With special performances in partnership with Jewish Federation of the Berkshires
LENOX – From Friday, October 10 through Sunday, October 12, Shakespeare & Company presents “Celebrating Jewish Plays: An Immersive Weekend of Staged Readings.” This is the first-ever series of its type for the venerable theater group, and will feature readings of notable Jewish plays from the past and present, as well as one currently in development.
Shakespeare & Company will present the two Sunday readings in partnership with Jewish Federation of the Berkshires. Register and purchase tickets through the Shakespeare & Company website: shakespeare.org. Readings will be presented at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre and the Tina Packer Playhouse.
Sunday Program
The Sisters Rosensweig, by Wendy Wasserstein at 2 p.m. This much-admired 1992 play tells the story of Sara, a representative for a major Hong Kong bank who lives in London and is about to turn 54 years old. Her sisters, Gorgeous Teitelbaum and Pfeni Rosensweig, arrive to help celebrate the birthday. Gorgeous is Dr. Gorgeous with a radio-advice program; Pfeni is a world traveler. Various friends and boyfriends also arrive for the party. In particular, Mervyn, a friend of Pfeni’s boyfriend Geoffrey, falls instantly in love with Sara. The New York Times review of the original production wrote that the play is: "...[a] captivating look at three uncommon women and their quest for love, self-definition and fulfillment. But underlying the comedy is an empathetic concern for the characters and for the prospects of women today.” This production is generously supported by Beverly Hyman and Larry Birnbach.
The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish (work in development by Kate Kohler Amory and Tamara Hickey) at 4:30 p.m. Author Rachel Kadish will discuss her critically acclaimed novel The Weight of Ink, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, with author Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Joining them in the Tina Packer Playhouse will be Kate Kohler Amory and Tamara Hickey, who are currently developing a theatrical adaption of the book, select scene of which will be performed onstage. A talk-back follows. The Weight of Ink tells the story of two historians uncovering the secret history of a young Jewish woman living in London in the 1660s, and features alternating storylines set in the 21st and 17th centuries.
Additional Readings
The Price, by Arthur Miller, Friday, October 10 at 7 p.m. The Price (1968) is an engrossing story of two brothers, estranged for the last 16 years and confronting their family history, when they finally meet to dispose of the furniture accumulated in their deceased father's apartment. The play explores family dynamics, the cost of success, and the enduring power of memory, with many critics calling it Miller’s best work.
Roz and Ray, by Karen Hartman – Saturday, October 11 at 2 p.m. Ray is a devoted single parent with one goal: to keep his twin sons with hemophilia alive. In 1976, this meant endless hospital visits, rigorous testing, and frequent blood transfusions. Then Ray meets Roz – a brilliant doctor who offers a cutting-edge treatment for his boys – and everything clicks, until they both discover the miracle treatment may lead to very dangerous results. Featuring Tony-nominated actor John Douglas Thompson (HBO’s The Gilded Age). This play was first staged in 2016.
Here There Are Blueberries, by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich – Saturday, October 11 at 7 p.m. In 2007, a mysterious album featuring Nazi-era photographs arrived at the desk of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist. As curators unraveled the shocking truth behind the images, the album soon made headlines and ignited a debate that reverberated far beyond the museum walls. Based on real events, the play debuted at New York Theatre Workshop in 2023 and toured nationally in 2025. A 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2025 Lucille Lortel Award winner for Outstanding Play, two-time Helen Hayes Award winner, named one of the 10 Best Plays of 2024 by The Wall Street Journal, and featured on 60 Minutes.
Special Event on Sunday, October 12 at 6 p.m.
A reception with Rachel Kadish and cast members of the weekend’s plays. This event is by invitation-only. Inquire at (413) 637-3353.
About Celebrating Jewish Plays
At a time when many cultural institutions are eschewing Jewish-themed programming, Shakespeare & Company has chosen to stage a compelling weekend of Jewish dramas. “Celebrating Jewish Plays” curates works from different eras that cover a broad range of the Jewish American experience and theatrical expression.
