The Legacy
Play Description
Rural Central Texas, 1962. Dave, still lives in the old family home that his father built. The family is still the only Jewish family in this isolated country town. As his son Nathan faces the (to him) bizarre prospect of becoming Bar Mitzvah, his wife Rachel faces an even greater crisis of faith. As Dave encounters the remoteness of his community, and the even further distance from the faith of his father, his entire family faces the legacy left behind by their immigrant forebears: What do the Jews believe? This is a fictionalized account of the next generation of the family introduced in THE IMMIGRANT, and the second play in Mark Harelik’s Texas saga of one Jewish-American family.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“The first full production of new play by Mark Harelik is a sequel to his previous successful drama, THE IMMIGRANT. This ongoing story of the Estanitskys, a Jewish family in Texas, slightly resembles, in its second installment, some aspects of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical saga founded on his own early experiences — and with a precocious and talkative little lad serving as the author’s presumed stand-in and mouthpiece as well … Instead of spotlighting the psyche of some wunderkind, the playwright is probing (but never answering) ultimate posers dealing with life and death, God and man, Jew and Gentile, human suffering and eternal “Why?” Harelik makes ideas confront each other with Shavian gusto, but he never lets the battle of words stray far from the passions and pain that provokes it … THE LEGACY is as strong emotionally as it is cogitatively.” —George Weinberg-Harter, Drama-Logue
Author(s)
Mark HarelikMark Harelik has appeared in THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA and THE BEARD OF AVON at the Goodman Theatre. Off-Broadway, he has appeared in THE BEARD OF AVON and OLD MONEY. He also appeared in the national tour of THE HEIDI CHRONICLES. Regionally, he has appeared in numerous plays at The Mark Taper Forum, the American Conservatory Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Intiman Theatre, the Denver Center Theater Company, the La Jolla Playhouse, The Globe Theatres and South Coast Repertory Theater. Film credits include Election, Eulogy, Jurassic Park III, A Gnome Gnamed Gnorm, and Barbarians at the Gate. Television credits include Seinfeld, Star Trek Voyager, Boy Meets World, The Practice, Picket Fences, Cheers, The Single Guy, Players, Angel, Diagnosis Murder, and the television movies War Stories, The Partridge Family, Hefner Unauthorized and My Brother's Keeper. He is the author of THE IMMIGRANT, THE LEGACY, and HANK WILLIAMS — LOST HIGHWAY. Mr. Harelik is a Fox Foundation Fellow.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 9/1/1997 |
| Pages | 94 |
| ISBN | 9780881451320 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Professional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
It’s 1961. Fidel has turned Havana upside down. Veronica’s family has fled the country, leaving her behind to find a new family. Pregnant and ready to participate in whatever Fidel throws her way, she is not fully prepared for everything the revolution has in store. ILLUMINATING VERONICA is a play about betrayal and hope that looks at Castro’s Cuba, not as a demonic state, nor as a perfect paradise, but as a work in progress.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 115 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Inspired by the 1973 killing of a ten-year-old boy by New York City police, THE MOJO AND THE SAYSO is both a comic and dramatic study of the ways that people cope with the aftermath of terrible tragedy.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
An audacious and dark comedy about a ten-year reunion of a son’s high school graduation that coincides with the one-year anniversary of the next-door neighbor’s death.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 85 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$50.00 Play Description
Rural Central Texas, 1909. A young Russian-Jewish immigrant, newly arrived in America through the port of Galveston, pulls his banana cart into the hamlet of Hamilton. Fleeing the vicious pogroms of his homeland, he has sought refuge in the land of the free. Able to speak only Yiddish, alone in the midst of a staunchly Christian community, he begs for shelter. Over the next 30 years, he makes a home and raises a family in this tiny town. THE IMMIGRANT is the story of a young Russian-Jewish couple and the local couple that take them in, as religion meets religion, culture meets culture, fear meets fear, and love meets love. This is the true story of Haskell Harelik, “the Immigrant.”
