Humour and hate go to summer camp Playwright mixes light into the darkness of serious subject matter teased by the show’s title By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 29, 2023

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This article was published 29/04/2023 (1238 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before he became a playwright, Ori Black worked one of the most hectic, multifaceted and indescribable jobs known to humankind: he was a teenage Jewish summer-camp counsellor.

To be a camp counsellor is to be a friend, an unaccredited therapist, a surrogate sibling, an often-lifelong mentor, and on most days, a conflict-resolution specialist.

Whatever happens, the camp counsellor is in loco parentis, and it’s tough to wake up a lethargic teenager for breakfast when you’re still a lethargic teenager yourself.

At Camp Gesher in Cloyne, Ont., Black was a “late bloomer,” attending camp for the first time as a 14-year-old.

“But once I went I never left,” says the writer-star of Summer of Semitism, which runs Saturday (April 29) through May 7 at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.

At camp, Black made lifelong friends, and can now wax nostalgic about everything, even the bathroom facilities, referred to as the uppers and the lowers.

“The uppers were the good ones,” recalls Black.

The lowers? “Who wants to schlep all the way down there?” he asks.

Cabin walls became, in Black’s characterization, “a giant, living, breathing archive” of camp history, filled with signatures from campers spanning multiple generations. It’s the kind of graffiti that unites, rather than divides.

But not all graffiti is done with love.

In 2019, British Columbia’s Camp Miriam, a Jewish camp on remote, isolated Gabriola Island, was tagged with crude images and swastikas not far from the camp’s entrance, where rainbows and the word “equality” were drawn and written in chalk by campers.

Black, who remembers his synagogue being tagged with swastikas as a teen, was struck by the brazen ignorance on display, as well as the efforts the vandals took to do such a cruel thing.

“Someone had the drive to canoe across the lake (to do that),” he says.

Black’s experiences at camp, plus the feelings provoked by that incident, helped inspire Summer of Semitism, a show he first began developing while studying acting at Toronto’s York University in 2019.

At the time, Black was working closely with the acclaimed Canadian playwrights David Yee and Nina Lee Aquino, along with his classmates, on a production called Rochdale.

As a university student, Black says he was used to having to act in roles meant for older performers, but on Rochdale, Yee and Aquino worked to develop roles designed to be played by actors from Black’s generation.

That was revelatory for Black, who then decided to follow the age-old advice and write about what he knew best. The result was an early draft of Summer of Semitism, which centres on four Jewish men in their early 20s who have grown up at the fictional Camp Mazal, where after years of training, they find themselves in key leadership roles.

On the first day of camp, just before the campers arrive, Mazal is struck by an act of anti-Semitism that shakes the friends to their core.

A digital production of the show was mounted at Toronto’s Paprika Festival in 2021, and seen by former Winnipeg Jewish Theatre artistic director Ari Weinberg, who had also seen Black perform in a monologue slam at the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company in North York. That led to Semitism becoming WJT’s final performance of the 2023 season, and the second under the leadership of newly installed artistic director Dan Petrenko.

The four stars of the première performance — Black, Hershel Blatt, Tom Shoshani and Wayne Burns — also appeared in the original digital production, which was cast by Emma Ferreira.

The WJT production is directed by Krista Jackson, who helmed this season’s production at Prairie Theatre Exchange of Frances Koncan’s Space Girl, as well as Escaped Alone, the Full of Days Collective’s adaptation of Caryl Churchill’s show.

The set design will be by Kara Pankiw, whose work was a highlight of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre Warehouse production of Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes; lighting designer Scott Henderson will lend his skills on the WJT run.

Black says the tone of the play mixes humour with the intense, serious subject matter teased by the show’s title. The opportunity to tell a story like this — centred on four modern, young Jewish men confronting an ancient form of hatred — is not something Black takes for granted.

“Of course there’s a responsibility, and I thought the best approach was to write from the heart. I can only write what I know, and especially when it comes to anti-Semitism and Judaism, which are very close and personal to my heart. I thought it was best to write my own fears, through my own perspective,” he says.

“I think it would be impossible to act as a catch-all source of information on combating anti-Semitism and what it looks like. All I know is how it’s made me feel, and how it’s made people close to me feel, and the best thing to do is share that through this show.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com