“I’m a Keeb,” jokes Deb Filler. “A Kiwi Heeb,” she says.
Filler claims to be New Zealand’s only Jewish comedian. After working as a teacher, she left her hometown of Auckland in 1979 to study acting in New York City with Uta Hagen and Stella Adler. She’s lived and performed in cities around the world, leading her to question: where is home?
That’s the theme she’s exploring in her latest one-woman show I Lost It In Kiev, which runs at Toronto’s Factory Theatre until Nov. 30.
“For me, I’ve always been an outsider,” says Filler. “So home has been many places.” While growing up Jewish in New Zealand, her family was accepted, but still different than their mostly Irish, Scottish and Maori neighbours. Now that she lives in Toronto, she sometimes still longs for New Zealand.
In I Lost It In Kiev, Filler takes audiences on a journey from New Zealand, to a kibbutz in Israel, to Paris, to Canada and finally, to Kiev, where something intense happens to her. “But, that’s a spoiler alert,” she says.
“The stories are poignant,” Filler explains. Her plays are never solely comedic. In 1990 she and her father, a Holocaust survivor, visited Poland on what Filler describes as a “whirlwind tour of eastern European death camps.” She based her first show, Punch Me In The Stomach, on this trip.
That show opened off-Broadway with Filler playing 36 larger-than-life characters, many of them based on members of her extended family. Her characters are eccentric, but ones we can all relate to. Anyone can imagine having a relative like her Aunt Zelda or Uncle Mendel.
She performed Punch Me In The Stomach internationally for 12 years, including a stint in Berlin, which she describes as amazing.
“My shows are not humorous pieces about the Holocaust,” she says. However, Filler sees humour as healing. “We survive in the best way that we can,” she says. “And sometimes, we need to find irony, or to find levity in a dark situation. And, I think that’s part of the human condition.”
Filler’s parents didn’t hide the past from their children. Her father was from the Polish town of Brzozow, about three-and-a-half hours southeast of Krakow. He survived Auschwitz and eventually moved to New Zealand where he opened a bakery. Her mother’s family immigrated to New Zealand from Germany right before World War II. Filler remembers hearing her parents’ stories at a young age.
Her parents, she explains, were never bitter about their experiences. “I’ve always felt very fortunate, almost like the baton has been passed to me to tell the story of the glass half full,” she says.
She brings this perspective into her work. After Punch Me In The Stomach, she debuted Filler Up! In this show she played 27 characters and baked challah on stage, which she later served to her audience. She hopes to bring Filler Up! to New York City next year. She’s also working on an original play with actress Marilyn Lightstone called My German Roots Are Showing. It’s about her experience performing in Germany.
Along with acting and playwriting, Filler teaches at the post-secondary level, including a course on what she calls “shtick” in the comedy writing and performance program at Humber College.
Filler has lived in Toronto since the mid-1990s. While many Canadian audiences are comfortable with distinctly Jewish humour, Filler strives to find universality in her work. It’s how she gets audiences laughing in places like rural New Zealand. “That was a real coup for me, doing Jewish jokes touring the heartland of New Zealand and them getting it,” she says.
She recognizes that despite the content, everyone can relate to universal stories. By combining poignancy with comedy, she connects with audiences and allows them to make sense of troubling situations.
“That’s what Jews do,” she says. “We’ve learned how to make humour out of darkness.”
I Lost It In Kiev runs Nov. 25-30 at the Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. For tickets: 416-504-9971 or factorytheatre.ca