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
It's the summer of '69, and the death of music icon Judy Garland has emboldened her gay followers. A routine police raid on an underground Greenwich Village hotspot erupts into a full-scale riot, the impetus of the modern gay rights movement. That's the well-known, oft-rehearsed myth of Stonewall, anyhow. Smash that myth against the vivid theatrical imagination of playwright Ike Holter, add a howling live rock 'n' roll band, and you get HIT THE WALL. Remixing this historic confrontation reveals ten unlikely revolutionaries, caught in the turmoil and fighting to claim “I was there.”
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
A comedy with tragic overtones, THESE FLOWERS ARE FOR MY MOTHER concerns husband, Adam, and wife, Eden, who are locked in a custody battle for their gifted son, Alan, whom Eden believes is in need of her nurturing to realize his potential. While the boy is the master of ceremonies for much of the play, the action revolves around which parent will get him and whether he will be able to achieve a compromise solution involving boarding school and summer camp. Another driving element is the pursuit of Eden by child psychologist, Dr Wright, who is fascinated by her while being available to either parent as a hired “expert witness.”
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
A love story and a murder mystery, LOVE IN A THIRSTY LAND uses materials from an actual case, the first trial of a Jew for murder in the New World, 1875. The circumstances — a very religious young married man, alone in America, is accused of killing the young woman with whom it’s been rumored he has been having an affair. Flesh vs spirit, old world ways and the new drive the four character two-act play.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.95 Play Description
BBC correspondent David Mazower (Sholem Asch’s great-grandson) described THE GOD OF VENGEANCE as “admired, translated, parodied, panned, banned, prosecuted, withdrawn, forgotten, revived, celebrated.” An international sensation after its 1907 world premiere in Berlin at Max Reinhard’s Deutsches Theater, Asch’s play quickly became the first Yiddish drama performed in translation across Europe and America. Notoriety was a key part of its success. Nearly every production sparked some level of controversy due to the script’s conflicting themes of hypocrisy and religious faith, rebellion and tradition, its brothel setting, graphic domestic violence, “gutter poetry” reminiscent of Wedekind, and an unprecedented erotic scene of lesbian seduction. This pre-Holocaust drama is today circumscribed by a very different post-Holocaust world, but THE GOD OF VENGEANCE remains one of the great urban dramas of the Yiddish Theatre repertoire.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (7 female, 5 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Darwin and Jo Smith, and their seventeen-year-old son, Ronnie, seem to be the typical Middle American conservative family. Darwin works as a systems analyst. Jo teaches community college. Ronnie is a high school baseball standout with big league aspirations. One night before dinner, they are paid a surprise visit from Commander Abraham Lincoln of Central Security, who claims to have information concerning their daughter, Lucy, an American soldier. Lincoln claims that Lucy was captured by the enemy in a foreign war and decapitated. But, thanks to the top-secret Operation Hydra, military doctors have been able to save her life by surgically reattaching her head. A combination of intense drama and surreal dark comedy, HOME FRONT explores the personal and social consequences of war.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 
Play Description
Unemployed mailman Humbert Lavoignet has fallen into a six-month trance. When he awakes, he announces that God has ordered him to do something wonderful, and he sets about building a tower made of junk. With echoes of Don Quixote, THE WONDERFUL TOWER OF HUMBERT LAVOIGNET is a play about genius, vision, and divine obsession.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (1 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Through the use of dialogue, music, chant, dance, pantomime, and image, the play satirizes attitudes toward the Vietnam war. It attempts to present the very complicated, tragic, and helplessly divided atmosphere that prevailed in America, and to look at hapless emotions in a hopelessly complex mythology of war. With the technique of “transformations” the play unfolds. People change from flowers to individuals to machines, from one character to another, from character into actor into bystander and back to character or abstract image or comment; women change to men and back to women again. Americans change into Vietnamese into Viet Cong and back to American soldiers. The line of the play follows several soldiers from birth, to induction, to indoctrination, to overseas, to battle, to fraternization, and to death. Along the way we meet their mothers, their instructors, their superiors, their elected officials, their friends and their enemies, their tormentors and finally their ghosts. A strong ensemble spirit emerges via the actors' technique and interaction with one another and with the audience. The form of the play is constructed so as to manifest the reality of theatre — not as a replica of or comment upon life but as a part of life — and thus restore its urgency and relevance.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (6 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, A DYBBUK recounts the tale of a wealthy man’s daughter possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved.
Production Info
Cast: 18 total (5 female, 13 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes