Sheldon Wolf

Elderly friends and neighbors, Ben and Estelle, have met every day for coffee and cake. This play occurs during their last ten minutes together before Ben is taken by his son to a senior facility.

This dark comedy occurs during the 10 minutes a newly-released cardiac patient and his estranged wife wait with an attendant for their car to take them home.

ACT 1
In the early twentieth century, many impoverished inner-city Jews in the Northeast were looking for a way out of economic despair. Encouraged by Philadelphia Jewish community leaders, the charismatic Benjamin Brown convinces a ragtag group of these Zionists, atheists, religious conservatives, socialists and others to join him in establishing a farm in what turns out to be a desolate patch of land south of Salt Lake City. Bookkeeper Irving Herbst provides some reasoned balance to this inexperienced group. They lack agricultural knowledge (one person took one course at the Jewish Farm School), but they are high in spirit and hope, even in the face of Mormon neighbors, drought and the State of Utah’s inability to complete a promised canal. Nevertheless, they sing, they plan, they dream.

ACT 2
Bit by bit the dream falls apart. Herbst, who narrates the story, is unable to talk sense to Brown. Brown tries every ruse to extract money from investors and to keep the colony together. The hurdles to success on the land prove too high and the Jewish farmers cannot sustain their experiment. Herbst moves on. Others move on. Brown, still dreaming, helps start a soon-to-be failed colony in New Jersey. Yet, the story is one of hope and determination to better oneself and a take pride in one’s history. As Herbst realizes at the end, when Brown dies a young man, that they dreamed and struggled against insurmountable odds and beyond reason, and that is their legacy. They tried. They lived.

MIRACLE PLAY is a Native American vision quest, a journey toward faith, incorporating Lakota religion and tradition, some song and dance, and various types of story-telling. Portions of the play are in Lakota language.

We learn part way through Act One, that David Taylor, is telling his life story to his doctor. David, age 22, is a Lakota on a quest. He has received the unlikely news that he has a rare and deadly brain tumor, a cancer that most often strikes men in their 50s. What are the odds? He has been told that he is a candidate for a dangerous experimental treatment, one which has only a miniscule chance of leaving him alive but even then perhaps in a vegetative state. What to do? Before he responds with his choice, he has asked for several days, days he spends searching for himself, searching for his heritage, and searching for an answer to the most horrific of questions about life.

David travels to an abandoned town in South Dakota, on the edge of the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, where a former 60s radical collects junk and stories as he awaits the next revolution. Two other visitors arrive that same day. One is an elderly geology instructor, an emeritus professor, returning to South Dakota on a bus tour after the death of his wife. The other is a young woman from Eastern Europe who now works for an American conglomerate that is buying all the nearby property to create a theme park, a Wild West money-making fantasy.

Four most unlikely characters meet in South Dakota. What are the odds?

Ultimately, the resolution is to create a miracle that will imbue the place with a sense of sacredness. What corporation would go up against that? And that same miracle, impossible, something beyond logic…faith… gives David the tiny shred of hope he needs.

The play happens now (in the doctor’s office) and then (in South Dakota) simultaneously.

In this ten minute play, a long-estranged mother and daughter meet just briefly at a bridal salon prior to the daughter's wedding. For most of the piece, the daughter is hidden in the dressing room, but when she finally reveals herself, we discover that she is more like her wayward mother than either might like to admit.

What happens to the people who are left behind? On the surface, SHUL is the story of the last few members of a desolate old synagogue in a desolate old inner-city neighborhood. On the day of the play, the elder members—surviving behind the mask of humor —gather to decide the fate of the congregation. They are unable to decide, unable to move. Yet, through their jokes, their stories, their heartaches, their tears, they reveal themselves to each other, forming a bond of community that helps them face the next day…even as the ceiling of their Shul is falling in.

At first I thought this was “just” a Jewish play, but several of the early readers and many audience members at SHUL’s two readings told me, “That’s my church!” “That’s my town.” “That’s my organization, my club, my family. I know these people.” And ultimately: “That’s me—unable to move and unable to decide.” SHUL, is about us, about the challenge of change.