The Haunted Sukke

Presented in Yiddish.

Presented by YIVO, Yugntruf, and the Congress for Jewish Culture.

Which ushpizin, or honored guests, will you invite into your sukke this season? Will it be Moyshe Rabeinu or Max Weinreich? Your bubbe and zeyde, or perhaps Molly Picon? Join puppeteer extraordinaire Jenny Romaine (Great Small Works), MC and actor Shane Baker, and a team of Sukkes musicians for a participatory theater exploration of the permeable borders between the living and dead, followed by an open mic in our pop-up sukke. Come to be haunted, stay to have a drink and sing a song or recite a poem for all your friends, living and dead.

About the Performers

Jenny Romaine is a director, designer and puppeteer, a founding member of the OBIE winning Great Small Works collective, and music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok. Romaine has led community-based projects in Canada, Argentina, Europe, Columbia, India, and throughout the United States. In the 1990's, in partnership with Yiddish scholar and artist Adrienne Cooper (z"l), Jenny inaugurated a radical Purim project which became the Aftselokhes Spectacle Committee. Romaine also directs the spectacle singing group, the Sukkos Mob (featured in the film Punk Jews). She earned a masters degree from NYU's department of Performance Studies and in 2013 was the first recipient of the Adrienne Cooper Award for Dreaming in Yiddish. Her life goal is to be worthy of this honor. A sound archivist at YIVO for 13 years, she has drawn for several decades on Yiddish primary source materials to create art that has exciting contemporary value. She is endlessly fascinated by the project of keeping theater at the heart of social life.

Shane Baker played Vladimir in the Yiddish world premiere of Waiting for Godot in his own translation for the New Yiddish Rep. He's best known for his hit Off Broadway show The Big Bupkis! A Complete Gentile's Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville and his online series, The Sheyn Show produced by the Yiddish Daily Forward. Baker is executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, a Yiddish cultural organization based in New York.