←Recommendations of TRAYF

We often get plays that look at observant Jews trying to get out of their restrictive community. Lindsay gives us someone with good reasons to want to get in. That’s the kind of new version of an old story that I love.

I read this hilarious play years ago but getting to (finally) see it on the Geffen stage, it has bloomed even further into one of the most beautiful plays I've gotten to experience. The characters' desires run so deep. The dialogue is stunning. The scenes are economic and precise. And the reversals hit hard. The exploration of faith is profound and the (rare) depictions of male friendship are the most tender and moving I've ever seen.

Joelle's characters are so funny, so completely realized and so real. Full of heart and love. The great success of your play is that it taps into the universal through the specific. The specific experience of Zalmy and Shmuel’s devotion to the Rebbe will only be shared by a minority but the obsession of two passionate teenagers, the trials and tribulations of finding yourself in the world, the strains of friendship as new people enter a tightly defined dynamic or when a someone you love begins to change – these are all things an audience can relate to. Excellent work!

An incredible and humorous play about the double life of an orthodox follower. The unquenchable desire to live adventurously, but with an enormous pressure to fit into a very specific mold. A powerful story of discovery and friendship!

Lindsay Joelle has a playful ear for language, informed with a deep cultural anthropology, so that her dialogue evokes a world in which Chabadniks brush up against periphery of the Jewish world, in which traditional forms of Judaism encounter the secular world, even if just to pose questions to one another. I was pleased to catch the opening scene in a reading presented Jewish Plays Project and later to review the world premiere:
https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2018/06/06/review-trayf-a-world-premiere…

I want to hang out with Zalmy and Shmuel and their Mitzvah Tank all day. TRAYF is such a beautiful, human, and warm story about two 19-year-old orthodox kids just trying to figure things out and I loved every minute of it. I would absolutely love to see this play staged one day. Thank you, Lindsay!

Wonderfully funny and human play about a very specific kind of Jew living in a very specific kind of community that we don't often see onstage, and I really appreciated how deeply Joelle dives into questions of faith and authenticity in this comedy that never feels slick or reductive - instead I cared very deeply for all of the characters and what they are each trying to do. Mazel Tov - it's a play to kvell about!

A wonderful play, saturated with the atmosphere of Chasidic Brooklyn. Best friends Shmuel and Zalmy, who drive around in a “Mitzvah Tank” that is like a portable shul, at first sound like a Jewish version of Gogo and Didi in their loquacious repartee. But once Jonathan, a young Catholic man, finds them and wishes to discover his inner Judaism, rifts occur between the two Chasids and they find their friendship tested. The play, which also depicts Jonathan’s girlfriend who rejects her Judaism as a “liability,” asks how to live a frum existence in a world full of secular challenges.

This play is so much fun!!! I really hope it gets produced all over. While being about such a specific culture, this play is able to convey a theme of longing for more out of life that we all can empathize with. More faith-based plays like this need to be written.

What a great play! Funny, complex, incisive. Investigates many difficult questions without presuming answers. Fun dialogue. Full of deep longing.