New Prize for Yiddish Plays

The National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene is announcing a new play contest to encourage writers and directors to conceive and develop new works in Yiddish. The winning play or musical will be showcased during the first New York International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts, in 2015 to commemorate the centennial of Folksbiene (Yiddish for “people’s theater”), the longest continuously running Yiddish theater in the world.

The festival, announced last summer, is envisioned by theater officials as an ambitious week of concerts, film screenings and theater in many languages. Folksbiene, which is located in New York, still creates productions in the old language of Eastern and Central European Jews. It also has productions in English. Yiddish is a more than 1,000-year-old Germanic-based based language that has contributed terms like “oy vey” and “bagel” to the English vernaular.

“The purpose of the contest is to let Yiddish serve as a spark for creativity, to help find new, creative ways to explore the Jewish experience,” Bryna Wasserman, the executive director of Folksbiene, stated in announcing the contest. “Yiddish, despite its diminished role as a language of daily life, remains a cornerstone of Jewish identity.”

Contest submissions are being accepted through Sept. 1. (Visit www.nationalyiddishtheatre.org for guidelines.) New full-length plays or musicals, as well as mixed-media projects incorporating performance and music will be eligible.  Projects can be entirely or partially in Yiddish. Projects mostly in English will need to creatively incorporate Yiddish in different ways.

A short list of projects under consideration will be announced on Jan. 15, 2014.  These will be presented later in the spring as staged readings, which will be ev! aluated by Folksbiene’s jury. The winning project will be developed by Folksbiene for a premiere in June 2015. The jury now includes Emanuel Azenberg, the producer; Jason Robert Brown, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Parade”; and the playwrights Joe DiPietro (“Memphis”), Israel Horovitz and Jon Marans (“Old Wicked Songs”).