The Braid takes the audience on a heartfelt and meaningful journey — through the stories of Jews with various backgrounds and experiences — in its latest show, “Traveler’s Prayer.”
Although it was first envisioned by The Braid’s founder and artistic director Ronda Spinak as a fun, breezy tour of the globe, she discovered the stories ran much deeper.
“In these times, many Jewish writers are seeing travel as more than just a fun time,” Spinak, who produced the show, said. “They’re exploring our people’s history and grappling with our place in the world.”
“Traveler’s Prayer” includes a hilarious, but cathartic, story by “Sex and the City” writer Cindy Chupack, a soul-searching one by novelist and playwright Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum and many others. As with The Braid’s salon shows, there will also be music; this one features Jewish songwriter Rhiannon Lewis.
Chupack said her piece, “Pussy Writes a Letter,” is one of the more irreverent stories to make it into a Braid show. One of her favorite essays, it first appeared as part of a longer essay in Chupack’s comic memoir, “The Longest Date: Life as a Wife.”
“It’s about a vacation in Thailand that my then-husband and I took while we were trying to get pregnant, which was a five-year process with a lot of heartbreak that finally ended with the adoption of our daughter,” Chupack told the Journal.
Chupack said she always loved to travel and took trips for various reasons.
“Not just to get away, but as a reset after leaving a job; a respite after getting my heart broken; a consolation prize when another round of IVF failed; or as an adventure where I know I will see, feel, appreciate and learn new things,” she said. “I’ve travelled alone, with girlfriends, with my mother and daughter and as a couple … and each trip has a story or lesson that becomes clear while you’re traveling.
Chupack hopes her story makes people laugh, think and feel.
“I hope it brings comfort to people who have endured or are enduring the long and often painful process of trying to have a child,” she said. “I’m really appreciative that The Braid brings stories like mine to new audiences in a new way.”
Rosenbaum believes there is something to be celebrated not only about traveling but also in discovering how varied the Jewish experience around the world.
“We are indeed Wandering Jews and this diversity within our own people is endlessly fascinating,” she told the Journal.
“We are indeed Wandering Jews and this diversity within our own people is endlessly fascinating.“
– Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
Rosenbaum’s story, “The Man in the Doorway,” is about an experience she had in the spring of her sophomore college year, as she wandered alone through a quaint Paris neighborhood. Raised in a secular Jewish family, she felt she had nothing in common with the bearded old Jew whose gaze briefly met hers as he stood in a doorway.
“The shock of reading the metal plaques on the buildings along this street memorializing the killing of its inhabitants by the Gestapo, made me realize the centrality of my Jewish identity for the first time,” she said. “Until that day in Paris, I considered my Jewishness a mere accident of birth, something as alien to my identity as the bearded old Jew in his black gabardine coat and yarmulka.”
Seeing those plaques above the doorways made her realize that, “like it or not, I’m a member of a historical people who should never allow the antisemites to define me as a Jew,” she said.
Rosenbaum said she wrote the piece to speak to people who feel as she once did, to ask them to wrestle with the question of what it means to be a Jew and hopefully, to discover deep meaning in it, as she has.
The cast of “Traveler’s Prayer” is Roni Geva (“Monsters,” “Law & Order”), Michael Naishtut (“Gene Simmons: Family Jewels”), Amy Tolsky (“Jury Duty,” “Mixed-ish”) and Jill Remez (“How to Get Away with Murder,” “Bosch: Legacy”), who also has a story in the show.
“My story is about me, as a young woman, visiting Europe for the first time and placing flowers on a family gravestone in Germany at the request of my grandmother who fled Germany in 1938,” Remez told the Journal. “It was a turning point in my life and will hopefully resonate with other children of immigrants, who perhaps were so steeped in their new American culture that they avoided the stories of the past generations.”
Remez said the experience changed her and her perspective on history and her family.
“I’ve seen the photo albums that my grandparents brought with them from Germany,” she said. “In the photos they seem so happy, they are proud and sometimes even silly … They are surrounded by friends and family, and then, suddenly, that life was gone.”
She added, “Seeing that gravestone really brought that all home to me; despite not actually knowing them, I will never forget them.”
For 17 years, The Braid has brought authentic Jewish stories to the stage. And this one is no exception.
Remez said that travel makes the world both larger and smaller.
“Larger, in the sense that we experience new cultures, languages, vistas, historic landmarks and ancient civilizations that rise and fall,” she said. “Smaller, in that we see how we are all the same, we love our families, friends and pets and we take pride in where we are from.”
“’Traveler’s Prayer’ recognizes how important it is for travel, how our mind and soul expands when we travel and that regardless of where we are, we always find home,” Todd Felderstein, Associate Director, “Traveler’s Prayer,” told the Journal.
“Traveler’s Prayer” runs from January 11 through February 6 in person in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, as well as live-on-Zoom. For schedule and details, go to the-braid.org/travelers.
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