Tree of Life
Tree of Life
by Victor Wishna
A declining, small-town Iowa synagogue welcomes a surprising visitor, as the tale of its origins—and its Torah’s mysterious past—unfolds contiguously, a century before.
Development History:
Private Reading
JPP Development:
2022 Jewish Playwriting Contest
Victor Wishna is a husband, father, author, editor, playwright, and commentator, among other things. As a dramatist (and comedist), he has composed nearly a dozen plays, several of which have been staged in multiple time zones. His play DNR was recently produced at The Living Room Theatre in Kansas City, and was named a semi-finalist in the Blue Ink Playwriting Competition at the American Blues Theater in Chicago. His first full-length play, Shearwater, was selected as a winner of the Panndora’s Box Festival of New Works in Long Beach, California, and a finalist in Playhouse on the Square’s New Works @ The Works Playwriting Competition in Memphis. He has also written extensively about theatre, and is the author of In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights (Umbrage Editions, 2006), a collection of his interviews with 61 prominent stage writers from Edward Albee to August Wilson, which won an Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal. He served as the inaugural artistic director for the Midwest Dramatists Center, a regional playwright incubator based in Kansas City. A graduate of Stanford University and the New School’s creative writing MFA program, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, and other major publications, and is a regular contributor to KCUR-FM, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate. In 2010, Victor was named New York’s second-funniest amateur Jewish comedian by The Jewish Week. Seriously.