If you’re in New York City this week, there’s a show you should see. It’s playing downtown in Tribeca at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. The play is the work of Karen Sommers and is entitled SOUTH OF DELANCY: THE LOWER EAST SIDE PROJECT. It’s a high intensity reading of a play that has a rather interesting history.

About a year ago Karen was invited to participate in a yearlong theater project through the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Karen was interested in a court known as the House of Sages. During the 1930s and ‘40s the House of Sages were a resource to Jewish people living in the lower east side who had familial, occupational, or religious concerns. The Sages were made up of rabbis and attorneys and their sessions, which are like a cross between a reality TV show and the PEOPLE’S COURT, were broadcast over the radio. In some senses the Sages served as group therapy for people who had problems with which they needed assistance. So Karen Sommers obtained the legal rights to use several of the broadcasts, translated them from Yiddish to English, and began to write a script.

Karen’s process of writing is particularly interesting. The director took the transcripts from the House of Sages, and cast seven as the characters involved in three of the cases that came before the Sages. Over the next nine months, Karen held rehearsals where the actors and she improvised scenes that lead up to the events chronicled in the transcripts. The director videotaped these improvised scenes and then took the tapes and wrote scripted scenes that became the first draft of THE LOWER EAST SIDE PROJECT.

About three months ago, I was introduced to Karen through a mutual friend at Makor, a performance space up on the Upper West Side. That day there was a theater festival at Makor and Karen and her troupe of actors were performing three of the scenes from their play. About three weeks later it appears that it became clear to Karen that she needed a fresh set of eyes and ears to look at her work. Somehow I was drafted to be the attending playwright or script supervisor for her play.

My role was somewhat nebulous at first. Karen handed me a stack of videotape and the assignment of “fixing” the play. I didn’t quite know what to make of this request. My initial excitement of being involved in a play that was certain to be produced quickly transformed into a feeling of utter and total fear. Once I sat in on rehearsals and realized that some fundamental questions I posed could not be answered by the principal players I started to feel as though I was on a runaway train. And frighteningly enough these people somehow expected me to keep the thing from derailing. But being either an idiot or a masochist I continued with the project.

The fruit of my labor will be showing this coming Thursday and Friday (April 1st and 2nd) at 7pm in Tribeca. I will reserve comment about the play with exception of a few words. I will tell you that the actors are solid. I will tell you that I substantially reworked the dialog from the original script. Thus, what you will see is a product of the actor’s improvisations reorganized and, in some cases, reworded by myself. Furthermore, I think I can safely take credit for presenting different ways to do scenes that already existed. I think the biggest thing I did for the show was to ask questions of the director which no one else was asking and to pose some possible answers for her. But in the end Karen and her troupe answered all the questions themselves.

About two weeks into the project I realized why I was so petrified of this experience. It wasn’t that I was afraid that I didn’t know enough about Judaism or the ‘30s to be able to write dialog that would sound real. It wasn’t that I felt that I had problems telling a story. I now know what the problem was. It was a loss of control. When I write my little columns and my plays I am the sole god of my little universe. I can write down my ideas on index cards, organize them into a story, build characters, and write the play or article (not necessarily in this order). Here I walked into someone else’s story. And not only that, I walked into a story that the authors couldn’t explain to me what it was about. For me to be comfortable, I have to know the theme of the story before I can write it. If I don’t know this information I think it’s going to be junk. Failing to have this “spine” not only makes me nervous but downright incapacitated. Last year I took a playwriting course in the City and my teacher encouraged us to forget about themes and just write. “Forget about having a spine for your story” he’d say. You need to just get out there and write. My teacher said, the theme would come out of what you’re working on. I vehemently disagreed with him and we had multiple arguments about this topic in class and outside. I thought he was insane.

Well, welcome to the dollhouse, Kevin Hylton. THE LOWER EAST SIDE PROJECT is my first experience working without a diagram. And to be honest I think by the end of my involvement themes emerged as my playwriting teacher promised. The play is not mine. The structure is not what I wanted. In the end essentially I redrew a portrait of someone else’s baby. They erased the ears and the eyes so it looked a little more like their baby in their own mind. But the sketch I made is still there. So, if you want to critique the critic I have an offer for anyone still reading. The first two of you out there who actually come to see this play and have the interest to review it will be printed. Whatever nasty or laudatory remarks you care to make will be sketched out on the bathroom walls of moviepoopshoot.com without any editorializing by myself. If you have any desire to talk with me about the play I’m happy to oblige. So enough said, the play’s specifics are below.

The show is FREE and will be playing April 1st and 2nd at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, located at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on the corners of Greenwich and Chambers Street. If you’re a New Yorker that’s the Chambers Street Subway stop for the 1/9/2/3 trains. And feel free to introduce yourself if you come. I’ll be the one sitting in the back row of the theater surrounded by blondes.

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