After a fire in Brooklyn, ‘Jewish Plot’ will have its world-premiere in Manhattan this week

Following a fire at Brooklyn’s nonprofit theater The Brick last week, where the show was originally scheduled to premiere, Torrey Townsend’s Jewish Plot will now have its world premiere at Theatre 154 in downtown Manhattan, on Christopher Street, this Wednesday, October 22. The 90-minute production will run through November 7.

Directed by Sarah Hughes, the play explores “what it means to be an American Jew today,” according to an official press release. In it, a playwright named Torrey Townsend spends five years adapting a long-forgotten English melodrama by the fictional I.W. Bruntmole. That play, also titled Jewish Plot, is described as a depiction of Jewish life and “the toll of prejudice that unleashed a grand furore upon its premiere in 1889 London.”

The play-within-a-play becomes Townsend’s own way of reckoning with his family legacy, including a grandfather who served as a speechwriter for Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974 and the only woman to have held the office, and who played a key role in raising $35 billion for the establishment of the State of Israel after World War II.

The show stars Neil D’Astolfo, Tess Frazer, Eddie Kaye Thomas and Madeline Weinstein,. Tickets are available for purchase here.