Family tries to rise to Passover Seder rituals in comedy ‘We All Fall Down’

Passover ended just about a week before Sarasota Jewish Theatre opens the Florida premiere of “We All Fall Down,” Lila Rose Kaplan’s comedic tale of one family’s efforts to put on their own Seder for the first time.

Running April 18-23, it is the closing production of the Sarasota Jewish Theatre’s third season.

Linda Stein, a psychologist who is seeing her family slip away as her kids get older, has decided that it’s time for this secular, non-practicing Jewish family to celebrate Passover with its own Seder. The trouble is, no one is quite sure what to do or what it all means.

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“I don’t think she ever went to one,” said director Jeffery Kin. “Her husband, Saul, had them with his family when he and his sister were kids. But no one else has ever had a Seder before.”

In a review of the play’s world premiere at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston in 2020, WBUR, the Boston University public radio station said, Linda’s “plan for the holiday involves not just such staples as matzo balls and the reading of the Haggadah but also a recycled ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ costume and finger puppets representing the ten plagues by which God muscled Egypt to let his people go.”

Despite the focus on a specific family and holiday, Kin said it’s a “universal story about a family coming together, their foibles and issues and every character has their problems that they’re trying to get through, their own secrets and of course, all things come out in this single day in the Stein household.”

Nellie O’Brien stars as Linda, opposite James Kassees as her husband, Saul, whom Kin describes as “that older white male who thinks he’s in charge and he’s kind of not anymore.”

They have two daughters. Victoria Flounders plays Ariel, a yoga instructor who still lives at home, and Lucy Guttridge plays the older daughter, Sammy, a California teacher who started her own women’s school, where she only uses books by women and people of color.

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L. Aden Russell plays Saul’s sister, Nan, who is also Linda’s best friend from college.

The cast also includes Pam Wiley as Bev, the “crazy former neighbor,” who thinks Linda’s most recent book on motherhood is all about her, Kin said. And Barbara Monteiro plays Esther, Linda’s graduate assistant, a Black woman who has recently begun studying Judaism and knows far more than anyone else in the group about the religion, beliefs and traditions.

The production is presented at the Players Centre in the Crossings at Siesta Key Shopping Center, where Kin was previously the producing artistic director. He is now leading efforts for a community-wide arts festival known as Sarasota Rising.

“This has been one of the best experiences I’ve had in the theater,” he said. “It’s just the greatest group of smart, caring, savvy people who get what we’re doing,” he said.

‘We All Fall Down’

By Lila Rose Kaplan. Directed by Jeffery Kin. Presented by the Sarasota Jewish Theatre, April 18-23 at the Players Centre, 3501 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Suite 1130. Tickets are $20-$36. 941-365-2494; theplayers.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: A family’s Passover Seder goes wrong in Sarasota Jewish Theatre comedy