Play ponders realities of interfaith marriages

Jordi Mand isn’t scared to talk about circumcision — she doesn’t bristle at the mention of a bris.

But the playwright born Jordan Mandlowitz understands that the importance of the rite of passage — a foundational covenant between God and the Jewish people — isn’t so cut and dry to the uninitiated.

And in interfaith marriages such as her own, the concept of brit mila isn’t as easily welcomed as lighting the Friday night candles to greet Shabbat.

“It was something that I knew growing up, that if you were Jewish, and if you were a boy, then you were circumcised,” says Mand, who was raised in a tight-knit Jewish community in Richmond Hill, Ont.

“I didn’t know any boys who weren’t circumcised, or at least, if they weren’t, that was not something that people were discussing widely. I grew up in what I would consider to be a pretty conservative Jewish household, and there was an assumption that people knew why we did certain things.”

Her future husband didn’t.

When they met 20 years ago while studying at the National Theatre School of Canada, the couple went through the standard steps of learning that those in interfaith relationships are wont to engage in.

“He started asking questions, ‘Why do you do this? Why not this?’ Not in a confrontational way at all. In fact, I found it to be incredibly thought-provoking because I realized I couldn’t always answer him. I actually didn’t really know. I was so grateful to have those conversations where I then felt like I wanted to go and learn why things were the way they were,” she says.

Those conversations — about kosher living, religious continuity and raising a Jewish family in an increasingly agnostic world — catalyzed Mand to write The Cut, a new comedy about Sarah (Hallie Seline) and Andrew (Wade Bogert O’Brien), an expectant couple who get a little bit snippy when mulling a call to the moil late in the third trimester.

It’s an increasingly common education: according to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Centre, out of the two-thirds of American Jewish adults who are married, 42 per cent indicated they had a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who tied the knot since 2010, 61 per cent were intermarried.

“Why I love this show so much is that I really saw a lot of myself, my mom, my friends and my family in Sarah,” says Seline, a Dora Mavor Moore Award winner from Montreal who is raising a child with a non-Jewish partner.

“It was really fascinating for me to be able to go into this character, with her language, her pace, her humour and her arguments that she cares deeply about as she navigates conflict, reflecting on the many levels of my outlook I see within this character.”

Mand is no stranger to writing complex family stories for the stage.

First staged in 2024, In Seven Days is a show in which family and friends try to convince a dying Jewish patriarch to forgo medical assistance in dying (MAID), an intervention on an intervention that technically violates Jewish law; the script is being developed into a feature film by a producing team that includes Winnipeg’s Jennifer Podemski.

Other works by Mand include her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was staged by the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2024. Her first play, Between the Sheets, dealt with her diagnosis, at 22, of ovarian cancer. It was directed by RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton in 2012 during her tenure at Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre.

Before writing Sheets, Mand intended to become a “serious” actor, with aspirations to tread the boards at the Shaw Festival, but by leaning into her writing, Mand began to understand the trade’s capacity to tackle questions about herself, her world and the future.

“And the questions I was asking became much more interesting,” she says.

“I went from being a navel-gazing actor in my early 20s to having big, thematic questions about life. When I decided I didn’t want to act anymore, really just to focus on writing for other people, it meant that I could dive into material emotionally that I don’t think I was able to do as an actor. There were so many things happening in that period of my life. It was the shotgun starting the long marathon of being a writer.”

In recent years, spurred by the fulfilling experience of In Seven Days, Mand has also been running that race with “Jewish writer” more boldly written on her bib; what once felt like a pigeonhole has lately felt like an open door.

After graduating from theatre school in 2006, as she started going out to auditions, Mand said she spent the beginning of nearly every audition helping the casting team figure out how to pronounce her name.

“And then the conversation would always lead to (them asking) if I was Jewish, and then the vibe in the room would change completely,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of roles for Jewish characters, but the kinds of roles I was being sent from then on were in a very small pocket. I had pretty big ambitions to be an actor, to play everything, and I felt like I could.”

Her agent, who is also Jewish, suggested she shave a few letters off her last name, so Mand did. That cut simplified and streamlined her professional life, but Mand wouldn’t make it again if given the chance to revisit.

“I would say that If I was who I am now, I would absolutely be using my legal last name,” she says. “I was too afraid of letting what people thought I was determine what my story was going to be, and it was cowardly. But I didn’t know I could do it any other way at the time. Of course, now I know so much more. As a writer, my whole perspective on life has changed. I’m much more of a fighter now.”

For Mand, that means boldly venturing into the modern realm of the Jewish stage, exploring ancient questions asked by Abraham, Isaac and Larry David.

ben.waldman@freepress.com

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