page_title: Lazarre Seymour Simckes
section_title: Playwright
hierarchical_section_title: Lazarre Seymour Simckes / Life and works / Playwright
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Lazarre Seymour Simckes, New Haven, Connecticut, 2009.
context_page_description: Lazarre Seymour Simckes is an award-winning playwright, novelist, educator, Hebrew-English translator, and psychotherapist. He has developed approaches to the use of creative writing in areas including prison therapy and cross-cultural communication between students in the Middle East.
context_section_description: His first play, Seven Days of Mourning (adapted from his novel published by Random House), was staged on Broadway at Circle in the Square. Clive Barnes called it "spiky, yet intensely moving. A Fiddler on the Roof without music, but with blood. Unique, wild, funny. It still haunts me."
  Simckes wrote the off-off-Broadway play Ten Best Martyrs of the Year, a Theater for the New City (TNC) production directed by Crystal Field, about the ten rabbis who were tortured to death in Rome for supporting the revolt led by Bar Kokhbah in 2nd century Palestine. Simckes said of that play, "I tend to make tragic comment in a mixture of styles. So what did I do? I wrote a play as if through the eyes of Hadrian, the Roman emperor, watching the genocide of the Jews from his balcony." The play was reviewed by Michael Smith in The Village Voice as "timeless, mythic, enlivened by all kinds of stylistic intrusions and an almost hysterical inventiveness."
  Another of Smickes' off-off-Broadway productions, Nossig's Antics, also a TNC production directed by Crystal Field, focuses on the character of Alfred Nossig, who was accused of collaborating with Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, and executed in 1943, just before his 80th birthday, by a Jewish fighters organization. The critic Richard McBee called it "a riveting puzzle," and it has also been described as a "dark farce" and an "absurd exploration of history and the horrific times we live in."
  His other plays include Minutes, a fictional encounter between Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler; "Soldier Boys" about Czar Nicholas's 1827 edict to recruit Jews into the Russian army for the first time, including children as Cadets, which had a reading at Theater for the New City with Judd Hirsch as the Czar; and "Open Rehearsal," chosen by Edward Albee as first runner-up in the inaugural 2006-2007 Yale Drama Series Competition,  He also wrote the screenplay for Sidney Lumet's movie version of The Last Temptation of Christ, which has not yet been produced.
caption: New Haven, Connecticut, 2009
exif: {}