Jon Adam Ross is a widely acclaimed theater artist, founding company member of Storahtelling and the Northwoods Ramah Theater Company.
For many summers, Camp Ramah in Wisconsin has had a robust theater program where, like many other Ramah camps, campers mount productions of Broadway musicals in fully translated Hebrew. The Ramah camps also happen to have a unique program called the Tikvah program, which provides opportunities for campers with intellectual, physical, and/or developmental disabilities to attend Jewish summer camp. In the summer of 2002, counselors at Ramah Wisconsin decided to try creating a platform for Tikvah campers to perform in their own, self-written Jewish play for the camp community. There were many in the camp who were nervous about this idea for several good reasons. But the green light was given and a project was born.
The idea was to create a play based on
Breishit
, the creation story in the book of Genesis. There were 12 campers.The campers were split into six groups with each group consisting of two Tikvah campers and one counselor. Each group focused on a different day of creation. And each group was tasked with not only writing a skit, but creating a visual image of their day (a sun, a tree, etc.). The performance itself was presented in a low-key atmosphere as a ‘lunch theater’ in the auditorium at camp. Just the oldest campers were invited to the performance and as they came in to the auditorium, everyone grabbed plates of spaghetti from the buffet and sat down to eat their dinner and watch some theater. One by one, each group got up to perform their scene, and then placed their visual image on the back wall of the stage and then sat back down to continue eating. It felt like a casual series of cute performances. And then for the last day of creation (Shabbat – God’s day of rest), all the campers came back on stage and fell asleep. The show was a huge success! Everyone talked about it for days and the campers felt so proud of themselves.
The next summer, a new idea was hatched. The counselors decided that for that summer’s Tikvah Lunch Theater, the rehearsal process would be opened up to several camper volunteers who wanted to work with the Tikvah campers to help them create their show. The only problem? 15 campers listed Tikvah Lunch Theater as their first choice activity. There were only 15 campers in all of Tikvah! So what did they do? They let them all in, and 30 campers performed in that year’s Tikvah Lunch Theater. No counselors had to help write the scripts or perform. The campers did it all themselves. It was a show about superheroes in the Torah (Joseph, Miriam, etc.). But it could have been a show about superheroes at camp. That’s what it felt like.
Fast forward to 2012: the 11th annual Tikvah Lunch Theater had a standing room only crowd. It has become a marquee event in the camp calendar. What is most exciting to me is that the staff members who were working on it this past summer had no idea that there hadn’t always been such a program as the “TLT.” They just assumed it was something that always existed at camp. This was culture change at its best. This is why people like me choose to work at Jewish summer camp. So we can watch campers and staff members become superheroes before our eyes.
Torah
Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.
