LENOX - Sonia Pilcer'S new play "The Holocaust Kid" will have a staged reading in Founders’ Theater at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, on Sunday, Dec. 9, at 2.
Tickets are a suggested donation of $18 and are available at the door. The play is performed in two acts and runs approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. The theater is wheelchair-accessible. For information, visit www.holocaustkid.com .
"Wit and humor interface with stark realities and unanswerable questions ... Provocative fiction, not just for the Second Generation but for all our collective memories,†says Booklist of the work.
An adaptation of her 2001 novel of the same title, the play is set in the late 1980s and the world of an adult child of the Holocaust, a Second Generation survivor who does her best to disassociate with her heritage and the horrors of her parents' past. Alternately dark, poignant, uproarious and irreverent, the play explores how the Holocaust, so many years after liberation, resonates in the lives of her characters.
Robert Walsh directs a cast of four, including Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Zosha, born in a Displaced Persons camp, liberal minded and irreverent, a freelance writer; Jonathan Epstein as Heniek Palovsky, her distant father, a survivor of Auschwitz; Seth Kanor as Uly Oppenheim, Zosha's lover and a scholar of the Holocaust; and Nancy Rothman as Genia, Zosha's mother, who met Heniek in Poland after the war.
In Pilcer's essay "2G" published in 1987, she writes: "We call ourselves 2G. Group shorthand for Second Generation, the survivors' children ... While the survivors seem to have the ability to go on with their lives – the bar mitzvahs and weddings of their children are huge, festive affirmations of life – it is their children who spend much of their time, not to mention money, talking to Ph.D.'s and MSW's. In unaccented, well-reasoned English, we speak of anger, guilt, trying to separate ourselves from our parents and their Holocaust past. Secretly, we believe that nothing we can ever do will be as important as our parents' suffering."
After working on "The Holocaust Kid" for 18 years and receiving nearly 40 rejections, Pilcer published it in 2001 and developed a one-act play for Shakespeare and Company’s 2003 Studio Festival of Plays. Since then, Pilcer has created a new two-act version.
This staged reading is co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and Congregation Ahavath Sholom.
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A Boutique Hotel is Bringing Guests a Luxury Stay in Lenox
By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
LENOX, Mass. — A new Inn is bringing a boutique-style stay for visitors and locals to enjoy.
Owners, Sullivan Capital LLC, purchased the property, located on 135 Main Street, in 2024. After a year or renovations, Garden Gables Inn is open for business.
"Garden Gables started off as one of the many Berkshire cottages, 1790 was the date on that, and it's always operated as an inn," said Hospitality Manager Yvonne Walton. "It's just a great gathering place and relaxation spot for people to come and get the feel of Lenox, and just slow down and enjoy the nature and the surrounding area...get culture and art and see some great concerts. I think it'll be a wonderful place, definitely does more of the upper-scale hospitality."
Owners Niko Giallouis and Eric Sullivan bought the property from the former owner. Sullivan had his eye on Lenox since attending a wedding almost 10 years ago.
"I came to a wedding in Lenox, probably six or seven years ago. Personally, just kind of fell in love with the area, and I guess that's kind of how it got on my radar. So you know from that perspective, as we got into the hotel business out towards an area, it was a place I was kind of monitoring and waiting for the right property to show up."
After purchasing the two underwent a full renovation, a project that cost around $1.5 million. The building, first built in 1780, required some TLC. Sullivan's wife, Jessica, who owns Jessica Sullivan Design, designed the inn.
Sullivan said they installed a new roof, repainted everything, renovated the bathrooms, installed new floors, a new HVAC system, and new plumbing.
"We really touched everything from the outside...I mean, all the aesthetics and layouts changed a bit," he said. "As I said, put about a million and a half into it. All new furniture, fixtures, everything. The design's completely different. It wasn't a full gut, but it was a heavy, heavy renovation."
The two like to collaborate with local businesses, and they make a point to direct visitors to local restaurants, businesses, and attractions.
"If guests are asking for recommendations, our customer service team, our guest services team, will relay that kind of information. Even if we can call and make a reservation for somebody, happy to do it," he said. "We aren't doing breakfast, but what we do is we have partnerships with a lot of the breakfast places downtown. We actually purchase a gift certificates for each person each day, so that they can use that to go downtown."
Sullivan hopes that guests don't see their inn as just a place to sleep and dump their bags, but make it an experience for anyone who stays.
"We really focus on kind of the experience side of things, so again, we want to give you the best experience you can have here...and we want that not just to be the place you put your bag and go do things. It's important to think of everything," he said.
Sullivan said partnerships are important to their business and are a way to connect with locals.
"The local partnerships, I can't stress that enough, because no matter how much and how great the room is, people are still going to want to go do other things," he said. "So, I think it just benefits everybody if we're all working together and so forth, and supporting the community, being neighborly too, because we are surrounded by residential homes...But we really try to put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, a lot of love into the building, all the details, really care about the senses," Sullivan said.
The Inn's check-in and reservations are completely online. When guests arrive, all they have to do is check in online and receive their code that they will use to enter their room. Sullivan hopes this helps create less stress for guests and gets them to their room as fast as possible, especially after a long trip.
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