Jessica Litwak says she loves New York, but recently moved to the Valley because “I wanted more of a collaborative community feeling. I fell in love with this area and felt I could grow old in a cultural, intellectual, left-wing artistic community.”
Litwak is a playwright, performer and teacher with a 30-year resume of work in experimental and ensemble theater. She shares those artistic passions with Sheryl Stoodley, who is directing a series of staged readings of Litwak’s work over the next month. Litwak is also busy creating a Valley version of her New Generation Theatre Ensemble, a training and performance project for teen- and college-age youth that has a similar aesthetic to Stoodley’s Serious Play! theater.
In addition to their common interests, both women are mothers whose children survived life-threatening illnesses. Litwak’s daughter Emma, now a theater major at Smith College, was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 10. The research Litwak did into the disease, and the long hours she spent in the hospital, provided the groundwork for Wider Than the Sky, subtitled “a love story about neuroscience.” In it, three sets of characters represent the hierarchies in a large research hospital—doctors, patients and lab monkeys—played by an ensemble of five actors in multiple roles.
In addition to addressing issues of status in a institutional culture and the ethics of using conscious beings for medical research, the playwright says the piece “serves as an allegory for America’s appetite for domination and how that appetite affects the dominated and the dominator.”
The other work in the Serious Play! performances, The Snake and the Falcon, fictionally explores a little-known byway of American history: the brief but momentous encounter between the anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman and a young J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1919, as a rising star in the FBI, called Goldman “the most dangerous woman in America” and engineered her deportation.
“Emma Goldman has long been a political and emotional inspiration to me,” Litwak explains. “My family has ties to her and I named my first daughter after her. As Emma G. said, ‘History is nothing but eternal reoccurrence,’ and I think we can learn from that. The issues of immigration and patriotism [the play] deals with are very apropos of current events.”
The readings—script-in-hand but fully rehearsed and staged—feature a cast of local actors including Michael Greehan, Eliza Greene-Smith, Becca Greene-Van Horn, Matt Haas and Maureen McElligott, along with Litwak herself. Most performances include facilitated audience talkbacks, a custom that feeds Litwak’s hunger for community.
“I write to stir people to speak to each other. It’s part of the joy of live theatre,” she says. “As a young theater artist in the East Village, we would go to the bar and talk about whatever play we had just seen, and sometimes those discussions were as exciting as the production. For me, these talkbacks are like going to the bar with the audience after the show.” Wine will be served.
The Snake and the Falcon: Nov. 7-8, 7:30 p.m., A.P.E. Gallery, 126 Main St., Northampton; Nov. 12-13, 8 p.m., Dynamite Space, Thorne’s Market ground floor, Northampton.
Wider Than The Sky: Nov. 21-22, 7:30 p.m., A.P.E. Gallery; Dec. 4 (7:30 p.m.) and 5 (8 p.m.), Dynamite Space. Suggested donation $10. Info: www.apearts.org.
