“Yearning to Breathe Free,” the latest show from Los Angeles-based Jewish theater company The Braid, takes its title from Emma Lazarus’ famous poem posted at the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
A recording of Australian-born musician Shelley Rosenberg singing an original song with lyrics from the poem opens the show, which features four actors telling nine true stories of Jewish immigrants living in the United States.
“They’re all performing authentic stories written by other writers, but you can’t tell from their performances because you would swear that this is their personal stories,” Susan Morgenstern, The Braid’s producing director, told J. “In addition, all our stories are put into present tense, so that nobody is telling a past tense story. You’re all in the moment.”
“Yearning to Breathe Free” will be presented Saturday, April 13, at Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto and Sunday, April 14, at Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos. The show will also be performed live on Zoom on Sunday, April 7.
The writers of the stories have family roots in Chile, China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Turkey and Ukraine. In “The Last Seder,” André Aciman, the bestselling author of books including “Call Me By Your Name” and “Out of Egypt,” describes his family’s last Passover in Egypt before they left for Italy in 1965. Marcelo Tubert, a Jewish Argentinian American actor, performs the piece.
The closing piece, “How José Ignacio Maria de Jesús San Juan e Ynduráin Learned to Dance the Hora,” is adapted from a story by Bárbara Mujica, professor emerita of Spanish at Georgetown University. Actors Kimberly Green, Heidi Mendez and Roxana Rastegar perform the piece with Tubert as an ensemble.
“It’s about a Latin, Catholic family whose daughter comes home and announces that she’s marrying an Orthodox Jew, and the ripple effects of that,” Morgenstern said. “It’s hilariously funny.”
Other story contributors include psychologist Natasha Bogopolskaya, who immigrated with her family from Ukraine to San Francisco when she was 7 and currently lives in Los Angeles; queer writer and clown Danielle Levsky, whose parents were refugees from Ukraine; Vanessa Bloom, a Chinese American leader of LUNAR Collective; Aharon Zagayer, who was born in Baghdad and fled to Israel with his family when he was a baby, then immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s; screenwriter Odin Pinhas Ozdil, who immigrated from Turkey to Detroit with his family when he was 6; Latina activist Emiliana Guereca Zeidenfeld; and three writers with Persian heritage: Esther Amini, Farnoush Amir, and Haideh Herbert Aynehchi.
Morgenstern said immigrant stories can help people from different backgrounds feel more connected to each other.
“The word immigration stirs up a lot of feelings and controversies, but the truth is most of us come from immigration somewhere along the line,” she said. “I hope this show will help audiences remember what we all share, how much we have in common, how we all want the same thing for our family — love and light.”
The Braid has presented more than 70 storytelling shows since 2008. Previous ones have put a spotlight on women rabbis, Russian Jews and Jews of color. The next show will explore the experiences of Asian American Jews. “What Do I Do With All This Heritage?” will be performed in the Bay Area in May after a run in Southern California.