Rachel Kaftan '21 | Playwright
Rachel Kaftan, a playwright, received the Lumer Fellowship which affirmed that her creative work could be taken seriously.
Kaftan had known for a while that she wanted to write and perform a play that would combine her family's Holocaust history, her own intergenerational trauma, and her love life. However, she did not know how she could bring this dream to life. Dr. Holli Levitsky suggested that Kaftan apply for the Lumer Fellowship, which would enable her to take this idea from script to stage. And just like that, BOY VEY was born.
"Getting [the fellowship] really inspired me to take my own work more seriously, because all of a sudden, someone had invested in it," Kaftan said.
The BOY VEY website describes the show as a "dark-comedic one-woman show," in which "a Jewish girl's quest for true love unveils the bizarre connections between her misbegotten dating life and inherited Holocaust trauma." The play is hilarious, touching, and quirky.
During a normal year, the fellowship award would have covered the expenses for performing an on-campus production, but the COVID-19 pandemic had other plans for BOY VEY. In order to put on the show, Kaftan, the play's director Katie Stottlemire, and other crowdfunding team members worked together to raise more than $30,000 in addition to the fellowship award! This fundraising allowed Kaftan and her team to rent out the Santa Monica Playhouse, which was suggested by her Theatre department advisor, Neno Pervan. From there, Kaftan and her team were able to live stream the show to audience members' homes.
Having grown up in Seattle and holding a deep love for acting, Kaftan knew Los Angeles was where she needed to be. She was originally drawn to LMU after her first visit when she noticed how many students on campus were engaged in film, theatre, and other artistic endeavors. But she hadn't anticipated enrolling in a Jesuit Catholic university would inspire her to explore Judaism to a greater degree than she ever had before.
Kaftan joined the LMU Hillel community and was welcomed by Rabbi Zachary Zysman, who she called, "one of the best adult figures on campus." By Kaftan's junior year, Rabbi Zysman had introduced her to Dr. Levitsky, who encouraged her to enroll as a Jewish Studies minor. Kaftan credits the Jewish Studies department with providing opportunities to feel more grounded in her Jewish identity and specifically views the Lumer Fellowship as the catalyst for integrating her Jewish culture into her theatrical work.
Now that Kaftan has graduated from LMU with a degree in theatre arts and a minor in Jewish Studies, she's started pondering the question recent graduates are always asked: What's next? She plans to keep BOY VEY alive at the Santa Monica Playhouse and hopes to one day take BOY VEY on tour to different festivals. Kaftan is considering returning to school later in the future to earn an MFA in playwriting.
She cites the Jewish cultural value of questioning as one of the driving reasons she had the "chutzpah" to put on this play. Kaftan said she'd advise any Jewish student at LMU to "study and explore your Jewish religion and cultural identity in the way that you need to, not in the way that you might be taught to believe," and the Jewish Studies minor is a great way to do that.