“Jewish tradition is known for storytelling as a way to bring community together and to tell stories, with themes that transcend the day-to-day bickering that seems to predominate in our world,” says Greg Lipper, a member of the Board of Trustees. “We want to share the voices of playwrights whose Jewish identities inform their works, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, and especially in these unsettling times.”
Adds Artistic Director Allyn Burrows: “We are a language-based and a relationship-based and a community-based organization. This seemed like a good fit, so we started to explore certain plays. Then the idea of Rachel Kadish came up through Kate Kohler Amory,” who is adapting The Weight of Ink for the theater with Tamara Hickey. Burrows said that Kadish had a Shakespeare & Company connection – when she was researching material for her novel, she had reached out to company founder Tina Packer for historical information about Shakespeare and his milieu that was incorporated into the narrative about the hidden history of a 17th century Sephardic woman living in London, Esther Velasquez, whose story intersects with both the Bard of Avon and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Once Kadish was on board, says Burrows, “there was a synthesis of ideas that crystallized into doing this weekend. Our board chair, Beverly Hyman, was keen on having an immersive experience for people, so that they weren’t just coming to see a reading, which we’ve done before. It became a powerfully substantive way of celebrating language and organically coalesced into a celebration of Jewish playwrights.”
The process the playwrights are employing to adapt The Weight of Ink is known as Moment Work, which was developed by Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project to create plays such as The Laramie Project and Here There Are Blueberries, the latter also part of this this festival. Tectonic describes the method as “a groundbreaking process [that] explores the theatrical potential of all the elements of the stage in order to create strong theatrical and dramatic narratives from the ground up. Moment Work gives us the freedom to create individual, self-contained theatrical units (Moments) and to sequence these units together into theatrical phrases that eventually become a play.”
Greg Lipper adds, “As Kate has said to me, she could spend two years trying to perfect the script, and she's not going to accomplish what bringing a group of really brilliant, creative actors together for a few days in a studio to experiment with bare, bare number of props can accomplish. And we're going to show that at the festival. People are going to see that magic happening.”
“It's not a playwright sitting in in a dark attic, writing and imagining the story,” explains Burrows. “You take a measure of text and you see what happens right in the room. It's very collaborative.” He says that the company is more accustomed to working with time-tested plays, but that working with innovative new material is “exciting for us, because Shakespeare was a deviser himself. You can imagine him bringing in text, all of which was expected to be learned by the actors before they showed up. They worked off of scrolls, so they only knew their lines. When they walked into the room, people would speak their lines and then their response was, ‘Oh, it must be my line now.’ And then all the lines were tossed because Shakespeare had no intention of publishing his works. It was only because of two stage managers that gathered up all the scripts and said, ‘Hey, this is some valuable stuff. Someone's going to want to read this again.’ [The plays were] all done for the masses, and it's in that spirit we are doing this. People have asked, ‘Why are you doing new plays? Why are you doing devised work?’ Well, Shakespeare was a new playwright who did devised work at one time. So, there's your connection.”
Shakespeare & Company has presented Plays in Process for the last several years, a staged reading series that birthed another Jewish-themed play, Lawrence Goodman’s The Victim. That play, which debuted at a reading in 2024 and went on a successful monthlong run at the theater last July, hardly played it safe, with themes that touched on hot button issues like privilege and race, as well as the Holocaust. “I don't know that I would have been able to do that play a year earlier given the themes, given the language,” says Burrows.
Lipper and Burrows both assert that Shakespeare & Company is exploring different ways to attract people to their campus – one example is Circus & The Bard, which ran in late August. Burrows said that 2025 was the first season since the Covid shutdowns and restrictions that he’s sensed “a robustness and activity that we really haven't felt since 2020,” and that he wants to build on that momentum.
The company, he adds, will continue “walking that line between a desire to do thought provoking material and what people consider ‘entertainment in the Berkshires in the summer.’ Most of our audience is from the Boston area, the New York area, the Albany area, when they convene here, a lot of folks might say, ‘Gee, I just want some diversion. Why to keep doing plays that have such a heavy lift thematically?’ We try to mix it up. Of course, we want to be entertaining, but we also want to be thought provoking.”