Meet the queer Jewish theater nerd who just won the national Jewish Playwriting Contest
Alexa Derman’s edgy new script breaks norms for Jewish theater
Derman, left, with friend Molly Rosa Houlahan, in front of a poster for one of Derman’s plays. Courtesy of Alexa Derman
By Mira Fox July 19, 2023
“We’re all just standing in a corner saying, ‘You’re the self-hating one,’ ‘No you’re the self-hating one,” said Alexa Derman over a pastry at a Providence, Rhode Island, bakery near Brown University, where she just finished an MFA. She was talking about the state of American Judaism.
Derman, 27, just won the annual Jewish Playwriting Contest, hosted by the Jewish Plays Project, for her script Zionista Rising. In the show, two 20-something interns at a Jewish media organization are asked by their bosses, two older women, to rebrand Zionism as a #girlboss, trendy, social justice issue using an AI-generated Instagram influencer. As a Jewish media employee myself, especially one who reports on both online influencers and advertising, it hits close to home.
It’s a sharp critique of American Jews’ relationship to Israel, to politics and to their Jewish identity. But it’s also hilarious. Before we met, Derman sent me the script, and it deftly spoofs topics like white-woman feminism, hashtag activism and overdone Jew-ish jokes. There’s even a Yiddish Duolingo reference. Basically, it manages to cover a ton of ground, getting at nearly every issue American Jews are grappling with today, and does so far more nimbly than any article or book. Art!
It’s not the first time Derman has played with Jewish stories. One of her other shows, I’ll be in my Hanukkah Palace, was a chaotic and surreal exploration of Jewish childhood and queerness. She’s also made a dating simulation game, where you play as a Jewish person named Lex who hasn’t been on a date for way too long and goes on a date with a lizard person.
Derman talked to me about the struggle of writing controversial material while keeping it accessible, the connections between queerness and Judaism, and the future of Jewish theater. We also gossiped a lot. The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about writing Zionista Rising. How did it all come together?
This play I wrote not in the program but basically over the summer during the Sheikh Jarrah evictions. Normally, my plays are like: I get obsessed with something, I research it a lot, I want to challenge myself artistically. But Zionista was like a week in May where I was like, “I need to write this play or I’m going to die.” I wrote it in seven days. I just need to puke this onto a page, no one’s ever going to read it.
And then I submitted it to this contest almost on a whim. It was even more screaming in that version — more of an explosion than a considered artistic process.
So how has it changed since then?
I think with this play I’ve come all the way back around to some of the traditional new play development stuff that I usually chafe against. Like: What does this character want, backstory, etc. Which, normally, I feel repelled by. My work is usually bonkers, and when someone asks, “What is my character’s last name?” I’m like, “I don’t care.”
I had to go from like, “I don’t care about what Ella wants. She’s a device for me to talk about the things that I care about” to making Ella a full and developed person.
The audience is being challenged in this play in terms of content, so I feel like giving them a little more to hold onto in terms of format is helpful.
A lot of your work is really “bonkers,” as you put it. It’s deconstructed and structurally weird and strange. Why does that appeal to you — and is there an audience for it?
For me, there’s this quote — I can’t remember where it’s from — that’s like, the weird and the uncanny “allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.” [This is from writer Mark Fisher’s work The Weird and The Eerie.]
Adventurous structural forms allow us to encounter the minutiae of our lives in unexpected ways. When you do this weird shit hopefully you can get people to encounter stuff they’re familiar with in a new and uncanny way. I feel like that’s what most of my plays are. Like: I think this is weird, but most of the people around me are just vibing with it. And I really want them to see how weird this is.
My thesis play at Brown was a kind of queer horror home invasion. It kind of starts with the classic American play form, which is two couples having a dinner party. They’re millennial gay couples. Then it starts to have weird horror elements, and halfway through they get invaded by local queer teenagers.
What it really is about for me is, in the past two years, I’ve become a person who has plates that I like. And that’s bizarre. And everyone is like, “Oh of course one day you’ll grow up to have plates and care about towels.” And I’m like — when did this happen?
When you’re a little queer teenager, you see older queer people and on the one hand you’re totally repelled by them. You’re like “Gross, old person, boring — you’re being gay wrong, you’re embarrassing. I’m never going to be like you.” And you’re also looking at them like, “Where do you buy shoes? Please teach me how to be gay — is there a future for me?”
