Jewish Plot
In Jewish Plot, a playwright named Torrey Townsend has dedicated five years of his life to adapting the fictional I.W. Bruntmole’s now-forgotten English melodrama, Jewish Plot, a rare depiction of Jewish life and the toll of prejudice that unleashed a grand furore upon its premiere in 1889 London. As he reconstructs the play, Townsend scrambles to situate himself within today’s theater industry’s desire for authentic storytelling and contemporary discourse’s tendency to concretize identity as an object one possesses. Turning toward his own “Jewish identity,” he writes an artistically, ethically, existentially flailing version of himself into the piece.
In the process, Townsend confronts his own family history -- including his grandfather’s speechwriting for Golda Meir and his role raising $35 billion for the foundation of Israel after World War II.
Jewish Plot captures the complex and crazy-making reality of Jewish American life amid unfolding daily horrors carried out in the name of identity.
Press
“[Jewish Plot] meets the moment with a howl of pain and fury”
THE BEST PLAYS OF 2025 (Jackson McHenry)
“the tonal and structural switchbacks here are genuinely exhilarating… how much is ‘real’ wavers, except for the rock-solid sense we're in the presence of real talent—both onstage & behind it.
— Helen Shaw
"Thank God for Torrey Townsend’s searing and provocative (and funny!) Jewish Plot..."
— Fran Hoepfner
“dynamites [the fourth wall] into smoking rubble.”
— Elisabeth Vincentelli
“an in-your-face, deranged work of metatheater that still manages to shock even when you know what’s coming.”
— Sean Pergola
“Townsend is one of the few artists willing to depict this societal psychosis with appropriate gravity.”
— Sean Pergola
“Townsend’s Jewish Plot is a wild deconstruction of authorship and identity.”
— Douglas Corzine
“a work of mad poetry about current-day Jewish identity”
- Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater
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Off Broadway
The Workshop