Plays and High Holy Days

Michele Lowe ’79 studied journalism at Northwestern and after a short stint in advertising returned to her first love: playwriting. Her first play, The Smell of the Kill, was produced on Broadway in 2002, and since then she’s written nearly a dozen more, picking up several accolades along the way. Then, a decade ago, a new and unexpected writing opportunity presented itself. 

Lowe was attending a service at a synagogue in Scarsdale, N.Y., when she noticed one of the rabbis was having some trouble on the bimah.  

“She seemed nervous,” Lowe recalls. “By then I’d been in enough rehearsal rooms. I thought I could help her connect with the congregation, because that’s what playwrights do, right?” Lowe offered to coach the rabbi on her presentation skills and help rewrite her sermon. “She texted me that night and said what a change she had felt up there,” says Lowe. “And even more wonderful was that other people noticed too. I still get choked up thinking about that.” 

The results were so positive that the senior rabbi hired Lowe to work with the rest of his team for the High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement), and a new business was born. When COVID-19 lockdowns forced religious institutions to conduct services virtually, Lowe experienced a surge of new clients. Now she coaches rabbis across the country. “I help people get to the essence of what they want to say,” she explains. “I help amplify their voices.”  

Lowe recognizes that rabbis and playwrights share a common mission: connection with the audience. During one consultation, a rabbi expressed to Lowe his desire to change one just mind, open one heart, with his sermon. And Lowe said, “‘That’s exactly what I do when I write plays.’ If I can show one person something they didn’t know, open their heart … then I think I’ve done my job.” 

Her experience as a playwright has come in handy. When another rabbi asked for help fostering a sense of community within her congregation, Lowe suggested that during her sermon, she come down from the bimah and start introducing members of the congregation to each other. “It went over like gangbusters,” says Lowe. “It’s very rare for a rabbi to come down off the bimah in the middle of a High Holy Day sermon. … I encourage my rabbis to do something that really sets the day apart.”  

Lowe’s Jewish faith, in turn, often influences her own writing. Her newest musical Split takes place in 1953 and features a character dealing with guilt over having worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic weapons were built. “I wanted to talk with the actors about the concept of tikkun olam,” says Lowe. A core concept in Judaism, the Hebrew phrase translates to “world repair” and refers to acts intended to heal or improve the world. Split’s main character strives to heal the world in her own way, by making up for her past and keeping her guilt from spilling over into her daughter’s life. “None of the actors had ever heard of this concept before, and they wanted to understand where it came from,” says Lowe. “The characters in Split embody the story I want to tell about the need for us all to help heal the world.” Split is set to premiere in 2027.