Steve Feffer

Loosely based and inspired by the 1923 film The Jazz Singer, No Punk on the Sabbath explores the predominance of Jewish artists in the New York underground alternative music scene of the mid-1970s, centered around the CBGBs punk club. Set in New York City in 1975-1976, the play tells the story of Sam "Savage" Rabinowitz, a cantor's son, who grapples with his jewish identity and family, as he begins to struggle with his own music and art down on the Bowery, a neighborhood that once belonged to his immigrant relatives, and now has become a bastion of alternative music and culture. The play is more of a play with music (as it calls for a live onstage punk band) than a musical in the strictest sense.

"Growin' Up: Or I Was a Teenage Bruce Springsteen!" is published in the anthology When the Promise Was Broken: Short Plays Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen, Smith and Kraus Theatre Books (New York, 2018). From the book's Forward by Craig Werner: "Funny and exuberant, Feffer's "Growin' Up" excavates one genealogy of Bruce's voice in a set of rollicking interchanges between the "Cosmic Kid" [a Catholic school age Bruce Springsteen] and two archetypal incarnations of Elvis Presley: the young Elvis whose music called Springsteen on his path and the late-period Elvis who has served as a cautionary example as Springsteen has both shaped and resisted his own myth."

Inspired by a significant and tragic moment in America's labor history, the Calumet Michigan Copper Mine Massacre of 1913, Strike Parade centers around a group of women, led by Annie "Big Annie" Clemenc, who are preparing a holiday pageant for the families of striking mine workers. This holiday pageant would end in the tragic deaths of 73 men, women and children after an anti-union agitator shouted "fire" in the crowded union hall where the event was taking place. The play is set in the Calumet Theatre where the holiday pageant is to take place and where ultimately the bodies from the massacre were interred, as the theatre was transformed into a make shift morgue. The first part of the play follows the women as they prepare for the holiday pageant and the second part of the play concerns the same women (those who lived) as they prepare for the funerals. The play's two protagonists are Annie "Big Annie" Clemec who becomes a leader in the labor movement, and a young reporter who is sent to cover the Copper Mine Strike.

AIN'T GOT NO HOME was first developed with a New Jewish Theatre Project Award from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture, and received a workshop production from the Whole Art Theatre in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

AIN'T GOT NO HOME is the story of Leonard Chess, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who founded the Chess Records label on Chicago's Southside in 1950, and his relationship with Muddy "Mississippi" Waters, the legendary bluesman from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, with who he made music history. Set between the years 1945 and 1969, the play traces the complex dynamics between these two men of enormous ambition, Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters, as they transform modern music, beginning in a Chicago tavern in the 1950s thru the turbulent 1960s. The play ultimately emerges as the story of two immigrants, each man attempting to stake a claim in an America where they may not otherwise fit or be accepted, as they negotiate racial and religious perceptions in the 1950s and 1960s, and those that continue to shape the cultural present in our own communities.

"Rock Hall" is a two-character, (a father, Nate [50s] and a son, Sam [late-teens]), twenty-minute play, set outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio in 2002. A former New York punk-rocker, now teaching high school English in Iowa, is called to Cleveland to pick up his estranged son, who has been busted at the Rock Hall for trying to steal Nate's historic t-shirt ("Please Destroy Me") from the museum's 25th anniversary of punk rock exhibit. The unexpected reunion forces the two to confront their too long-ignored relationship, as Nate examines where his life has gone after disappearing from New York and the CBGBs scene in the late-1970s and Sam tries to fill the hole that his absent father left in his life.

The House I Call Love is a play for young audiences that runs about an hour.

The play premiered in a full production at Stages Repertory Theatre (Houston, TX), where it was the first place winner of Stages Southwest Festival for New Plays--Theatre for Young Audiences Division. Additionally, the play has been presented in a full production on the Mainstage at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The House I Call Love tells the story of Sammy, a 10-year-old girl who tries to save her family home from a developer in order to preserve and honor the memory of her father. The house and Sammy soon become a growing cause célèbre to an increasingly strange group of interested parties that range from the local mayor to a major Hollywood producer and his stable of dysfunctional stars. The play explores memory, as Sammy discovers through the musical heritage of the house (though the play is not a musical), how her father first fell in love there and legacy of that love to his family.

Published by Dramatists Play Service. The play takes place in various locations around New York City and a Congressional Committee hearing room in Washington D.C. between the winter of 1956 and the winter of 1959. Herbert Stempel, a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish ex-GI from Forest Hills, New York, and a genius with a 170 IQ, watches the quiz show 21 in his living room and effortlessly answers the questions on the television. He is persuaded by his wife, Toby, to apply for the show and is quickly accepted by the show's producer, Daniel Enright. Enright encourages Herb to play up his character as the penniless ex-GI, attending the free City College of New York. He is also told that, because of his genius, he will have to be told when to miss answers in order to create suspense for the viewers. Herb becomes the first big winner on the show and begins to see himself as hero for the Jewish people and all of society's more downtrodden. When Herb's success peaks, Enright offers Herb another job and asks him to lose to Charles Van Doren by missing a question about his favorite movie, Marty. Herb resists losing to Van Doren, whom he sees as everything that he is not—but could be—on a question about a movie that he relates to so personally. After much self-examination that includes a visit from the fictional movie character Marty and a talk with his friend and barber, Gordon, Herb takes the dive. Unable to deal with life after celebrity, amid broken promises from Enright and the rise of Van Doren's fame, Herb attempts to expose the scandal. After doubts are cast about Herb's sanity, his claims against Van Doren's integrity and Enright's own mounting offensive, the scandal finally breaks, and Washington hearings are called. It is there that Herb expects to find retribution as the whistle blower, only to discover that Van Doren is elevated once again.
Based on the true story of the quiz show scandal of the 1950s, fantasy and reality blend to tell the story of television's loss of innocence and the high cost of fame. "…Feffer has captured the emotional force of that frightened moment when an entire country realized it was being fooled into caring about an extended commercial for Geritol." —Philadelphia City Paper. "Feffer finds media morality play and brittle tragicomedy in [THE WIZARDS OF QUIZ], telling a good stage yarn without heavy reliance on documentary crutches." —Chicago Tribune.