Playwright Sonia Levitin splits her time between Park City and Los Angeles. The long-time author of novels started writing plays about 15 years ago. “Chained” is her fifth, and she says it’s about a marriage gone wrong.
“My thinking, especially as I've developed this play,” she said, “is that there's not one villain. When things go wrong, everyone is complicit. So, it turns out that these characters really married for the wrong reason.”
The work specifically delves into the complicated and mostly unknown law of Jewish marriage. To get a divorce, you need not only a civil, but a Jewish divorce, if you married under Jewish law.
“This divorce is called a get and it's a simple document that the husband gives to the wife that declares that they're no longer married, and she is free to marry again. Simple. Well, it's not. And the fact is, amazingly, in this day and age, there are dozens of women who are stuck, chained, because for some reason or another, this man refuses to give her the get.”
While there are efforts to get the law changed, Levitin says the easiest solution is to make sure that Jewish couples sign a prenuptial agreement that the husband-to-be will give a get, if needed.
“It's very hard to change and we go through this in the play,” she said. “But it's on several levels and of course, the parents get involved and, and the mother isn't religious at all, and says ‘why in the world are you staying in this marriage?’ And the cousin says, ‘why are you in this cult?’ So, there's a lot of drama.”
Levitin has a fascinating story of her own and has written about it in her novels. She and her family escaped Nazi Germany when she was four years old
“My mother fled with three girls, I was the youngest,” she said. “She had sent my father out first, because the Nazis were coming in the night and hauling Jewish men out of their homes, and they disappeared. So I wrote this book, “Journey to America” for my own children. I wanted them to understand their roots, and what it meant to be an American, what it means to be free. And that's one of the passions that has guided my work.
The stage reading is Thursday at 7 p.m. The location is revealed upon ticket purchase. For tickets see the link at kpcw.org.
