Numbered be our days

Written by Andrea Stolowitz - Directed by Donal Gallagher

First Development Showcase - Cork - October 2024

About the play

Playwright Andrea Stolowitz creates this play using the words from interviews with the Cork Jewish Community and other locals. Director Dónal Gallagher and an ensemble of award-winning Cork actors complete the creative ensemble.

In 2016, newspaper headlines declared that there were no more Jews in Cork. While the claims were never true, playwright Andrea Stolowitz and her team explore this small but vibrant group. Made up entirely of words from interviews, with real-life accounts through multiple lenses, we hear from locals about their history, what it means to be Jewish, to be Irish, and to be in community with each other in these tumultuous times. We explore the notion of nationhood at a time of worldwide crisis, bringing the Cork specific stories and questions of this play into a universal dimension. 

Second Development Showcase - Cork Theatre Collective - June 2025

PROCESS

Andrea’s working method is based on her developing interview-based practice. Most notably, this resulted in her award-winning play The Berlin Diaries, which interrogates the legacy of the Holocaust on her own family, and the New York University/Mark Wing-Davey commissioned Elegy Play, which uses first-hand accounts of New Yorkers during the COVID crisis to examine our post-pandemic life. Earlier work in his method includes her play Ithaka (Oregon Book Award in Drama winner) about returning women combat soldiers.

Numbered Be Our Days’ working method draws on past and current practices of verbatim theatre, using real words by real people in interviews, to tell a story. We fictionalize the names of private people. We leave names as they are in the historical record when possible. We use primary documents to provide context. We take theatrical license to combine characters and arrange text for dramatic possibilities.

“Five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach, and they were sent back again over sea”

- Entry for year 1079, Annals of Innisfallen

Developmental Timeline

  • September 2023: Received Arts Council Strand One Theatre Project funding

  • April 2024: Andrea and her team source verbatim interviews in and around Cork

  • Summer 2024: Andrea Stolowitz creates a script template from 26 hours of sourced material

  • Fall 2024: Using the script template, the team creates 35 minutes of work-in-progress material for an invited showing at the former Cork Synagogue (now 7th Day Adventist Church)

  • April 2025: week-long working session awarded as a “space to play” residency at the Cork Theatre Collective

  • May 2025: Andrea Stolowitz and Donal Gallagher explore the text in New York City, supported by Andrea’s playwright residency at New Dramatists (NYC), Asylum Theatre (IR), and Wax Factory (NYC)

  • Summer 2025: Presentation of a 50-minute selection of the play as a work-in-progress showing as part of the 2025 Cork Midsummer Festival. Open Dress rehearsal 20/6 at noon and W.I.P. showing 21/6 at 5:00 PM. CTC/Triskel Arts Center

Actor Marcus Bale

Development Partners

  • Andrea Stolowitz Theatre Projects

  • The Arts Council

  • Cork Midsummer Festival

  • The Cork Theatre Collective “Space to Play” program

  • The Abbey Theatre Literary and New Work Department

  • Fishamble’s New Play Clinic

  • Cork ETB and The Cork Creative Local Youth Partnership

  • Douglas Street ETB

  • New Dramatists (NYC)

  • Wax Factory (NYC)

  • The Ronni S. Lacroute Fund of OCF

  • The Venturous Theatre Fund of the Tides Foundation

  • The Oregon Arts Commission

  • The J. Schuberth Fund