Productions & Events featuring Elise Kauzlaric

A powerful and poignant drama about two sisters trying to reconnect after years of separation brought on by the rise of the Nazis.

In New York City in 1946, a daughter and her father, Rose and Mordechai Weiss, have adapted to life as new Americans after escaping Poland before World War II. In their escape, they were forced to leave behind Rose’s sister Lusia and her mother. When Rose and Lusia are reunited, Rose tries to engage with an older sister who, having survived the horrors of war overseas, now seems a stranger. And Lusia—haunted by vivid memories of her past—struggles to connect with a family she barely knows. A Shayna Maidel explores family, faith, and forgiveness inthe pursuit of a better future.

Written in 1984, A SHAYNA MAIDEL was widely produced by America’s leading regional theaters and became a long-running success Off Broadway from 1987 to 1989. The New York Times called the play “a tribute to the sustaining power of family,” the Hartford Journal Inquirer hailed it as “an emotional powerhouse,” and the Atlanta Constitution raved that “anyone who sees it will not soon forget it.” The Chicago Reader underscored the play’s fit with TimeLine’s mission, describing it in a 2002 review as “history as intimate as a snapshot.”

“If you stick round long enough, the same ideas come round again and again. Wearing a different coloured tie.”

A portrait of a dynamic and provocative woman—the symbol of a nation—as she weathers decades of history and political strife. Every Tuesday afternoon for more than 60 years, Queen Elizabeth II has met with her Prime Ministers in a private audience, a gesture of unity between government and Crown. Through moments of tension, negotiation, war, and unrest, these conversations with political leaders from Winston Churchill to Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher have remained a constant across the years. Playwright Peter Morgan re-imagines these meetings, giving us a glimpse at the queen’s role in guiding the circumstances that have shaped Great Britain, and a window into the mystery, compassion and humor of the woman behind the iconic crown.

This classic play is about the legacy of the past and the price of life’s choices. In a New York brownstone marked for demolition, two estranged brothers meet to sort through and sell their late father’s belongings—a pile of relics and old furniture buried by a lifetime’s worth of family baggage. What follows is a poignant, intimate, and often heart-wrenching look at the ways we are liberated or trapped by those we love.

Based on the best-selling novel and set in post-war Brooklyn, MY NAME IS ASHER LEV follows the journey of a young Jewish painter torn between his Hasidic upbringing and his desperate need to fulfill his artistic promise. When his genius threatens to destroy his relationship with his parents, young Asher realizes he must make difficult choices between his passion and his faith. This stirring adaptation of a modern classic presents a heartbreaking and triumphant vision of what it means to be an artist at any cost—against the will of family, community and tradition.

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV received its world premiere in January 2009 at the
Arden Theatre in Philadelphia and recently closed a heralded 10-month run Off- Broadway in New York City, receiving the Outer Circle Critics Award for Best New Off-Broadway play. TimeLine’s production is the play’s Chicago premiere.

This powerful drama “changed American theater forever” (The New York Times) and resonates across generations — recently serving as inspiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park. An African-American family living in a crowded apartment on Chicago’s South Side during the 1950s believes that a better life is just around the corner. But they are challenged when their plan to buy a home in the Clybourne Park neighborhood is thwarted by racial intolerance. This award-winning play celebrates faith, courage and the human spirit, even as it spotlights divides that still plague Chicago more than 50 years after its premiere.