Treif
Playwright Lindsay Joelle
TREIF
Shmuely and Zalmy are like any typical twenty-year-old bros—they drive a cool truck, they talk about girls, they geek out over music… Except the truck they drive is a Mitzvah Tank, their dates are arranged by a matchmaker, and their music is chanted in Yiddish by a 90 year-old Chassidic rebbe who may soon be revealed as the Messiah. When Jonathan busts into their truck claiming to have a Jewish soul mistakenly born in a gentile body, he brings with him the allure of the secular world he’s desperate to leave behind. As Shmuely and Zalmy integrate him into orthodoxy, their Mitzvah Tank is caught dead center in neighborhood race riots between the Jewish and Afro-Caribbean communities, catalyzing revelations that will either hasten the coming of Moshiach or tear their friendships apart forever.
Inspired by the true stories of current and former Chabad-Lubavitch Jews, Treif is a road trip/buddy comedy that asks how hard you have to believe in order to belong.
HERE'S A BIG QUESTION: IS THERE REALLY A "JEWISH SOUL"?
“We often get plays that look at observant Jews trying to get out of their restrictive community. Lindsay gives us someone with good reasons to want to get in. That’s the kind of new version of an old story that I love. ”
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Lindsay Joelle is an NYC-based playwright and lyricist. Her work has been produced or developed through The Lark, the Hunter Playwriting MFA, The New School for Drama, Vital Theater, TADA! Youth Theater, 20% Theatre/JCC, and Primary Stages/ESPA. Her plays have been finalists at the Eugene O’Neill NPC (’14. ’15), UMass New Play Lab (’15), Jewish Plays Project (’16), and received the Anne Freedman Student Theatre Grant and Irving Zarkower Award for Best New Play of the Year (’15). Additional writing includes restaurant reviews for New York Magazine’s Grubstreet and interactive mental and behavioral health trainings for hospitals and universities across the country. Lindsay is an alumna of Columbia University, the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, and is currently mentored by Arthur Kopit and Sam Hunter. www.Lindsayjoelle.com
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