The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok

Chaim Potok

Edited with an Introduction by Rena Potok

Contributions by David Bassuk, Carol Rocamora, and Aaron Posner

Adam Kadmon Books

Hardcover with dust jacket
978-1-939681-78-2
US $26.95
Ebook
978-1-939681-79-9
US $14.99

While Chaim Potok is most famous for his novels, particularly his first book The Chosen (1967)—which was listed on The New York Times bestseller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies—he also wrote plays, which are collected and published here for the first time. Rena Potok edited the collection and wrote the introduction. This book features all five of Potok’s plays, production notes on each of the plays, prefaces by the directors, and the transcript of a post-performance discussion on Out of the Depths featuring Chaim Potok and Prof. David Roskies, which appears for the first time in print, in this volume.

Includes:

Out of the Depths (Performed in Philadelphia in 1990. The last version was a 1990 video of the staged workshop performance. The play was reconstructed for this collection by Rena Potok and David Bassuk, the play’s director and co-creator, based on the video and on the final rehearsal script.)

Sins of the Father: The Carnival and The Gallery (Performed in Philadelphia in 1990. Adapted from scenes in Chaim Potok’s novels The Promise and My Name is Asher Lev.)

The Play of Lights (Performed in Philadelphia in 1992. Adapted from Chaim Potok’s novel The Book of Lights.)

The Chosen (Premiered in 1999 and performed widely since then. Adapted from the novel of the same name into a play by Chaim Potok and Aaron Posner. This volume contains the most recent authorized version of the play.)

CHAIM POTOK (1929-2002) is the author of nine novels, including The Chosen, My Name is Asher Lev, Davita’s Harp, and I Am the Clay. He also wrote fiction for young adults (Zebra and Other Stories), children’s books (The Tree of Here and The Sky of Now), a collection of novellas (Old Men at Midnight), biographies of Isaac Stern and Vladimir Slepak, and Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, along with numerous essays and short stories. An ordained rabbi, he served as a U.S. Army chaplain in Korea. The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok is the first volume of his plays to be published.

RENA POTOK is a writer, editor, and educator. Her articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in many publications, including Religion and Literature; The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature; Borders, Exiles, Diasporas; and Contemporary Women Poets. She is the former senior acquisitions editor at the Jewish Publication Society, and is the editor of Hills of Spices: Poetry from the Bible as well as the 50th-anniversary critical edition of The Chosen by Chaim Potok. In 2017 she was a Fiction Fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She teaches literature and writing at Villanova University.

DAVID BASSUK is professor of theater arts at Purchase College. Previously, he was artistic director of Novel Stages Theater Company and Arcadia Shakespeare Festival in Philadelphia, and co-artistic director of Ark Theater Company in Los Angeles. He has directed many productions, among them Cat’s Cradle, a musical by Kurt Vonnegut; an Off-Broadway production of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen; and “American Camera” at Lincoln Center.

AARON POSNER is a theater director, teacher, and playwright. His adaptations of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev have had more than 100 productions, both in the United States and abroad. His other plays and adaptations include Stupid Fucking Bird, Life Sucks, No Sisters, District Merchants, JQA, and Sometimes A Great Notion. He has directed at major regional theater companies throughout the United States.

CAROL ROCAMORA is an educator, translator, playwright, director, and critic. She founded the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays at Annenberg Center, where she produced and directed three world-premiere plays by Chaim Potok. She is the author of seven books, and has served on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for the past 25 years. She is a member of the American Theater Critics Association, the Outer Critics Circle, and Drama Desk.