Talisa Friedman

Talisa Friedman

Talisa is the author of several plays and screenplays. Her most recent work, WHO BY FIRE, won the 2021 National Jewish Playwriting Competition and was one of three finalists for Monumental Theater’s New Work Series at the Kennedy Center. She is also an actress and singer, and has appeared at The Old Globe, Arena Stage, the A.R.T., and on TV and film.

Originally from Washington, DC, she spent...
Talisa is the author of several plays and screenplays. Her most recent work, WHO BY FIRE, won the 2021 National Jewish Playwriting Competition and was one of three finalists for Monumental Theater’s New Work Series at the Kennedy Center. She is also an actress and singer, and has appeared at The Old Globe, Arena Stage, the A.R.T., and on TV and film.

Originally from Washington, DC, she spent formative years of her childhood in Pretoria, South Africa. She majored in English at Harvard, where she was awarded the Jonathan Levy Prize for Acting, the David McCord Prize for the Arts, and was a member of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and the Signet Society of Arts & Letters. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Plays

  • Baby
    Three freshmen with conflicting visions for their college experience bond, clash and betray each other as they navigate their new-found independence and what it means to have power in this world.
  • Who By Fire
    Len and Jules Feinstein are your standard progressive, not-particularly-religious DC-area Jews. So when their eldest child Eliza brings her Black boyfriend Everett home for Yom Kippur break fast, there’s no issue. Sure, the dog attacks him (“I’ve only seen him bark like that at the mailman”) and the quantity of African artifacts around the house feel a little appropriative, but it’s nothing too alarming. The...
    Len and Jules Feinstein are your standard progressive, not-particularly-religious DC-area Jews. So when their eldest child Eliza brings her Black boyfriend Everett home for Yom Kippur break fast, there’s no issue. Sure, the dog attacks him (“I’ve only seen him bark like that at the mailman”) and the quantity of African artifacts around the house feel a little appropriative, but it’s nothing too alarming. The biggest “problem” is that the family seems skeptical of the film that Eliza and Everett are collaborating on...but maybe they just don’t get it.

    Tensions ramp up over the next few family gatherings. Abby, the youngest child, still can’t find a job; middle son Noah has an Asian-American girlfriend; Len’s sister might be embarrassingly racist. Amidst the minefield of these minor family dramas, however, a real tragedy begins to unfold that turns the lives of the Feinsteins on their heads. In the subsequent months, each family member finds themselves navigating a newly-fraught existence—none more so than Eliza, who begins to question every construct in her life and cling to the religion she once had all but abandoned.