Pulitzer Prize finalist Lore Segal's internationally acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Other People's Houses will be adapted for the stage by Emily Feldman and three-time Obie Award winner Daniel Aukin.
Nine months after Hitler takes Austria, a ten-year-old girl leaves Vienna aboard a train that transports several hundred children to safety in England. For the next seven years she finds herself living in "other people's houses": the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters who inhabit a formal Victorian household. Told from the perspective of a child, Other People's Houses offers an insightful and witty depiction of the habits and customs of those who gave her refuge, and a memorable portrait of the postwar immigrant experience.
"In 1938, when I was ten years old, I wrote down my story for my first foster family because it seemed to me that they did not understand what it was like to have lived in Hitler's Vienna, or to escape to England on the Children's Transport. The story grew into a series published in The New Yorker between 1962 and '64, and became the novel Other People's Houses. For a lifelong lover of the theater it will be wonderful if, in my nineties, I can see these events adapted for the stage to allow new generations to witness to the terrors human beings can inflict on each other," said Lore Segal.
"Shortly after I read Other People's Houses, I discovered that Lore Segal lived just two floors below me. I treasured her book and knew that it was kismet. Lore and I became friends and I started to imagine a way to bring Other People's Houses to life onstage. I am excited to pair two theater artists I admire to adapt this moving and relevant story and I'm grateful for our ongoing collaboration with Lore," said producer Jacob Stuckelman.
Lore Segal's Other People's Houses was originally published in 1964 by The New Press and hailed by critics including
Cynthia Ozick and
Elie Wiesel. The stage adaptation of the novel will be produced by Jacob Stuckelman and
Joseph Hayes. Additional information will be announced shortly.
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