HAPPENINGS IN POLAND
At the Henry Street Playhouse 1921/2025
Bringing the archive to life with a century-old cautionary play written by an immigrant teenage girl living in the Lower East Side tenements in 1921.
In 1921, Rachel Meirowitch, a 16-year-old immigrant living in the tenements of New York's Lower East Side wrote a short play, Happenings in Poland, depicting a tragic day in the life of an alternate self in Poland, who witnesses Polish soldiers murder her entire family. The story takes place in the tenuous moment between the World Wars, between two vanished spaces – the tenements of New York and the Jewish towns and communities of Poland. At the play's end, the curtain rises, the characters (played by teens) stand together, raise their hands out to the audience and say, together, "help." This was 18 years before the onset of World War II and the Holocaust. A chilling cautionary tale.
The playwright was my grandmother. She often spoke of a play she wrote and presented at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse as part of its youth program, and that activities with this program saved her life. Long after she died, I found the play written out by hand in her fading high school journal.
Wondering what to do with the play, I brought it to the Henry Street Settlement's Abrons Art Center, the present-day steward of the playhouse. They helped me find the perfect solution. Between the fall of 2024 and the Summer of 2025, I worked with Abrons Art Center's Urban Youth Theater (UYT) to explore what it means to restage my grandmother's play now in the very same location, over a century later. The members of UYT are a group of teen actors from the local neighborhood and across New York City, alongside their dedicated Teaching Director, Jonathan Dingle-El. Together, over three semesters, with a changing ensemble, we recreated my grandmother's original play plus a devised response. The culminating event was a performance on the original playhouse stage in August of 2025.
Short intro video that played in the Henry Street Playhouse as the audience entered for the performance.
Performed by New York City teens with limited prior knowledge of the details of what life was for Polish Jews in the decades before the Holocaust, this project offers a safe space for questioning and dialogue around the relationship between this fraught history and its relationship to current political events.
Some of the questions asked as we revisited my grandmother's script: If the play had been written today, who would be the characters, and to whom would they be making their plea? How do the experiences of the characters in the play connect with our daily lives?
Video, audio, and photographic documentation of this process will culminate in a multi-media performance lecture/ artist documentary that follows the research, exploration, and development of this complicated story in the contemporary moment.
Combining research, theater workshops, and documentary, this multifaceted project is made possible with support from:
Abrons Art Center, Henry Street Settlement
Asylum Arts
The New York State Council on the Arts
The Puffin Foundation, LTD
It is a fiscally sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts.
