Two of playwright Cynthia L. Cooper’s plays reflect on the work of Remember the Women Institute
The Spoken and the Unspoken portrays the difficulties of incorporating sexual violence into the Holocaust narrative, and All Databases Are Incomplete complements our She’s Gone project about domestic violence.
The Spoken and the Unspoken, a short play written by Cynthia L. Cooper, premiered at our 2016 Women, Theater, and the Holocaust event, held on May 2 at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. The play brilliantly focuses on the difficulties encountered while researching and uncovering stories of sexual violence. The play, based on the work of Remember the Women Institute and the resistance we have faced in bringing this subject into the open, featured two professional actors, Stacey Linnartz and Jessica Litwak. The 2016 event, which includes this play, can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkGYZPuKYbc&t=30s. The play was performed again on April 15, 2018, as part of a matinee of theater readings that accompanied our VIOLATED! Women and Holocaust and Genocide exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, SoHo, New York City. For this performance, Claudia Schneider joined Stacey Linnartz.
Cooper wrote All Databases Are Incomplete as part of our She’s Gone domestic violence project, and it premiered on a December 1, 2020 webinar, Artists and Writers Respond to Domestic Violence. The one-woman play was performed by Lisa Pelikan. Like the She’s Gone art installation created by Keren Goldstein, the play centers on victims’ clothing. The databases cited are incomplete because they are numbers, rather than the individuals who have suffered. The video of the play is also part of the December 2 – 9 She’s Gone mini-exhibition at the Strongin Collection, Washington, D.C., and was shown in a webinar for the Pace Women’s Justice Center. You can see Lisa Pelikan’s performance of Cynthia L. Cooper’s stirring play here.