A Personal ‘Victory’

Like Maya, the troubled Jewish teen in Jessica Litwak’s radiant solo show, "Victory Dance," the author couldn’t find a date for her senior prom. "I finally went with some guy who insisted we have sex afterwards, though I didn’t want to," says Litwak, 43. "Later he wouldn’t drive me home, so I slept in my yellow prom dress on his floor and walked home the next morning, my dress all crumpled, feeling lonely and lost. Until I found the theater, I spent my teenage years feeling worthless and invisible."

The poet Maya and her friends — dubbed "a minyan of witches" by Maya’s Marxist grandma — traverse a similar journey in "Victory Dance," at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center’s Davidson/Valenti Theatre through June 22. The homely Jewish heroine, neglected by her hippie parents, is so self-hating she envisions paying for a prom date with humiliating sex. Her pal, Luna, an English orphan, is a closeted lesbian; African American actress Grace is oppressed by an abusive boyfriend. For all three girls, the price of admission to the "Victory Dance" — the senior prom — is confronting a dysfunctional part of herself. Each does so with the help of an idealistic, creative writing teacher and supernatural emissaries, such as the biblical Miriam.

The acclaimed writer-performer, who effortlessly morphs into the play’s seven characters, says she "created the piece to revisit a difficult time and to heal the most vulnerable part of myself."

The "difficult time" Litwak is referring to is her adolescence in San Francisco in the 1970s. Like Maya, she attended a racially mixed high school but spent more time on the streets with her friends. "We roamed the inner city, doing lots of drugs, hanging out in parks," she recalls. "It was a lot of sexual experience from age 12 or 13."

It didn’t help that there was a spiritual void in the Haight-Ashbury home Jessica shared with her single mother. Litwak’s communist Russian grandparents eschewed religion as the opiate of the people; on Passover, she recalls, "there was an awkwardness about saying the word, ‘God.’" Rather than Hebrew school, she attended an alternative junior high where she traveled the country in a decrepit yellow bus. "But I always felt a pull toward Judaism," she says. She believes ritual might have curbed her self-destructive tendencies.

Instead, at age 16, Litwak stole a car and wrecked it. She feels she might have ended up incarcerated had it not been for the teacher who recruited her to attend an improvisational theater workshop around 1975. "She made me realize I was worth something," the performer says. "Theater gave me a purpose and saved my life."

A couple of months later, Litwak found herself studying at the Royal Academy in London. She went on to attend the experimental theater wing at New York University and to earn a graduate degree in playwriting from Columbia. Her earliest work explored the conflict between religion and radicalism she experienced in her childhood home. "I was writing about Judaism even before I began to practice it," she says.

That changed in 1997 when Litwak’s husband suddenly left her and their two young daughters. Soon thereafter, she says, "I was wandering around the Upper West Side, sobbing, and I stopped in front of a Judaica store. This old Chassid awkwardly asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I said, ‘I’m very alone.’ He abruptly replied, ‘Are you a Jew? Then you’re not alone’ — which set off a lightbulb for me. I realized it wasn’t a sentimental kindness he had given me but a message he totally believed in."

Litwak promptly joined a synagogue and began celebrating Shabbat; after moving to Los Angeles in 1999, she joined Ohr HaTorah and enrolled her daughter, Emma (named for the Jewish radical Emma Goldman) in a Jewish day school. When the 10-year-old had surgery for a brain tumor three months ago, Ohr HaTorah congregants undertook a 24-hour prayer vigil (Emma’s prognosis is good).

Having experienced the kindness of friends and strangers, Litwak hopes to give something back via "Victory Dance." "If my play can help heal somebody, even in a small way, that would mean so much to me," she says.

For tickets and information, call (323) 860-7300.