“A Celebration of Life: Confessions of a Jewish Shiksa” – A Dramatic Gem
By Marla E. Schwartz
An autobiographical gem that will fill your heart with laughter and
bring you to tears; tears of joy, reflection and hope that a woman whose parent’s survived the Holocaust, immigrated to Canada and were so persecuted they felt the need to hide their Jewish identities forever by attempting to blend into a gentile neighborhood.
“Confessions of a Jewish Shiksa”. An oxymoron – yes. For those who need a translation from Yiddish to English, shiksa is slang for a gentile woman. So, how can someone be a Jewish Gentile? Well it’s possible and a play has been written about it and you shouldn’t miss it!
“A Celebration of Life: Confessions of a Jewish Shiksa” is a one-woman show that recently played to packed houses at the West Boca Theatre Company at the Levis JCC in Boca Raton last month and will soon open at The Colony Theater in South Beach.
Frannie Sheridan, a West Palm Beach resident wrote and performs in this solo-show with characters based on her family members. In fact, she dedicates the show to her parents and siblings as she remembers her atypical childhood with sincerity, humor, and deep affection.
The play opens with a haunting selection by composer Michael Yannette, as Frannie walks onto the stage. “Once upon a time there was a little girl and her family, who were always hiding. You see both my parents were Jewish, but they raised us as Catholic. The thing is – they looked and sounded as Catholic as kreplach.”
She begins to talk about her father Bernie, who during Christmas time tried to imitate the Ho, Ho, Ho’s of Santa Claus, but instead would say “Oy, Oy, Oy – do you have problems.” And people say there’s no such thing as a Jewish Santa. Bernie Siegal was the myth come true.
There you have the premise of a story about a little girl who had NO idea that her parents were Jews until she found out very innocently one day when she was still a child. The fact of the matter is how sad it was for her entire family to be living in such a self-imposed environment. And how brave it is of Frannie to be telling this story of survival and a miracle that she’s even alive in the first place to tell it.
It’s imperative that every Holocaust survivor should be treated with kid gloves because of the unspeakable horrors they witnessed, survived and due to the sheer magnitude of harm done to their psyches is something that people cannot even quantify – and there’s no doubt that the terror they endured is passed onto the next generation. And Frannie, who is part of the next generation, has admirably told this story from her unique perspective. Her story is told with such dignity and grace that every theatre, synagogue, church and congregation around the world should be telling it.
You get the idea of the story … but without ruining the entire plot and giving away all the juicy nuggets – the best way to experience it is to see it for yourself. After the show the stage lights were brought up so Frannie could take questions from the audience. One audience member asked her whether she lived as a Catholic or as a Jew before writing this play.
“Well, I always thought that my parents were posturing as Catholics when I was a little girl so even though I had closet Catholic experiences, in a sense it was never a persecuted realm for me to live in. Though I never felt Catholic, because you know when your parents are pretending,” Frannie explained. “My parents were really visibly and audibly Yiddishkeit (which literally means “Jewishness”, i.e. “a Jewish way of life”, in the Yiddish language), but we were going to church. I went to a boarding school that was Anglican, and I didn’t have a religious identity until I started writing this play in 1995. The original version of this play was called The Waltonsteins and that changed my life.”
Shari Upbin marvelously directs the current version of the play. Shari is also directing the exciting Timeless Divas! Series that’s now on tour as Broadway Live!
Tickets for the production at The Colony Theater at 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach, Saturday March 13, 8 PM and Sunday, March 17, 7 PM are on sale now. Please call the box office for more information: 305-674-1040, ext. 1; and check out this website for more all things Frannie: www.FrannieSheridan.com.
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A native of Toledo, OH and a graduate of Kent State, Marla E. Schwartz has been a professional journalist since her teenage years and is a Senior Writer for Miami Living Magazine, and a freelance writer for CRAVINGS South Florida in Aventura, as well as Around Wellington Magazine and Lighthouse Point Magazine. An avid photographer, her images have appeared in numerous Ohio publications, as well as in Miami Living, The Miami Herald, The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post. She has had numerous plays published and produced around the country. Her short play, America’s Working? was originally read at First Stage in Los Angeles and in the same city produced at the Lone Star Ensemble. It was then produced at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL and then taken to an Off-Broadway playhouse by its producers Adam and Carrie Simpson. Her piece, The Lunch Time Café, was a finalist for the Heideman Award, Actors Theatre of Louisville. Feel free to contact her at: meschwartz1@hotmail.com.