When Seth Rozin, founding inventive director of Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Firm, first learn Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Final Yiddish Speaker a couple of 12 months in the past, “I instantly thought it was essential,” he recalled lately. “It was well timed, a very stable play that has an incredible story with characters that anybody may care about, very relatable, but additionally with some distinctive magic.”

Well timed certainly: The drama is ready in a near-future dystopian Christian Nationalist America during which the coup of Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded, and ethnic, ideological, and spiritual 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 lady who embodies a millennium of Jewish historical past and custom.

World occasions have since given the play’s conflicts a fair sharper edge. With the struggle in Gaza, rising public expressions of antisemitism, and the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency, The Final Yiddish Speaker is “way more than well timed, however frankly pressing,” mentioned Rozin, who additionally directs. “It’s an important play, a crucial play, to remind us of the stakes when outdoors occasions poke at our biases and push folks right into a nook.”

A Lucille Lortel Theatre fee and a finalist within the Jewish Performs Mission, The Final Yiddish Theatre’s InterAct bow (March 29-April 21) is the primary in a Nationwide New Play Community rolling world premiere. Extra productions are deliberate at Oregon Modern Theatre in Eugene (Oct. 23-Nov. 10) and Theatre Lab at Florida Atlantic College in Boca Raton (Oct. 23-Nov. 17), the place Laufer herself will direct.

“I like to jot down about what it’s prefer to reside within the time we’re in, and the time we’re in is shifting so rapidly,” mentioned Laufer, who lives in Mount Kisko, N.Y. “I preserve saying historical past rewrites my performs sooner than I can.”

The Final Yiddish Speaker takes place within the fictional upstate New York city of Granville in 2029, in a world the place Jews, gays, and others deemed outsiders are banished or killed, dissent is punished, and a latest edict forbids girls from attending faculty. A pissed off Sarah, now generally known as Mary, and her extra circumspect father, Paul, are at loggerheads about methods to survive with out dropping themselves within the course of.

The play’s surveillance state calls to thoughts George Orwell’s 1984, in addition to the totalitarian regimes Orwell each satirized and prefigured. Laufer’s counterfactual premise additionally evokes Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Occur Right here and two different novels later tailored for tv: Philip Roth’s The Plot In opposition to America, during which the isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and ushers in fascism, and Philip Okay. Dick’s The Man within the Excessive Citadel, which imagines an America conquered by the Axis powers of World Warfare II.

Laufer’s 90-minute one-act is amongst a spate of latest dramas and musicals coping with antisemitism and the types of Jewish response, some epic in scale. Broadway has featured Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical Leopoldstadt, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, and Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s Concord: A New Musical, a tribute to the Twenties and ’30s German sextet the Comic Harmonists.

Laufer mentions one other equally themed play, The Ally, by Itamar Moses, who occurs to be a member of one among her three writing teams. Premiered this winter by New York’s Public Theater, The Ally places a progressive Jewish professor within the crosshairs of disputation concerning the Center East.

However Laufer (whose performs embrace Finish Days, Leveling Up, and Knowledgeable Consent) mentioned that the preliminary spark for The Final Yiddish Speaker wasn’t political in any respect: It was a podcast she heard a couple of Hawaiian fowl on the verge of extinction.

“I used to be so moved by being the final one who speaks your language, or being the final of your species,” Laufer mentioned. As with tales of “folks being misplaced in area, it’s the loneliest feeling on the earth.”

Laufer mentioned her performs are likely to emerge “from 4 or 5 issues that I’ve been obsessing about.” Within the case of The Final Yiddish Speaker, which she referred to as “most likely the least hopeful” of her works, these obsessions did embrace some political considerations, particularly rising antisemitism and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. The Final Yiddish Speaker can also be a response to her first skilled manufacturing, The Final Schwartz, concerning the Jewish “worry of assimilation and the way it tears households aside.   

“There’s a criticism of Jews within the coronary heart of that play,” mentioned Laufer, who was raised in rural upstate New York “with a sure paranoia” about being Jewish. “I’ve developed within the final 20 years. I really feel extra protecting of my Judaism.”

Educated as an actor at SUNY Buy, Laufer additionally has labored as a standup comic and a director. At a convention in Missoula, Mont., Marsha Norman learn a play Laufer submitted and informed her, “You understand, you’re a playwright.” On her invitation, Laufer enrolled on the Juilliard College, the place Norman headed the playwriting program. “It was probably the most wonderful factor,” Laufer mentioned, “and it modified my life.”

Laufer’s most profitable play so far, Finish Days, impressed partially by 9/11, is a comic book household drama that includes a collision between science and faith, as incarnated by the physicist Stephen Hawking and Jesus. It has obtained about 90 productions, she mentioned.

In an earlier model of The Final Yiddish Speaker, the eponymous character of Aunt Chava was a extra lifelike determine—a girl in her 90s. A author colleague informed Laufer, “There’s one thing lacking—it’s not a Deborah Laufer play.” Now Chava is 1,000 years outdated, a magical component that, to Laufer, makes the present “reverberate in a a lot bigger approach.” InterAct’s Chava is portrayed by Stephanie Satie, who coincidentally performed Tevye’s daughter Chava within the unique Broadway nationwide tour of Fiddler on the Roof.

Citing Rozin’s directorial enter, Laufer described The Final Yiddish Speaker as comprising three love tales: “between a father and daughter, a boy and a lady, after which this outdated lady who’s passing on Judaism to this younger lady.”

Continued Laufer, “I actually see this play as Our City—if there have been a very darkish backdrop. There nonetheless must be all of the innocence and ease and joys and issues of dwelling in a small city. All these issues need to be simply as alive within the play because the backdrop, which is so darkish. I preserve saying, ‘It’s Grover’s Corners—let’s not lose that. It’s a small city and it’s younger love.’ The sweetness of those relationships actually must be emphasised.” Within the InterAct manufacturing, Gabriel Elmore’s efficiency as John, the boyfriend torn between allegiance to the brand new world order and his love for {the teenager} he is aware of as Mary, captures that sweetness.

Laufer’s play poses a query, Rozin mentioned, that isn’t restricted to Jews, however that defines Jewish historical past: “The fixed query that we ask at each place that we’ve settled is, ‘Will we combat, will we flee, or will we assimilate to be able to survive?’” Every choice entails some loss. The Final Yiddish Speaker, he mentioned, is each a reminder “of what has been given up already” and, by way of the character of Chava, a suggestion of a “magical alternative of reconnecting together with your historical past, your tradition, your language.”

“One of many issues I like about this play is that it’s very particular,” Rozin mentioned. However, like The Diary of Anne Frank, he mentioned, it “feedback on the bigger problems with humanity and human nature. Whereas it makes use of the precise historical past of Judaism, of the Jewish folks and Jewish tradition, the play is actually concerning the challenges of dwelling collectively in group going ahead.”

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

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