Calof
“Last night, we were all crushed into that little shack but today the waves stretch out to the sky.”Rachel
“Actress Kate Fuglei gives a tour-de-force performance in Rachel Calof...” NYTHEATRE.COM, Julie Congress
The Calof Family ~ Abraham and Rachel, nine children and two son-in-laws ~ 1919
Rachel Calof ~ A Memoir with Music dramatizes the story of Rachel Calof, a Jewish picture bride. We follow Rachel’s touching story, as she emigrates from Russia to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota in 1894, crossing the ocean to marry a man she has never met, determined to make a new life as a homesteader. For four years after her arrival, Rachel and her husband live in a twelve-by-fourteen foot shack with her in-laws, her husband’s brother, wife and children, two dozen chickens –and a cow. She gives birth to nine children on the prairie, endures brutally cold winters – and in the end, triumphs over adversity.
Rachel Calof eventually chronicled the story of those years when she was a 55 year old woman living in St. Paul. Her manuscript, handwritten in Yiddish, was discovered by her children after her death and eventually published as “Rachel Calof ’ s Story” in 1995 by Indiana University Press. Her story is filled with an engaging humor, compassion, and detailed accounting of the unrelenting realities faced by homesteaders on a windswept prairie.
Little things made the difference between tragedy and happiness in a matter of moments.
Rachel Calof ”
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Rachel Calof is, in e very respect, deliberately stark, mirroring the barren frontier. It is a show of struggle, after struggle, after struggle. Not only is it excellently realized and a testament to minimalist theatre, but it does put our own lives very much into perspective.”
NYTHEATRE.COM, Julie Congress
Rachel Calof ~ A Memoir with Music is a dynamic theatrical event with great drama, heart and melody. A solo show, Rachel Calof is a theatrical tour de force based on the memoir of a Jewish picture bride. In less than ninety minutes, on a stage bare except for a table and two chairs, Kate Fuglei enacts the story of Rachel Calof as she emigrates from Russia to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota in 1894. America is a nation of immigrants, and Calof ’ s story touches themes that are essential to our shared experience: The courage to come to a new land; the capacity to endure brutal hardships in the quest for a home of one ’ s own; and the intersection of the faith of the old world with the realities of the new world.
Theatre invites audiences to become imaginative partners in a journey, and Rachel Calof takes us into a world filled with intense challenges and sparkling delights. Kate Fuglei embodies the characters that fill the twelve-by-fourteen foot shack: Rachel’s glowering mother-in-law; her slovenly brother-in-law; her loving husband; an unexpectedly kind butcher. Leslie Steinweiss’s evocative and modern score is as primal as the plains Calof lived on. Rachel Calof ’ s diary left behind mesmerizing details of a woman ’ s life on the prairie – eight human beings huddled together in a shack during the winter, enduring the close quarters shared with two flocks of chickens and a cow; the towering skies of the summer and the intense loneliness of life on a sea of prairie grass; the joys of the first party in three years – and the music, words, and bravura performance bring it vividly to life.
Rachel Calof is appropriate for all audiences. It brings up timeless questions: How do you go on when you think you can’t? How does one deal with tiresome in-laws? How do you face being alone among those who are supposed to be your family? The performance is a tour de force for Kate Fuglei, whose transformational power brings to life Rachel Calof ’ s spirit, humor, and love of life. It can be performed in a simple space, with a table, two chairs, an acoustic piano, and a minimalist lighting plot.
Actress Kate Fuglei got her professional start at The Guthrie Theater. She has played leading roles on stages across America, including Mrs. Webb in Our Town for Tony Award winning director Michael Greif at the La Jolla Playhouse, and appeared as the Adult Woman u/s in the Broadway National Tour of Spring Awakening, directed by Tony Award winner Michael Mayer. A Nebraska native, she was delighted to be in a new staging of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, directed by Scott Schwartz, with music by Stephen Schwartz. She has performed at America’s leading regional theaters: At the New York Shakespeare Festival, she played Maria in Love’s Labour’s Lost. She was Sonia in Arena Stage’s groundbreaking production of Crime and Punishment, directed by Yuri Lyubimov. She starred as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Utah Shakespearean Festival and played Emelia in Othello at the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival. She has also appeared at the McCarter Theatre, Seattle’s A.C.T. Theatre, the Portland Stage Company, and Minneapolis’s Illusion Theatre. With Ken LaZebnik and Leslie Steinweiss, she was a founding member of New York City’s theater company DearKnows, whose staging of James Joyce’s Dubliners stories played at Lincoln Center and Olympia Dukakis’s Whole Theater.
Kate has appeared in over thirty episodes of television, including Showtime’s Masters of Sex, N.C.I.S., Touch, The Event, Desperate Housewives, and in the films Muffin-Top: A Love Story, The Green Hornet, The Onion Movie, Escape From Polygamy, Amish Grace, The Day The World Ended and Nowhereland.
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I gre w up in Nebraska, so it is easy for me to empathize with Rachel’s sense of the prairie as both an overwhelming vastness and a claustrophobic confinement... Women still struggle between the poles of an unending horizon and a confined existence.”
