Imagine a multiracial family’s Passover Seder where an estranged daughter comes home for the first time in five years with an unexpected guest and a documentary film project. A series of events unfold over the next two nights, causing the family to look back on past choices. This is the plot of Kendell Pinkney’s new play, I Know of Plagues. Pinkney is a playwright, producer and rabbi as well as the artistic director of The Workshop, a cultural fellowship for Jews of color, Jewish-Indigenous, Sephardi and Mizrahi artists. His play, Pinkney explains, “asks the question: Why is this night different from all other nights? Specifically, from the perspective of a family that has Jews of color in it.”
I Know of Plagues is one of six plays that came out of Expanding the Canon, a program established in 2022 by Theater J in DC in partnership with the New York City-based Alliance for Jewish Theater. The program’s stated aim is to “correct and broaden the historically limited portrayals of Jewishness on stages in the United States and around the world.”
“The New York Jewish experience is interesting, but tell me about the Colorado Jewish experience or the Ukrainian Jewish experience or the South Asian Jewish experience.”
Theater J Artistic Director Hayley Finn says that the nationally renowned theater, established in 1990 as a program of the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, is “committed to celebrating and exploring the complexities and nuances of the Jewish experience. That’s something that really inspires me,” she adds.
“They wanted to commission multiple playwrights who were interested in drawing on their specific experiences,” says Pinkney. “I thought that was pretty rare, being Black and Jewish, to have that opportunity.”
Pinkney and fellow playwrights Harley Elias, Zacharia Ezer, Jesse Jae Hoon, M.J. Kang and Carolivia Herron, a well known author and scholar of African-American Judea, were selected out of 82 applicants to each create a full-length play over a two-and-a-half year period. They each received a $10,000 commission and $5,000 developmental budget for readings, workshops, research and travel. The initiative was funded by grants from the Covenant Foundation, the Jews of Color Initiative, and other donors. The six scripts will also be considered for a main stage production at Theater J in the future.
Their plays take on a variety of ideas and time periods. Harley Elias, who is also an actor, wrote his play The Pardon about Jews in hiding just after the Spanish Inquisition. Jesse Jae Hoon’s Do You Think I’m Annoying? explores what it means to be an adoptee. Jae Hoon himself was adopted into a Jewish family and is also an actor and organizer. “There’s a common thread in adoption narratives that you must be grateful, but gratitude is a painful way of looking at it,” he says. “People think life begins the moment you were adopted, but life begins before that, it’s ignoring the context.”
Expanding the Canon began with a three-day Beit Midrash, or learning space, led by Sabrina Sojourner. (She’s a nationally recognized Jewish scholar, leader and the inventor of Training to Listen, a program that discusses diversity, equity and inclusion through the lens of Jewish values.) The group of playwrights met once a month over the two-and-a-half-year process. The first year entailed Jewish learning seminars with topics that ranged from Torah, to historical to cultural. The second year was more focused on reading each other’s drafts and providing feedback. Jae Hoon said of the cohort experience, “It was a wonderful thing to get to know other Jews of color and all the ways in which one comes to Judaism.”
Theater J’s Finn feels that most of the Jewish plays that get produced are from an Ashkenazi perspective. “[Expanding the Canon] stories are underrepresented, we don’t see them on stages,” she says. “We can all benefit from learning about the rich diversity that exists within the Jewish experience.”
Pinkney agrees on the importance of having variety in Jewish stories. “I often find that the New York Jewish experience is interesting, but tell me about the Colorado Jewish experience or the specificity of the Ukraine Jewish experience or the South Asian Jewish experience. The story needs to be specific.”
Opening image: Expanding the Canon participants (back row, from left) Jesse Jae Hoon, Sabrina Sojourner (nationally recognized Jewish scholar), Kendall Pinkney, Harley Elias, Theater J Artistic Director Hayley Finn, (front row, from left) MJ Kang, Zachariah Ezer, and Carolivia Herron. Credit: Ryan Maxwell Photography
Will the six plays be performed around the US? I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area & would love to see them out here.
There’s a common thread in adoption narratives that you must be grateful, but gratitude is a painful way of looking at it,” he says. “People think life begins the moment you were adopted, but life begins before that, it’s ignoring the context.