Welcome to the Shiva House by Benjamin Behrend and Logan Gabrielle Schulman

Benjamin Behrend and Logan Gabrielle Schulman's Welcome to the Shiva House advertised itself as an "interactive virtual performance" exploring what it means to grieve collectively. In practice, Welcome to the Shiva House unfolded as a complex event comprising three multimedia pieces: the virtual live "shiva," which took place on Zoom; a pdf companion "reader"; and an audio file intended to be listened to following the performance. Together, Behrend and Schulman's production experimented with ideas of temporality, community, and faith, connecting them to what it means to grieve and move forward during a time of unprecedented loss.

Ritual of kriah in Welcome to the Shiva House, co-written, -directed, and -performed by Benjamin Behrend and Logan Gabrielle Schulman.

(Photo courtesy of the playwrights.)

Shiva refers to the seven-day mourning period in the Jewish tradition. This performance situated its participants on the seventh day when those in mourning reenter society. The choice of sitting shiva as a dramaturgical rubric reflected our cultural moment and Behrend and Schulman's broader body of work concerned with Jewish American identity. Before theatres shut down in 2020, Behrend and Schulman were slated to open their play Now at the End Again, a performance predicated on audience interaction and communal recitation. In part because such phenomena are anathema in COVID times, Welcome to the Shiva House emerged from the artists' decision to create a new play informed by the material circumstances of COVID-19. In doing so, Behrend and Schulman brought an effective and surprising sense of liveness to "Zoom theatre," where the body of the spectator is all-too-often forgotten.

The live portion of the performance consisted of three eulogy monologues divided by moments of audience participation: call-and-response recitations and traditional Shiva rituals. In my viewing, Behrend played the nameless Moderator who greeted the "mourners" as they logged on, reminded us to have our Yizkor candles and cloth at the ready, and instructed us to set our screens to "Gallery View" so that we could see this community of which we were now a part. Schulman played the Host, who conducted the service from various character positions of grandchild, friend, and child of the late "Sam Bloom," whose identity seemed to shift over the course of the three monologues. A dutiful grandfather in the first monologue, Sam was subsequently eulogized as a 28-year-old female transplant to Tel Aviv, and then as a father taken too soon by cancer. This mourning narrative of shifting identity felt familiar in a pandemic moment where we were constantly barraged with reports of death and trauma. Sam Bloom was conjured as a representation of those we have lost but cannot grieve, a dramaturgical maneuver that deftly straddled the line between intimately personal and incomprehensibly vast.

Each monologue hit several relatable and heart-string-tugging beats. I caught myself welling up as Schulman described their grandfather's forty-three-year marriage to "Mom-mom," and again as they recounted the feelings of frustration, anger, and helplessness that comes with losing a dear friend to a sudden accident. I was not alone. This shared affect circulated through us all, evident in melancholic eyes, falling tears, and expressions of recognition passing over each face visible in the Zoom grid. After the second monologue, the Host held up a small piece of ornately stitched black fabric, reminiscent of a mourning veil, and guided us through the ritual of kriah, explaining, "We'll rip our garments together. In doing so, you identify yourself as a mourner, and more importantly, it gives you a chance to express our loss in a single certain moment." This structured mourning was a main impetus for the playwrights to share shiva with those who were perhaps at a loss for ways to process their loss and grief in isolation. Judging from the blink-and-you'll-miss-it smiles that darted across participants' faces as they tore their pieces of paper and cloth, it was clear that Behrend and Schulman were tapping into a deep well of unprocessed emotion at the height of the pandemic.

After this half-hour marking absence and loss, Behrend and Schulman offer an audio file to be listened to individually on the traditional post-shiva "walk around the block." The audio greets us: "Imagine yourself outside. We begin outside. There's an infinity to stress, worry, and grieve over in the world right now." Of course, Schulman's voice reminds us that "our grieving is far from over. However, this is a way of marking time." The companion reader, which includes a brief call-and-response script for use during the performance, helps to further ground this moment of performance in time, borrowing lyrics from contemporary musical artist serpentwithfeet, a meditation on loss from Judith Butler, the Rabbi's speech from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and stage directions from Behrend and Schulman's never-performed Now at the End Again.

As we begin in late-2021 to exit the height of pandemic restrictions in the United States (regardless of whether the pandemic is itself exiting), I am left with a blurry amalgam of Zoom-play memories, some better than others, none remarkably memorable. What makes Welcome to the Shiva House stand out is the radical care inherent to the project: care for the audience, empathy for an unprecedented cultural situation, and an experimental mode of making community, achieved through the performance of multiple methods of connection, all with their accompanying temporalities: the liveness of being together in a virtual space, the memories presented through storytelling, and the multimedia aspect that has a synchronous and asynchronous life within and outside of the production.

The intentionality of marking time throughout Behrend and Schulman's media both anchored us and allowed us to ruminate on temporality's relationship to our ideas of what is considered "live" performance. The pandemic has its own terrifying velocity, while many of us find ourselves in standstills, cycles of recursion or regression, or perhaps grief has shattered our sense of time altogether. Welcome to the Shiva House threw into relief what is now clear in retrospect: that our ever-changing conception of "liveness" not only corresponds to our technologies and innovations, but to our wants and needs as a culture, here being the need to ground ourselves as we are unmoored in time through incalculable loss, media oversaturation, and isolation.