Fuglei
We are the pioneers. The land became ours. The land of milk and hone y, right outside our door.”Rachel Calof Kate
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L E S L I E S T E I N W E I S S = K AT E F U G L E I = K E N L A Z E B N I K = E L L E N S . P R E S S M A N
Ken LaZebnik is a playwright, film and television writer, whose work includes collaborating with Garrison Keillor on Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion, as many years of writing for the public radio show of the same name. He wrote the popular Christmas movie A Christmas Cottage, starring Peter O’Toole and Marcia Gay Harden, which has become a perennial favorite. His plays have twice won American Theater Critics Awards, the first for Vestibular Sense, and most recently for On The Spectrum. Both plays were commissioned by the Mixed Blood Theatre of Minneapolis and deal with issues of autism. On The Spectrum had an acclaimed run in the spring of 2013 at The Fountain Theater in Los Angeles. His play Theory of Mind was commissioned by Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park and has been performed in Hawaii, Minnesota, and Michigan.
For television, he wrote and produced over 25 episodes of the top-rated CBS series Touched By An Angel, and has written episodes for series as diverse as Providence, Army Wives, and in 2014, When Calls The Heart. For PBS, he wrote three In Concert At The White House specials, featuring singers such as Patti LuPone, Jennifer Holiday, and Toby Keith.
In the spring of 2014, his book Hollywood Digs: An Archaeology of Shadows will be published by Kelly’s Cove Press.
Composer and lyricist Leslie Steinweiss has most recently been writing chamber music and choral works including a string trio, and wind quintet and two songs for choir, piano and string ensemble. His Flight of Fancy for Clarinet and Piano was performed at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass.
He has also recently created music for Museum Scandals, a short film directed by Sande Shurin. As composer-in-residence for the theater company DearKnows in New York City, his scores were performed at Lincoln Center, Home for Contemporary Theater and Art in New York City, and Olympia Dukakis’s Whole Theater in Montclair, New Jersey. He composed music for The School of Jolly Dogs with book and lyrics by Denise Balle, which was workshopped and performed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.
Other film credits include PBS documentaries,independent films as well as collaborative work with his wife Marjory Steinweiss, who is a filmmaker. Open Lines directed and edited by Marjory, is an award-winning short film which was featured at the Breckenridge, Chicago and Saarbrucken film festivals.
Ellen S. Pressman is an Emmy award winner whose work has been featured on such acclaimed series as thirtysomething, L.A. Law, Hill St. Blues, My So-Called Life and Party of Five. She began her career at MTM/CBS (Mary Tyler Moore Productions) where she worked her way from the back lot as a transportation clerk to Producer and Director on thirtysomething. Once an established producer on thirtysomething, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz gave her the opportunity to direct her first episode, “Mermaids,” which aired on ABC. Ellen’s early directorial resume includes episodes of Felicity (J.J. Abrams), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon), My So Called Life (Winnie Holzman), as well as Party of Five, Time of Your Life, and Charmed. As a producer, Pressman has received Emmy awards and Golden Globe awards for Best Dramatic series, as well as Humanitas Prize awards, for Hill St. Blues, L.A. Law and thirtysomething. Numerous episodes of Hill Street Blues that Pressman supervised won Technical Emmys for film editing, sound editing, and sound mixing.
Later as a producer/director on Time of Your Life, Ellen juggled her rising career with her growing family. She continued to direct guest episodes of Pasadena, Huff, Jack and Bobby, and Everwood. In the theater, she directed Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune in Los Angeles. She has directed Rachel Calof throughout its development.
The show has been performed throughout America demonstrating a universal appeal.
Production History:
Ensemble Studio Theatre West
November 2010
John Raitt Theatre, Pepperdine University
February 2011
New York International Theater Festival
August 2011
Jewish Theater Conference, UCLA
January 2012
Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company
August 2013
North Dakota Chautauqua Association
Devil’s Lake, North Dakota
June 2014
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This piece should be seen by e veryone. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
Pepperdine University
Rachel Calof brings to life the pioneering immigrant story f lush with unimaginable hardship, perse verance, and pain. Yet with Ken LeZebnik’s tender writing and a performance of such specificity by Kate Fuglei, this 90-minute, colorful tour de force becomes a mesmerizing journe y of hope and triumph.”
BARBARA BROOKS, Producing Artistic Director
Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company
Fuglei begins the story in the 12-by-14-foot dining room of Rachel’s St. Paul home in 1936. The space is taped out on the stage f loor and she tells us that this was the size of the family’s first home in North Dakota.
Throughout the play, we look at these dimensions and imagine husband and wife, his parents and brothers, a couple dozen chickens and a cow all living in this dirt-f loor hovel. Always, there is the suffocating presence of others with no privacy. It boggles the mind.”
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, Graydon Royce
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Fuglei creates the whole thing with her body, movement, and voice, all of which build a rich and vibrant world. Be yond that are the Steinweiss’s songs. The show is subtitled ‘ a memoir with music,’ and the selections have a lot more in common with classical art songs than rah-rah American musicals.”
CITY PAGES, Ed Huyck
CIT Y PAGES, Ed Huyck
“Fuglei’s performance is captivating, whether detailing her first encounter with cockroaches in NYC or in the day-to-day reality of living in a tiny home, carefully rationing fuel because running out would mean death.”
