Amherst, MA – Hampshire Shakespeare Company will mount a performance of the new play, Burning Words, by New York playwright Peter Wortsman, on Monday, April 30, at the Forum Theater at Holyoke Community College. Curtain time is 6:30 PM, and the performance is free and open to the public, with no advance reservations necessary. A story of courage and dedication in the defense of religious rights, long obscured by the veils of history, the premiere of this powerful drama was staged in Northampton last November. This touring production is made possible by a grant from the Credit Data Services, Inc., Fund of the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, and is hosted by Holyoke Community College.  The playwright will be available to discuss the play after the show. For information about this performance, call 413-587-9398.

In the early 1500s, an era marked by the lingering excesses of the Inquisition and the initial rumblings of protest by Martin Luther, Emperor Maximillian I was persuaded by rabidly anti-Semitic forces to order the confiscation and destruction of holy Hebrew texts. One German Christian scholar, Johannes Reuchlin, argued forcefully for their preservation as the foundations of the Christian faith, adding the “the Jew is as worthy in the eyes of our Lord God as I am.” The play tells the story of Reuchlin’s confrontation with his church and his society in one of the most religiously turbulent times in European history.

Veteran Hampshire Shakespeare actors will flesh out such powerful characters as Reuchlin himself (Walter Carroll); his nemesis Johannes Pfefferkorn (Dan Barnes), a Jewish convert to Christianity; the Emperor Maximillian I (Chris Rohmann); and various other members of the German Catholic hierarchy at the time. The playwright worked with director Lucinda Kidder and dramaturg Lauryn Sasso to hone the action of the play, which received enthusiastic reviews at its November performances and in two public readings in the Valley, including its first reading at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies.

Peter Wortsman is a playwright and author produced the first English translation of Reuchlin’s historic defense of the Talmud and other holy books, Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy and Burn All Jewish Books (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2000). This book on which the play is based, was the subject of a day-long symposium at New York University in 2001 attended by a wide variety of scholars, clergy, diplomats and publishers. An earlier dramatic work by Wortsman, The Tattooed Man Tells All, based on extensive interviews with Holocaust survivors, was published in 2000.