People in my life are like, “please, I’m begging you, could you please write a play that’s just like people talking in a room.” But to me, this is a live shared ritual experience. Why would we act as though we’re all in a living room that isn’t really there?
What was your Jewish upbringing like?
I’m from New Jersey, my dad is Jewish, my mom converted, my amazing bubbe lives in New Jersey too. I had a bat mitzvah. My family has a clique of family friends that are the other Jewish families in the town. I went to sleep-away camp. I went to the JCC kindergarten. We’d go to see Broadway musicals every year. I had a little Star of David necklace for my American Girl doll — Rebecca Rubin, MVP. We were just very, very archetypal quasi-basically-secular Reform Jews from Jersey who celebrate the major holidays and have a mezuzah.
My bubbe has been taking me to the theater since I was a wee child. I don’t think I can remember a time in my life when I wasn’t into theater. My bat mitzvah theme wasn’t literally Rent but my bat mitzvah sweatshirt did say “no day but today” on it, and I was so into Seussical the Musical that when it closed on Broadway, I forbade anyone from mentioning it to me because I was so devastated.
I think when I was a kid, my burgeoning queer identity and my Jewish identity were kind of wrapped inside each other. I was like “I’m not a good girl, I can’t perform my femininity in the way my best friend can.” I now think it’s because I was a baby gay, but in my mind it was very wrapped up in being Jewish.
It sounds like your connection to theater is also pretty bound up in Jewishness, and vice versa. What was it like to be working on these Jewish shows in what sounds like a pretty non-Jewish program?
I’m going to give him his credit, there is another Jewish person in the program now. But the Jewish community here, I think it just took more work than I was expecting.
On one hand, I felt really cut off because in the past my Jewish community had been all about being with my family for every Jewish holiday. But instead what I found was ways of forming, like I went to my friend’s Seder, and it was the first time I’d been to an abolitionist lefty Seder and it was really fun and different, weird but good.
I bought my first menorah here and especially since I was here for COVID, it just wasn’t feasible to go home for Jewish holidays. And I had all my friends over and most of them weren’t Jewish. I had never baked challah before I came here and I was like, well I guess I’ll have to bake it myself.
And you know my bubbe still sends me a Zabar’s box for every Jewish holiday. And my one roommate was raised Greek Orthodox and my other roommate is Muslim and then we’re all eating black and white cookies together.
Do you think non-Jews are able to “get” your Jewish work? Because it feels very in-group — it’s really peppered with references and jokes that not everyone is well-versed in.
In some rooms when reading this play aloud, people are cackling all the way through. But in some rooms people are like: “Why are you talking about Dr. Brown’s celery soda?”
So it’s in-group, but also the in-group is the group that I think will be the most uneasy with it. This play is about Jews in America. But also Israel and Palestine are real places — so what is the responsibility of this play to those people and those places? But it’s not a play about Israel, it’s about how American Jewish institutions relate to Israel.
As you said, it’s a topic that makes people uncomfortable, and people shy away from it. A lot of the really acclaimed Jewish art and theater, even today in 2023, is still about the Holocaust or antisemitic persecution, like Leopoldstadt or Parade. The community really gets behind those. But your work is much edgier, and also much more current. How do you think it’ll land with the Jewish world it’s speaking to?
What’s on my mind a lot is that often when theater programs plays about Jewish identity, they’re programming naturalistic family dramas. Which is so frustrating, because when I think of American Jewish theater I think of Angels in America, or Indecent, and they were both good commercial successes. So I don’t understand why Jewish theater in the American theater means a family in a room.
Because to me, Jewish theater is theater that’s wrestling and complicated. My writing practice is very much wrestling, dense, pulling. It feels related to being in Hebrew school: You can look at it this way and look at it that way.
I feel like there’s this idea that when people think of their Jewish audience, they think about people over the age of 50 and it’s so weird to me because the people putting on the show are all young Jewish people in theater together.
JPP specifically has a no Holocaust plays rule, so they are very specifically like, “We gotta get out of the 20th century.” That’s been really great. To me, I’m like, “let’s take the next step.”
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