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    Looking Back: Four Plays
    Looking Back: Four Plays
    Looking Back: Four Plays
    Ebook245 pages2 hours

    Looking Back: Four Plays

    By Judith Weinshall Liberman

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    Looking Back, the first collection of published plays from visual artist Judith Weinshall Liberman, brings the ineffable human experience to life, to the stage, and to the imagination. Written in her eighties, these four new plays explore a journey to understanding, as filtered through a mature perspective that raises questions relevant to our times.

    When her husband, a professor of law and a gifted pianist, suffered a stroke in his early fifties, everything changed. A heartfelt study of their shared journey to understanding and compassion, Empathy explores the impact of life-altering illness on a family.

    Until recently, Liberman never questioned biblical Abrahams obedience to God, but after a lifetime of reflection, that all changed. Good Old Abraham questions the rationality and morality of Abrahams behavior and his suitability for the positive symbolic role accorded to him by history.

    Like Michal, daughter of King Saul, Liberman has known the agony of grief in wartime. The loss of her only brother during the Israel War of Independence in 1948 inspired Liberman to create Michal, in which a young woman is caught up in forces beyond her control.

    As in her other plays, the implications of Siseras Mother extend beyond the confines of the drama. A lifetime of contemplation about the war against the Canaanites revealed something extraordinary to Liberman: the Canaanite commanders mother was not a villain but the tragic victim of mans inhumanity.

    A profound and achingly beautiful passage into the human experience, Looking Back brings new light to timeless issues.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateJul 21, 2010
    ISBN9781450237666
    Looking Back: Four Plays
    Author

    Judith Weinshall Liberman

    Born in Israel (then called “Palestine”), Judith Weinshall Liberman came to the United States in 1947 to pursue higher education after completing high school in her native city of Haifa. She earned four American university degrees, including a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and an LL.M. from the University of Michigan Law School. While teaching law in Israel in 1955, she wrote a textbook on public international law in Hebrew for use by her students. After settling in the Boston area in 1956, she studied art and creative writing. Her art studies were at various art schools in the Boston area, including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum School, and the Massachusetts College of Art. She completed all course work for the M.F.A. degree in art education at Boston University School for the Arts and was certified by the State of Massachusetts as an art teacher. In the early 1960s, Ms. Liberman began creating some of her numerous series of artworks. She used a large variety of mediums in her art, including oils, acrylics, graphics, mixed media, wall hangings, sculpture, ceramics, and mosaics. She is primarily known for her artworks about the Holocaust. A book titled Holocaust Wall Hangings, based on one of her three series on the Holocaust, was published in 2002. Her art has been widely exhibited in museums and other public institutions in the United States and in Israel, and is represented in important museum collections as well as in the collections of scores of other public institutions. During her long career in visual art, Ms. Liberman wrote and published several books. Her children’s book The Bird’s Last Song (Addison-Wesley, 1976), which she wrote and illustrated, won a citation as one of the “fabulous books of the year.” Twenty years later, in 1996, she wrote and illustrated Ice Cream Snow, which was published as a children’s book in 2012. In 2007, Judith Weinshall Liberman published her autobiography, My Life into Art. Her interest in playwriting dates back to her college days in the late 1940s, when she wrote her first play. In the years that followed, she studied playwriting and wrote several plays. After reaching her eighties, Ms. Liberman devoted several years to writing plays and musicals. Looking Back, her first book of plays, was published in 2010. The play Good Old Abraham, included in that book, was performed by the Shades Repertory Theater under the direction of Samuel Harps at the historic Central Presbyterian Church in Haverstraw, New York, in the spring of 2010. Empathy, another play included in Looking Back, was used by Mr. Harps as the screenplay for a film. Her second book of plays, On Being an Artist, contained three plays and the libretto for one of her two musicals. Vincent’s Visit, one of the plays contained in that book, was staged by the Shades Repertory Theater under the direction of Samuel Harps in 2012. All four dramatic works in On Being an Artist deal with art as a creative process, a subject about which Judith Weinshall Liberman is eminently qualified to write. Ms. Liberman’s appetite for writing poems/lyrics was whetted by her work on her two musical plays, i.e., Good Old Abraham and To Be an Artist. Both musicals were based on her own plays. Ms. Liberman had written poetry on and off since her college days, but, although her own mother was a poet and had many poems published in her native Russia and in Israel, Judith Weinshall Liberman never anticipated that she herself would devote full time to writing poems and lyrics when she reached old age. In collaboration with her daughter, Laura Liberman, M.D., Judith Weinshall Liberman published the book Reflections: Poems, Lyrics, and Stories, in 2012. Each author contributed her own poems and other materials to that anthology. The present book, Passion, contains 150 poems and lyrics, all written by Judith Weinshall Liberman in 2012. Passion is the author’s ninth published book. Ms. Liberman’s archives can be found in the Fine Arts Department of the Boston Public Library and at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

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      Book preview

      Looking Back - Judith Weinshall Liberman

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