In their own voice

Who knew that addressing your synagogue’s sisterhood on “How I Spent My Summer in Israel” would be excellent preparation for a life on the stage?

Stephanie Douglass may have had an inkling.

A Chicago nonprofit professional by day, Douglass also has a serious sideline as a spoken word artist who performs and hosts at open mic storytelling venues, including public radio’s The Moth Radio Hour . It’s a calling she credits to her teen years on the shul and Hadassah lecture circuit.

Growing up in Scranton, Pa., Douglass, a self-avowed theater brat, said she jumped at every opportunity to perform in front of live audiences. When local Jewish institutions said, “Let’s get a high schooler” to talk on a particular subject, Douglass recalled, she was among the first to volunteer.

Douglass earned her undergraduate degree in theater and Jewish studies from NYU and a master’s in Yiddish from Oxford University. She has plumbed every part of her life to craft stories that are hilarious, poignant, humiliating, and relatable–whether it’s assisting a former colleague on an Israeli farm with an embarrassing quasi-medical procedure or connecting her Russian-Jewish ancestors’ traumas to hardships faced by today’s immigrants.

“If it happens, it’s fair game,” said Douglass, a Moth GrandSLAM champion who runs Story Club North Side. If she can extract a humorous nugget of wisdom from a seemingly tragic situation, all the better.

Douglass is among a significant number of Jewish Chicagoans who have created a voice for themselves on the open mic scene.

Before COVID-19 hit, Blair Chavis, a local journalist who developed her chops for the art of the spoken word while working at Chicago’s NPR affiliate, WBEZ, would appear around town at a variety of storytelling venues. She often waxed poetic about the quest for a life partner who, like her, shared an appetite for a “vast and delicious world” and the ironies of growing up. “We spend much of our childhood trying to imagine adulthood, and we spend much of our adulthood trying to reimagine our childhood,” she said in a story she performed at a JUF-sponsored Oy! Chicago storytelling podcast in 2015.

Chavis said that her stories, many of which she has mined from her “trials and tribulations” of dating and her Jewish family, frequently “start in a simple place … and unfold into a bigger picture.”

Simple or not, LGBTQ+ spoken word artist Jeremy Owens has been immersed in first-person narratives for well over a decade. The producer and host of You’re Being Ridiculous , a company he founded in 2012 that develops storytelling events around the Chicago area, Owens has dug deeply into his own life, including a childhood in small-town Arkansas, where he recognized that he might not be like most of his neighbors: straight and Christian. His emergence as a gay man and a Jew by choice is a story he feels a responsibility to share.

“Storytelling is not necessarily therapy,” mused Owens, “but in a way, it is, because you open the world a little bit for yourself and others. You give [others] permission to feel how they feel.”

Storytelling per se, said longtime Jewish storyteller Susan Stone, is not quintessentially Jewish, but it was an integral part of early Judaism. “The rabbis told stories to make a point,” said Stone, who has taught at the Piven Theatre Workshop and National-Louis University. Think of the Talmud and this Mishnah, she said, as well as the rich Jewish stories of the diaspora–from places as far-flung as Greece, Spain, and Yemen.

Douglass, the Yiddishist, opined that she and her contemporaries come from a long line of storytellers, including Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I.L. Peretz. “I think about all the great storytellers sitting around cafes sucking on a sugar cube” regaling each other with tales, she said.

Those cafes of Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow may no longer exist, but Douglass and her spoken word cohorts are carrying the Jewish storytelling tradition forward.

Robert Nagler Miller is a journalist and editor who writes frequently about arts- and Jewish-related topics from his home in New York.