Tufts University Hillel invites you to a staged reading of a brand-new play, “Benefit Performance, or The Other Jew,” by playwright Cary Mazer.

The play was inspired by people, events, and plays featured in the Barnard Hewitt Award-winning book, “Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage,” by Heather Nathans, Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and Alice and Nathan Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies at Tufts. The performance features Tufts professors Laurence Senelick and Barbara Wallace Grossman, as well as Tufts graduate students Teri Incampo and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi.

The plot: In 1858 New Orleans, theater manager and playwright George Washington Lazarus has two problems on his hands, and both of them involve trial scenes: an actor in his theater company has chosen to play Shylock for his benefit performance, and his trial for first-degree murder begins the next day. Lazarus refuses to defend himself; but his wife and daughter may have other plans.

Please note that this play includes discussion of sexual violence.

Free and open to the public.