New TheatreWorks play time-travels through Passover Seder feasts
"In Every Generation," presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, touches on one family's Passover Seder feasts in several different eras.
It’s appropriate that Ali Viterbi’s multi-generational, time-hopping play “In Every Generation” is centered around Passover. With its signature Seder feast, the week-long spring holiday celebrates the Jewish people’s escape from slavery in Egypt with an eye toward the resonance of the story for the present and the future.
“Passover has always been my very favorite holiday,” Viterbi says. “I always found that there was so much inherent pageantry and theatricality baked into the holiday. It’s a holiday all about storytelling.”
Viterbi has been writing annual skits for her own family’s Seders since she was 12 years old.
“It was the year ‘The Passion of the Christ’ came out, and that was obviously a big conversation in Jewish communities at the time,” she recalls. “I wrote ‘The Passion of Moses.’ I can’t say it was my best play, but it was certainly memorable.”
Now making its West Coast premiere with TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Viterbi’s new play follows one family through its Passover celebrations in four different time periods: 2019, 1954, 2050 and during the Exodus itself.
“I was really drawn to this line in the Passover Haggadah, which is the text that you follow as you go through the Seder: ‘In every generation one is obligated to see themselves as if they personally had left Egypt,’” Viterbi says. “Ritual is tradition, but it’s also time travel. It connects us magically and instantaneously to both the past and the future.”
The play also has roots in much more current events.
“I started writing this play in 2017 in the wake of the Charlottesville march, when it became clear that antisemitism was once again on the rise in America, and when the question of whether White American Jews were White was foregrounded in conversations around contemporary American Jewish identity,” Viterbi says. “These questions got me thinking a lot about what happened to the Israelites after the Exodus from Egypt, after they escaped slavery, when they were no longer enslaved but they weren’t quite free either. That felt like a really powerful metaphor for the state of Jews in our country and globally today.”
“In Every Generation” premiered at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater last April. Its second production was scheduled for San Diego Repertory Theatre last May but was canceled right before performances were to start. A month later, San Diego Rep suspended operations and laid off its entire staff.
In September Victory Gardens also dismissed its staff and announced its intention to transition from a producing organization to a presenting venue, the latest chapter in a long conflict between that theater’s board and staff over the firing of its artistic director.
“We were the last show that had a full run, which was a blessing, and then things kind of exploded,” Viterbi says. “So, you know, third time’s the charm. I’m trying not to think that my play is cursed, but rather that there’s larger, deeper institutional issues with theater in this country right now. But TheatreWorks has been a terrific partner, and I’m very excited to see it come to fruition.”
The play has changed a lot over time, especially its vision of the not-so-far future.
“A lot has changed for American Jews in those six years (since she started writing the piece), most notably the shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and in Poway. I’m from San Diego, so that one hit really close to home,” says Viterbi. “And so the play has transformed a lot in how it talks about antisemitism, how it talks about race, how it talks about the future of the Jewish people and our country at large.”
The contemporary section remains set in 2019, in part because Viterbi didn’t want to introduce COVID into the play.
“That’s not what this play was ever about or wanted to be about,” she says. “And I have the added challenge of two Holocaust survivor grandparents that are a large part of the story. It was important that I lock it in a time when there were still survivors of the Holocaust around to tell the story.”
Still, the intervening COVID years can’t help but inform the experience of the play, Viterbi says.
“I think the themes of community and family and gathering and the necessity of having community in order to make meaning became so much more alive in the wake of the pandemic.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘IN EVERY GENERATION’
By Ali Viterbi, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
When: Jan. 18-Feb. 12
Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View
Tickets: $30-$85; www.theatreworks.org