Shira Ginsburg inspired by the heroic actions of resistance her grandparents took against the Nazis as Partisans created the one woman show, “Bubby’s Kitchen.” She will star in this show on October 9, 2021 at 8:00pm at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.
In an interview with hamptons.com she explained the show is so much more than the story of how her grandparents survived the years in the forests of Belarus. In the end she said, Bubby’s Kitchen is story of one young woman’s struggle to live up to her grandparents’ incredible legacy.
Ms. Ginsburg said, “Actually the genesis of this project was twofold. For many years I had wanted to do a play/show to tell my grandparents story, but it really occurred when I was at the end of my graduate program and for my thesis, there was a performance requirement as well. “Bubby’s Kitchen aligned perfectly with everything I was doing at the time and it just sort of presented itself in the best way, the perfect time to put pen to paper and bring all of this music together. Since then, it has definitely taken on a life of its own to some degree. At first I did not use original music… but ultimately I wound up working with a wonderful composer and together we created this beautiful new score that really tells the story and takes it to an entirely new level.”
The show is 90 minutes long with no intermission. When asked about being on stage that long alone Ms. Ginsburg said, “I just get out there and I start telling stories and start singing songs, and ninety minutes seem to fly by in an interesting way, there is no teleprompter or anything like that!”
After meeting with someone on the board of the WHBPAC Ms. Ginsburg explained how, “We started talking and I began telling him about the show, and said he loved the idea, and wanted me to do it for WHBPAC.”
She said the rehearsals are going well and are being done in the city, but they will be ready for the October 9th show. “We will pull up to the theater and load in the morning, and pack out after the show and will be that evening.”
When asked what will most likely be the most moving part of the show she said, “There is a moment when I become all these different characters in my family so I actually become my “Bubby” (grandmother) and there is a piece in the show where I become her on her first night in the woods when she was a partisan on her very first night when they told her to stand guard. I am reenacting my grandmother’s experience as I imagined it must have been from her telling me the story over and over again. It is very emotional. She had just had her entire family displaced not knowing where they had been taken, she had run from the trains and the rest of her family were all taken to concentration camps and she never saw them again…she was all alone in the world.”
When asked why folks should come out to see “Bubby’s Kitchen,” an emotionally charged Ms. Ginsburg said, “A lot of the Holocaust stories that are told in film and in theater are reenactments of that particular horrible story but what this show is really about is that it is told from the perspective of me, but when I wrote this as someone in my late twenties, early thirties the show is really about how a legacy of such magnitude and weight informs the second and third generations. Informs the people who have inherited that legacy and what we do with a legacy of this nature and how we decide to go through our lives and take these lessons on. It’s really a story about me growing up in their (grandparents) home.”
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