweetness of these relationships really needs to be emphasized.” In the InterAct production, Gabriel Elmore’s performance as John, the boyfriend torn between allegiance to the new world order and his love for the teenager he knows as Mary, captures that sweetness.

Laufer’s play poses a question, Rozin said, that isn’t limited to Jews, but that defines Jewish history: “The constant question that we ask at every place that we’ve settled is, ‘Do we fight, do we flee, or do we assimilate in order to survive?’” Each option entails some loss. The Last Yiddish Speaker, he said, is both a reminder “of what has been given up already” and, through the character of Chava, a suggestion of a “magical opportunity of reconnecting with your history, your culture, your language.”

“One of the things I like about this play is that it’s very specific,” Rozin said. But, like The Diary of Anne Frank, he said, it “comments on the larger issues of humanity and human nature. While it uses the specific history of Judaism, of the Jewish people and Jewish culture, the play is really about the challenges of living together in community going forward.”

[Commonly known as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the actual journal was published in English translation as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and they adapted it for the screen for the 1959 movie version. For a report on a pandemic-era Zoom performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, see “The Diary of Anne Frank Online,” 29 May 2020.]

[Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.]

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[After reading Klein’s article on Laufer’s play, I thought it would be interesting to see some of the published reviews of the Philadelphia première production.  My first selection—for obvious reasons, I think—is from The Forward, the New York City-based, English-language newspaper for a Jewish-American audience.  This review appeared on the website on 8 April 2024; coincidentally, the reviewer is Julia M. Klein.]

“IN A CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST SURVEILLANCE STATE,
THE FEW REMAINING JEWS STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE”
by Julia M. Klein 

Deborah Zoe Laufer’s ‘The Last Yiddish Speaker’ envisions a dystopian future for America

Deborah Zoe Laufer packs a suitcase full of themes into her passionate and timely new play, The Last Yiddish Speaker, currently running at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company.

In just 90 minutes, with only four characters, she artfully etches a dystopian world in which the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has triumphed. The terrifying result is a Christian Nationalist surveillance state that punishes dissent; banishes or kills Jews, gays and other outsiders; and forbids women from attending college or holding professional jobs.

Laufer’s characters — a Jewish father and daughter concealing their identity, the daughter’s unsuspecting boyfriend, and an older woman embodying the richness and trauma of Jewish history — must negotiate these perilous circumstances while somehow remaining true to themselves.

An experienced playwright (End Games, Leveling Up, Informed Consent, The Last Schwartz, among others), Laufer reveals the contours of her menacing future America, and the stakes of opposing its rules, only gradually and with considerable craft.

On Colin McIlvane’s realistic set, depicting a kitchen, living room and porch, 17-year-old Sarah (now known as Mary) and her father, Paul, argue about how to balance their safety with her ambitions. Disconnected from their heritage, they are passing as Christians in a small, rural upstate New York town, where they must accustom themselves to religious and social conformity, Big Brother-level intrusiveness, and firearms. On their walls, they display a portrait of Jesus Christ and two crucifixes — emblems of their disguise. 

The year is 2029, and the situation for women is deteriorating. Sarah is smart, feminist, frustrated and desperate for opportunity. Incautious and sick of concealment, she is willing to risk everything in a flight to Canada, still a free country, even if the border is protected by a wall.

Sarah admits to being “a loose cannon,” and in Kaitlyn Zion’s somewhat over-the-top performance it’s hard, initially, to fully embrace her. “You’re impossible,” her father says, with some justification. “Every day you leave this house I wonder what you’re gonna say that will get us killed.”

Dan Hodge’s terrified Paul, forever on edge, occupies the other end of their seesaw: He is the timid accommodationist, willing to compromise everything to keep his daughter safe — a stance that leads her to insult him as “weak.” He, too, has his reasons, not least the fate of his outspoken wife [daughter? (Paul’s wife disappeared mysteriously some years before the play.)].

Their survival depends, in part, on her handsome and besotted boyfriend, John (Gabriel Elmore), tasked (in a blatant conflict of interest) with surveilling their home for contraband items and thoughts. A representative of a noxious government, he is nevertheless sweet, sympathetic, and trying to do what he believes is right. Will he truly love Sarah, whom he escorts to both the prom and the gun range, or turn her in? John is the play’s pivot, and Elmore’s subtle, perfectly pitched performance elevates this production.

There is one more complication: the eponymous last Yiddish speaker. Dropped off mysteriously at Sarah and Paul’s doorstep, Aunt Chava (Stephanie Satie) represents the last millennium of Jewish tradition and identity, as well as everyone’s favorite Jewish immigrant relative. Her otherworldliness is signaled by Drew Billiau’s eerie lighting, sound designer Christopher Colucci’s music, and the layers of ethnic dress in which costume designer Katherine Fritz envelops her.

Satie, who played Tevye’s daughter Chava in the original Broadway national tour of Fiddler on the Roof, is haunting as this mysterious figure. Speaking a mix of Yiddish (some of it untranslated) and English, she gives the play much of its humor and poetry. Like Anne Frank, Aunt Chava must be hidden from authorities, putting Sarah and Paul at risk. But she is also a mentor: a purveyor of Yiddish jokes, Jewish prayers, pickles and magically appearing ritual objects.

Mostly written before Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza, The Last Yiddish Speaker is nevertheless very much of the moment. Laufer is attuned to the threat of Christian Nationalism, efforts to undermine democracy, and the judicial and legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights. She is equally passionate about the dangers of political polarization and the challenges of maintaining Jewish identity in a sometimes hostile world.

That is a lot to cram in, a heavy lift. But Rozin’s production mostly navigates the play’s transitions — some of them sudden — with grace, and leaves the audience appropriately shaken and stirred.

[Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.]

*  *  *  *

[On the blog Burd Reviews, Frank Burd posted the following notice on 7 April 2024.]

“THE LAST YIDDISH SPEAKER AT INTERACT THEATRE COMPANY”
by Frank Burd 

An old, Yiddish speaking woman, lands on the steps of the home of Mary and Paul in upstate New York. It is 2027, and they have fled from New York City in the wake of a successful January 6th rebellion that has brought a white supremacist regime into power. They are Jewish, passing as Christians in this small town. Interact Theatre is presenting the world premiere of “The Last Yiddish Speaker,” by Deborah Zoe Laufer at the Drake. It is engaging, suspenseful, and powerful as we watch a father and his 17-year-old daughter try to figure out how to reply, not just to the woman, but to the events around them.

The play begins in the home where Paul (Dan Hodge) and Mary (Katlyn Zion) live. Hung on the walls are crucifixes and a portrait of jesus. But we soon learn that they are trying to blend into a society that doesn’t know their true identities. Mary’s real name is Sarah.

The third major player before the woman arrives is John (Gabriel Elmore), a good-looking young man who is in Mary’s senior class in high school. They have serious crushes on each another, and he is to be taking her to the senior prom. But not only does he not know of Mary’s real identity, he is also part of the youth group that seeks to root out all those who oppose the regime. They are seeking “to take the country back” from the Jews, the gays, the non-whites, and even the women, who are prohibited from attending college. When the old woman, Chava (Stephanie Satie) arrives, they cannot let John know about her and they hide her in the basement. Paul doesn’t even want to keep her there, lest their true backgrounds be revealed.

So who is this old woman? She says she is Mary’s great aunt. She says she’s been married over a dozen times. She says she lived 1000 years ago. The only things we can be reasonably sure about is that she is Jewish and speaks Yiddish. And that is a threat to Paul- revelation of hiding a Jew can lead to serious consequences and his only goal is to protect his daughter. Her mother, his wife, disappeared mysteriously a few years earlier.

Chava awakens in Mary a sense of what is means to be a Jew, and it threatens the precarious situation in which it challenges Paul’s attempt to let them “blend in” to their new life. She makes Mary laugh. She gives her a sense of history.

We are riveted for every moment of this 95-minute drama, but also the effective comedic touches that Laufer has given us, like the results from the downloading of the Yiddish app on Mary’s phone to understand what Chava is saying, before we realize it won’t be needed. And what will happen to many of the professions usually dominated by Jews if they are eliminated? But what struck me so powerfully were the brief descriptions of Jewish identity based upon the centuries of repression.

The ensemble is terrific- so honest, so real, so conflicted. From the challenging daughter to the protective father, from the questioning young suitor to the mysterious yet sweet old woman, they all create memorable characters. Director Seth Rozin does a superb job bringing this dystopian future play to life. I loved every minute!

*  *  *  *

[In the Broad Street Review, an arts and culture website with a mix of reviews and commentary, mostly about events and performances in the Philadelphia area, Josh Herren had a different response to Laufer’s new play.  His review appeared on the site on 9 April 2024.]

“InterAct THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS
DEBORAH ZOE LAUFER’S THE LAST YIDDISH SPEAKER”
by Josh Herren 

Imagining life for Jews after a successful insurrection

There is a refrain often repeated by my Jewish mother, encapsulating the essence of our holidays: “They tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat.” Existential terror has been a constant in the history of Judaism, spanning both ancient and modern times. In Deborah Zoe Laufer’s new play, The Last Yiddish Speaker, receiving a rolling world premiere at InterAct Theatre Company, this history is personified by a 1000-year-old Yiddish-speaking Bubbe named Chava. This character, funny and pragmatic, offers a striking glimpse into the specificity of Jewish generational trauma.

Unfortunately, these ideas are not able to fully develop in The Last Yiddish Speaker. The world of this play is an alternate near future in which the January 6 insurrection successfully overturned the 2020 presidential election. What this serves to do, besides raising my blood pressure, is to offer up a fictional world open to debate. Rather than following characters through a story, I found myself constantly second-guessing the world of this alternate future being created.

Tension and confusion

In this dystopian projection, set in 2029, the United States has transformed into a hyper-conservative, patriarchal white Christian nationalist ethno-state. Paul (Dan Hodge) and his daughter Sarah (Kaitlyn Zion), now using the name Mary, are living under new identities in a small New York town. There they must open their home, phones, and computers to frequent inspections by repressive agents of the state. Their inspector also happens to be Mary’s boyfriend, John (Gabriel Elmore). Amidst this tense situation, Aunt Chava (Stephanie Satie), a mysterious Jewish elder, arrives on their doorstep. Together, the family must decide how to navigate their identity and plan for their future.

Director Seth Rozin keeps the action moving. The ensemble members do their best to commit to a script that veers into the maudlin. In particular, Hodge delivers a nuanced performance as he wrestles with the dueling needs of safety and self-acceptance. Satie gives a surprisingly grounded performance as Chava. As written, Sarah is a puzzling character. She knows the grave stakes of being discovered yet is seemingly unable to keep her true feelings under the surface. Zion tries to thread the needle between these dimensions, but the character ultimately feels confused. This confusion strikes at the heart of The Last Yiddish Speaker: the play wants to serve as dramatic speculative/dystopian fiction while also using magical realism to explore Jewish identity. Ultimately, it achieves neither.

The possibility of solidarity

More problematically, its focus on the specificity of Jewish suffering in this particular narrative feels misguided. In the context of the story, Sarah and Paul have watched as immigrants, African Americans, liberals, and queer people have been exterminated. They are able to survive by suppressing their Jewishness and passing as white. The focus then on Judaism, in the midst of all that suffering, seems to ignore intersectional identities and the possibility of solidarity. As a queer Jewish person, I walk through the world with two identities. It felt disconcerting to have Jewishness seen as inherently tied to suffering, while violence against queer folks is handwaved away.

Colin McIlvaine’s set conveys the claustrophobia of this family’s situation and nails the small-town Christian aesthetic. The costumes by Katherine Fritz feel a bit dated, which is possibly a nod to the cyclical nature of fashion. She dresses Chava in layers of clothes that effectively symbolize her journey. Drew Billiau’s lights and Chris Colucci’s sound can veer into the cheesy as it tries to convey the play’s more magical elements.

[I’m a little surprised that none of the writers whose articles and reviews I read drew the analogy of the new life of Paul and Sarah/Mary to that of the Marranos, the secret Jews who lived outwardly as Catholics in 15th-century Spain during the Inquisition. 

[(I have a post, “Crypto-Jews: Legacy of Secrecy,” published on 15 September 2009, which relates the tale of some descendants of the secret Jews who traveled to the New World with the Conquistadors and settled in New Mexico, then part of New Spain, and only rediscovered their Jewish past in the late 20th century.)

[There also seems to be a resemblance between John, “Mary’s” boyfriend in The Last Yiddish Speaker, and Rolf, the young Hitler Youth in The Sound of Music who’s courting Liesl von Trapp (“You Are Sixteen”).  No one remarked on that, either.

[Maybe it’s just me.]