A Traveling Jewish Theatre: Kennedy Center award for "See Under: Love"

Corey’s remarks at the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award Luncheon, October 5, 1999

My sense of gratitude to the Fund for New American Plays is enormous and layered. In awarding this grant for See Under: Love, the Fund is recognizing much more than my work as an individual playwright. This play would not have been written if A Traveling Jewish Theatre did not exist.

I helped found A Traveling Jewish Theatre twenty-one years ago and am still a co-artistic director of it, along with Albert Greenberg, Naomi Newman and Helen Stoltzfus. All those years of creating collaborative, ensemble works that mined our specific culture—in very unconventional ways—and stretched our voices and bodies and imaginations have given me a theatrical vocabulary that can match the density and wildness of the novel on which the play is based. So I thank the fund for implicitly recognizing that tradition of collaborative, ensemble theatre that has contributed so much to the vitality of American theatre.

It's also obvious that the play wouldn't exist without the novel by David Grossman on which it's based and I can't tell you how excited I am by the opportunity to help translate his amazingly generous, fierce and uncompromising vision into theatre. It's a vision that refuses to name anyone simply "the other" or "the enemy." Grossman insists that we not be ruled by fear, no matter how justified that fear may seem. The power of this world view would be remarkable in any time and place. That David, an Israeli, has been able to maintain it, to keep his heart open through the chaos and terror of life in the middle east fills me with awe and wonder. I am extremely grateful for the Fund's recognition of the work of this wonderful writer.