Αγαπητές φοιτήτριες, αγαπητοί φοιτητές,
ο καθηγητής θεατρολογίας του Πανεπιστημίου του Μιζούρι David Crespy, που σύντομα θα δώσει μια ανοιχτή ομιλία στο Τμήμα μας, ψάχνει άτομα με καλά αγγλικά για μία ονλάιν ανάγνωση του τελευταίου του έργου. Πληροφορίες ακολουθούν – όποια/ος ενδιαφέρεται μπρεί να επικοινωνήσει μαζί του στο μέηλ crespyd@missouri.edu.
CALL FOR ACTORS for FULBRIGHT PRESENTATION :
Four Actors are needed for a reading (in English) of David Crespy’s Las Semillias de la Expulsión, a ten-minute play to be read via Zoom on Thursday, March 16, 19:00 (time is to be finalized). No memorization is necessary – this will be an online, Zoom reading for the Fulbright Greece community.
SYNOPSIS: This the first ten-pages of a full-length play Las Semillias de la Expulsión, which will be part of my six play cycle, Mi Corazón Español Vive Ahora En Grecia: Six Plays of Sephardic Spain & Greece. It takes place in Thessaloniki with Sephardic Jews Allegra Parente (a Holocaust Survivor) and her daughter, Bolisa, contemplating their future. In the process, Bolisa asks about her grandmother, her Nona, Doudoun Toledano (who died at Auschwitz). Doudoun, as a young woman, gathered stories of Old Spain from Sephardim around the Mediterranean as she taught French for the Alliance Israelite Universelle, during the time of the Ottoman, Empire. Doudoun herself appears mystically, as a ghost of the Holocaust, at this moment, and offers to share these stories with Bolisa, and this short version of the play ends with Bolisa stepping into the past with her Nona (and off of her mother Allegra’s balcony!). This starts the cycle of stories about the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It is “seasoned” with a bit of Ladino songs – which would not have to sung – just spoken. The play explores the trials of Abraham Senyor, Crown Rabbi of Castile, and Isaac Abarbenal – the great father of the Sephardic Exile as they wrestle with the reality of the 1492 Alhambra Decree which gave Jews and Muslims three choices with regard to their continued presence in Spain – Convert, Leave, or Die!
I would need four actors, mostly women, and anyone in the Fulbright Greece community who would like to perform is great (you do not have to be a professional actor – just enthusiastic!). We would schedule also two 1.5 hour Zoom rehearsals (dates TBD) just to practice the language and get our performances up to speed. Actors do NOT need to memorize their lines. The roles are:
ALLEGRA PARENTE 55, tough older businesswoman, survivor of Auschwitz, having struggled to help her husband’s textile business for years (after inheriting the wreckage of her father’s business after the Holocaust), now dealing with his sudden death, and the burgeoning needs of her only daughter, born later in life, who desperately wants to go to college. She’s mostly hidden from her sisters what happened to her during the war.
BOLISA PARENTE 18, Allegra’s daughter, born late in her mother’s life; gifted, intelligent, ambitious, works in her parents’ textile business, longs to go to college in the US, but is concerned her mother has become unstable in her grief over her father’s death.
DOUDOUN VITALE 61, Allegra’s mother, an older, fiercer version of the idealist and teacher she once was, murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz; a ghost of the Holocaust, forgetting nothing, seeking remembrance for her life, and the lives of all Sephardic Jews. She is an untrustworthy narrator – perhaps darkly so. Actor would need to sing Adio Querida.
STAGE DIRECTIONS READER – Actor to read the stage directions as a kind of narrator.
SETTING: The apartment and balcony of ALLEGRA & BOLISA PARENTE looking over the Port of Thessaloniki in 1957.
