Our storytelling series is all about community engagement. We believe that stories impact change, that we better our world by coming together to learn about our shared and unique experiences.
Our storytelling events, whether live in NYC, over Zoom, or a hybrid model, feature plays, monologues, poetry, music, stand-up, and every variety of storytelling in various stages of development.
Are you a creative artist looking for an opportunity to share new work? We’d love to consider including you in our monthly series!
Past Storytelling Events
Me, You, and the Greyhound by Noelle Sacher
Our event in December of 2025 was a staged reading of Me, You, and the Greyhound, a new dark comedy from emerging playwright Noelle Sacher.
When a young woman gets an urgent call from her mother that her brother is in the hospital, she rushes to get from NYC to Ohio just as fast as those wheels can go. But busses are, notoriously, very public. This play is for everyone who is just doing their best in all circumstances of life.
This event was produced by Ayla Rosen and directed by Hannah Ciesil (winner, “Best Director,” Origin’s 2025 1st Irish Festival), and featured Jasmine Johnson and Jackson Hayes.
Tasteless by Mark Eisman
Featured Image, photographer Robbie Shone, featured in 2012 article by Mark Prigg
Director: Leah S. Abrams
Featuring: Ella Stoller, Jonathan Dauermann, Katherine McDowell Dugan, and Scott Cagney.
In Tasteless, a famous food critic loses his longtime dining companion. Then the pandemic. He loses everything else.
This reading and Q&A with the playwright was held on Zoom on December 4th, 2023
Eleanor Reissa reads selections from her memoir: The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey
In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a wad of dried-up papers in a brittle baggie: fifty-six letters handwritten in German by her father, in 1949 — only four years after Auschwitz — to her mother, also a refugee, already living in the United States.
Forty years later, Eleanor finally had the letters translated. With her father’s letters as her silent guide, Eleanor goes on a journey down the River of Time, unearthing the unknowable about her family’s past and her own present.
Artist Bio
Eleanor Reissa is a Brooklyn born and bred victim/beneficiary of the NYC public school system from K through college. In spite of that (or because of it) she has lived a life greater than her own expectations. She is a Tony Award-nominated director (Those Were the Days); Broadway/television actress (Paula Vogel’s Indecent/ HBO’s The Plot Against America); a prize-winning playwright, former artistic director of the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre, host of the Yale University/Fortunoff Video Archive podcast: Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust, and currently shares the audio guide duties with Juliana Margulies at the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s latest exhibition The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do.
Reissa has sung in every major venue in New York City and in festivals around the world. She is a storyteller in English and Yiddish, and is often the voice for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, including their new episodic radiocast: Who is Guilty? Many of her musical performances can be found on YouTube and the internet. Most recently, in Italy, she filmed “Musical Tales of the Venetian Jewish Ghetto” and “Chopin and Liszt” with Hershey Felder. Her memoir, THE LETTERS PROJECT: A Daughter’s Journey, is available now.
Troglobitetes by Zachary Desmond
Featured Image: photographer Robbie Shone, featured in 2012 article by Mark Prigg.
Somewhere in the American West, the ground opens up and swallows seven cavers. Hidden beneath glittering gems and underground rivers, something is alive and yearning to bestow an extraordinary gift.
With no route to escape and no promise of rescue, the cavers must traverse the underworld, invoke their mythic ancestors, and rally together to face down the end of all things.
We first read a draft of Zachary Desmond’s original play, Troglobites, over Zoom in December 2022
This new draft was part of our programming in April 2023.
This reading was directed by Henry Gottfried and featured Piper Rae Patterson, Felix Teich, Danyel Geddie, Julian Robertson, Steven Conroy, Ali Lopez-Sohaili, Vann Dukes, Kassandra Cruz, and Stage Directions by Gabriela Torres.
Playwright Bio
Zachary Desmond is an actor, playwright, and director living and working in New York City. He is a member of the resident acting company at the Mercury Store in Gowanus, Brooklyn and a recent graduate of the Juilliard School of Drama. He played Hunter and Headmaster Burns in Undiscovered Works’ production of Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm at 59E59.
Director Bio
Henry Gottfried is a theater artist based in New York City. His directing and associate directing credits include projects on Broadway and Off-Broadway, as well as NYC concerts and the development of new plays and musicals (most recently: THE LESSON by Tyrone Davis, Jr. at Ars Nova). Henry has also developed new plays as a director/collaborative dramaturg at Ojai Playwrights Conference and Hedgebrook Playwrights Festival. As an actor, he has performed in the Broadway production of WAITRESS, the national tours of BRIGHT STAR and PIPPIN, and the world premiere production of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. Henry holds a BA in Theater Studies from Yale University.
henrygottfried.com