A’RIEL TINTER
They brought the children to the United States and placed them with foster families until their parents could immigrate. Many families were never able to be reunited. “Of course, I took some artistic license,” Sobler says. That sort of license seems to serve her well. In The Secret Annex (2014), for example, Anne Frank survives World War II and moves to New York to write her memoir, but the only publisher interested wants incessant rewrites. The Great Divide, which digs into a 1911 tragedy among workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the lower east side of Manhattan, won the 2015 Canadian Playwriting Competition. Sobler and Senior are of like minds. “This is the work I want to be doing,” Senior says. “I feel called to do this, the political work. Something that is calling ordinary citizens to act in extraordinary times.” Sheltered took Sobler most of two years to write and, she says, chuckling, “I’ll let you know when I’m done.” Director and playwright hadn’t met before partnering on this project but now consider themselves inseparable, a sister act birthed by Alliance artistic director Susan V. Booth, who put them together. “We call it Jewish geography,” Senior says, referring to their common backgrounds and lifestyles. “We know how to talk to each other,” Sobler says. “We’re on the same page with what the play is and what it should be.” The two share something else, as well: a belief in the power of being female. “Women have been left out of our history books because we didn’t start wars or, with some exceptions, run governments,” Sobler says. “I never identified my work as political because it always felt like I was writing about such personal things,” she says, “about people and situations that were pulled right from my life.” As she’s written more, her subject matter and understanding of political theater have expanded. With few exceptions, she says, her work reflects the political climate of a certain time. It seems appropriate then, that she learned of her Alliance/Kendeda win while traveling
by bus to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Sheltered bested 61 other entries from playwrights at the best graduate schools in the country — Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, the New School for Drama, NYU Tisch and Yale, among them. The list of Alliance/Kendeda alumni includes Bekah Brunstetter (who writes for the stage and television, including “This Is Us”); Jiréh Breon Holder (whose Alliance/ Kendeda-winning Too Heavy for Your Pocket was staged off-Broadway within eight months of its Alliance world premiere); Carson Kreitzer (produced regularly nationwide and locally, particularly at Synchronicity Theatre); Mike Lew (who became the first Alliance/Kendeda winner to get an Alliance mainstage production with his Tiger Style!); and Tarell Alvin McCraney (an Academy Award winner for Moonlight and now playwriting chair at the Yale School of Drama). “It felt very apropos to find out that this political play I had written was finding an audience on the same day I was out there expressing my political views,” Sobler says. “It was a moment when I felt my voice mattered in more ways than one. I also knew the unique circumstances made it a moment I would never forget.” To cap the day, she says, “I went home and kissed my husband.”
Director Kimberly Senior (center) and playwright Alix Sobler (right) have found a certain “Jewish geography” and like-mindedness working on “Sheltered.” (With them is Skylar Burks, a stage management production assistant.) ALLIANCETHEATRE.ORG
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