Montrealer Ben Gonshor’s dramatic play inspired by the unlikely friendship between the African-American singer/actor Paul Robeson and leading Soviet Jewish cultural figures is the first-ever winner of an international contest that encourages the creation of new theatre projects that relate to Yiddish culture.
The English-language When Blood Ran Red will receive a professional, staged reading in New York in June during KulturfestNYC, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene (NYTF), sponsor of the David and Clare Rosen Memorial Play Contest.
Gonshor’s work was selected from among five finalists by a jury composed of Tony Award-winning Broadway producers Emanuel Azenberg and Jane Dubin, playwright and TV series writer Jeff Baron, Tony Award-winning composer-lyricist and orchestrator Jason Robert Brown, playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jon Marans, and Drama Desk Award-winning playwright Israel Horovitz.
Their choice was made after a month-long deliberation and viewing 30-minute, professionally presented, live excerpts.
“Though the plays all painted a picture of the significance of Jewish and Yiddish culture in our society, When Blood Ran Red brought a historical perspective that we found intriguing and unique,” Azenberg said.
Marans added: “The judges were deeply moved by the play’s examination of the ties between Jewish history and personal relationships.”
The contest received hundreds of applicants, and more than 60 of their works were selected for evaluation by readers that included scholars, publishers and other knowledgeable people.
Gonshor casts Robeson as a hero in the face of tyranny, both that of Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union and in his own country, where his relationships with Soviets, developed before and during World War II, had dire consequences for Robeson’s career in the postwar anti-Communist fervour – no matter that his friends were enemies of the Stalinist regime.
The play culminates with Robeson’s final performance behind the Iron Curtain in Moscow in 1949 where he emotionally sang the Jewish partisans’ song. While Gonshor has exercised some artistic licence, the story remains true in its essence, he says.
“Ben’s play is quite extraordinary,” said NYTF executive producer Chris Massimine, who will oversee the play’s staging in June. “It’s one of those pieces that kind of sneaks up on you and really takes you to an unexpected place. It captures humanity at its best and its worst, and in ways that are earnest, stimulating, and often inspiring. And the result is a hauntingly beautiful evening of theatre.”
The play had its first public staged reading in March 2014 at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts here, where Gonshor was the marketing and communications director from 2003-2011.
He has a much longer association with that stage, having acted in Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre (DWYT) productions since the age of five.
A CBC radio program that Gonshor heard back in 1999 about Robeson’s friendship with Soviet Jews he met while touring, among them leading lights of Moscow’s Yiddish theatre and well-known writers or poets, planted an idea in his mind to recreate this “incredible, profound story.”
Some of the characters portrayed in When Blood Ran Red were murdered under Stalin’s orders.
Soon after hearing the program, Gonshor left to study film at the University of Southern California, where he developed a screenplay on that theme.
Gonshor graduated with a MFA, but his professors discouraged him from trying to produce the movie. “They said there just wouldn’t be an audience for a big historical epic like that.” But the story was never far from his mind over the years.
The New York-based NYTF describes itself as the oldest consecutively producing Yiddish theatre company in the world, and the sole surviving professional Yiddish theatre in the United States. It also presents all types of performing arts about the Jewish experience in English and other languages. Former Montrealer Bryna Wasserman (the late Dora’s daughter) is its executive director.
KulturfestNYC, subtitled the First New York International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts, in honour of folklorist Chana Mlotek, takes place from June 14-22 and will include hundreds of performances by artists from all over the world, including Montreal.
“I’m so incredibly honoured to be moving onward to the next stage of development,” said Gonshor, who can’t get over this vote of confidence from such a prestigious panel and considering the quality of the four other finalists.
By day, Gonshor heads a biotech company with his father, Aron Gonshor, a DWYT stalwart as well, but at heart, he remains an artist. In addition to writing and acting, he is an accomplished bass guitarist.
“I’m turning 40 in June, and I can’t think of a better birthday present than this, and that I’m playing the [male] lead role in the DWYT’s production of The Dybbuk during the festival.”
S. Ansky’s dark classic of the Yiddish theatre will be presented at the Segal in August.
