HOLOCAUST MUSEUM LA PARTNERS
WITH JEWISH PLAYS PROJECT TO HOST SECOND ANNUAL
 LA JEWISH PLAYWRITING CONTEST

 ‘American Idol’ Style Format Features Excerpts From
Three National Finalists and Audience Vote to Select Winner

 In partnership with the Jewish Plays Project and the Wilshire Ebell Theatre Los Angeles, Holocaust Museum LA presents the second annual Los Angeles Jewish Playwriting Contest, a combination of “American Idol,” a play reading and a Ted Talk, Wednesday, May 13, at 7 p.m. at the Ebell.

This unique event will feature 20-minute excerpts from three plays, which are finalists in the national Jewish Playwriting Contest. Each play is introduced by a video from the playwright, and then the audience votes to select a winner. 

The Los Angeles Jewish Playwriting Contest is executive produced by Lauren Schaffel and co-produced by Jeremy Aluma, Melanie Anthony, Matthew Bohrer, Rachel Berney Needleman, Emily Nash and Jacob Surovsky with Jonah Platt as an honorary producer. Other community partners are The Braid, The Road Theatre Company and The Last Acting Studio. The evening will be directed by Illana Stein and Jeremy Aluma and hosted by Stein.

Over 50 Los Angeles community readers, including actors, directors, community members and theater lovers, met for several weeks to read, discuss and narrow down the finalist plays for the LA contest:

• “Flatbush Lysistrata” by Lila Rachel Becker: Three Hasidic women gather at an axe-throwing parlor to plan a sex strike.

• “A Play About a Baby Carrot” by Juliet Roll: A grieving mother starts to see her child in an unexpected place in this absurdist comedy set over the seven days of Shiva.

• “This Place Stinks” by Jacob Surovsky: Noah chooses to destroy his family to save the world. Noah will be played by Jonah Platt, actor, activist and creator and host of the podcast “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt.”

The results of the Los Angeles event will go toward selecting the national winner, which will be chosen at the National Finals at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia on Monday, June 29 (live streaming of the finals will be available to all LA Contest attendees). 

The Jewish Plays Project is holding similar contest readings in cities around the U.S., Canada and Israel, including Palo Alto, Houston, Philadelphia, Hartford, New York, Boston, Toronto and Ra’anana, Israel.

The Jewish Plays Project seeks to discover, highlight and nurture contemporary Jewish drama by engaging with artistic and Jewish communities throughout the English-speaking world. In its 15-year history, the Jewish Plays Project has received and vetted over 2,800 plays by 1,800 writers in 34 states and 10 countries. The Jewish Plays Project has actively developed 66 of those plays, 45 of which have gone on to productions in cities across the globe, including New York, Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv, playing for more than 140,000 audience members. The 15^th National Jewish Playwriting Contest is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information and tickets, visit https://holocaustmuseumla.org/event-details/los-angeles-jewish-playwriting-contest-1.

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About Holocaust Museum LA

Holocaust Museum LA is the first survivor-founded and oldest Holocaust Museum in the United States and houses the West Coast’s largest collection of Holocaust-era artifacts. Since 1961, the museum has carried on the mission of the founding survivors to commemorate those who perished, educate future generations about the Holocaust, and inspire a more dignified and humane world. When open, museum admission is free for all teachers, students and children under 17 and is also free for visitors all day Sunday. A mobile guide to the museum that can be used both on-site and off-site and can be accessed through the Bloomberg Connects app or downloaded on Google Play or the App store. https://holocaustmuseumLA.org/

About The Jewish Plays Project

The Jewish Plays Project, founded in 2011, identifies, develops and presents new works of theater via one-of-a-kind explorations of contemporary Jewish identity between audiences, artists and patrons. The JPP’s innovative and competitive development process engages Jewish communities in the vetting, selecting and championing of new voices and secures mainstream production opportunities for the best new plays.

https://jewishplaysproject.org

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