Stan Kaplan
Title of Play
Matter of Judgment
Date and Place of Reading
June 10, 2011
Manhattan Theatre Club Creative Center
New York City
Director
Lewis Magruder
Cast
Debra Lee Daco–Stage Directions
Joel Rooks–Old Man/Goldman
Joy Hermalyn–Rebecca/Francie/
Palestinian Woman #1
Elizabeth Rouse–Benicia/Palestinian Woman #2
Wilson Bridges–Stoop
Julia Motyka–Maya/Palestinian Woman #3
Jack Davidson–Maxie
About the Playwright
Stan Kaplan is a playwright, performer and storyteller. Between 1971 and 1982 he had a dozen
plays produced at such venues as Soho Repertory Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, La Mama ETC and the Equity Library Theater at Lincoln Center. In 1982 he co-founded Dentures Art Club, an organization devoted to bringing artists and non-artists together to do performance and conceptual work along progressive themes.
From 1997-1999 he worked in Harare, Zimbabwe, as Special Advisor to an indigenous NGO building co-operative housing. Resuming playwriting, his bill of one-acts, 3 Valises, was performed at La Mama in 2000. One of the plays, Schrodinger’s Cat, was revived in 2007 at their “Experimenta!” Festival. In 2007-2008 Kaplan toured in his one-man show, Tonkin, a tabletop re-creation of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which then-President Lyndon Johnson used to take America to war in Vietnam. Tonkin’s intertext is our ongoing involvement in Iraq. In August, 2010, he told his hour-long story “Jack be Nimble,” about gangsters and goniffs in Manhattan's glitzy Soho in the 1980s at the Eureka Opera House in Eureka, Nevada.
Lavrenti Takes a Fall, features Behemoth, the cat from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and treats the power struggle between Lavrenti Beria and Nikita Khrushchev for top spot in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death.
Kaplan is married to the Italian-American artist Joan Giannecchini. They divide their time between their farmhouse in Mendocino county, CA, and a trailer in a nameless ghost town in high-desert Nevada.
About the Play
Rebecca founded The Cow’s Lick, a small non-profit theater company in lower Manhattan, over twenty years ago. Being a shrewd and experienced producer, she knows the company is now in need of fresh ideas and younger audiences. To meet this need, she has initiated a late-night series of productions of new plays that might appeal to younger generations and she has hired Maya, an ambitious up-and-coming producer, to lead it.
One of the plays Maya has selected for the series treads on some very sensitive issues, including the contentious relationship between Israel and its neighbors. Its author is Maxie—Jewish, once an ambitious professor of Marxist studies, and now a cantankerous, but likeable, old cynic. While producing the play will risk offending some of the theater’s oldest and steadiest financial supporters, it might bring in a fresh young audience, as well.
The artistic staff takes sides: Jozef, The Cow’s Lick’s outspoken artistic director, has a strong conviction that theater artists must take on difficult issues and risk offending audiences; Benicia, the company’s savvy business manager, feels with equal conviction that the play will effectively close down the theater; Stoop, the young, intellectual literary manager, is on the fence. Each character must examine his/her own convictions and decide just what is at stake. This includes Maxie, who, as a Jew, takes the biggest risk of all.