After a sold-out 2019 season, Theater and Theology prepares for its Spring 2020 production...
MIRACLE ON S. DIVISION STREET
a comedy about what happens when we begin to question miracles
by the playwright who brought you Off the Derech Dolorosa,
TOM DUDZICK
Direction by Yael Valier / Design & Consultation by John Krug
Coming to the Khan Theater, Jerusalem, in the spring of 2020
Performance dates: May 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 26, 27
June 2, 3, 4, 10, 11
Fresh from its off-Broadway run at St. Luke's Theatre, Miracle on South Division Street is the story of the Nowak family, living amidst the urban rubble of Buffalo, NY’s East Side. Maybe the neighborhood is depressed, but not Clara, the family matriarch. She happily runs her soup kitchen and tends to the family heirloom – a twenty-foot shrine to the Blessed Mother which adjoins the house. This neighborhood beacon of faith commemorates the day in 1942 when the Blessed Virgin Mary materialized in her father’s barber shop! When the play opens, a family meeting is in progress. Daughter Ruth divulges her plan to finally “go public” with the family miracle by creating a one-woman play about the sacred event. But during the course of the meeting, the entire family’s faith is shaken when hitherto hidden information causes the family legend to begin to unravel. The results are thought-provoking, heartfelt, and hilarious.
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I chose to produce Tom Dudzick's deceptively naive Miracle on South Division Street
because, with humor and mercy, it gently unearths issues that all religions and religious people have to deal with. What happens when science, or academia, or our own curiosity holds a magnifying glass to our beliefs and forces us to pay attention? Can we maintain both belief and intellectual honesty? If so, how?
I greatly look forward to bringing Tom Dudzick's wonderful play to the Jerusalem stage and to inviting audiences to join me and my guest scholars in debating the issues after every performance.
Yael Valier
Creative Director
Scenes from current and previous productions
