When A Traveling Jewish Theater founder, Naomi Newman,  first presented the idea of collaborating on a new project with YTE, I must confess—co-artistic director Laura Sheppard and I had set our hearts on a rollicking comedy or musical.  Anything uplifting. The world was still in the debilitating isolation of Covid and many of us still couldn’t find the lamentation needed to grieve the reign of hate mongering and anti-immigrant sentiments that reared its familiar ugly head here in our country.  We thought audiences  might need some kind of escape from our relentless collective tzuris—troubles.  Being the soulful theater shaman she is, Ms Newman believed otherwise. She presented YTE with Between Worlds—a play based on the words and life of poet Irene Klepfisz.  In the play, Irena, the ‘keeper of accounts’, takes a courageous decision that most of us would prefer to avoid. She chooses to look closely at her own shadowed past.  As a side note, the ancient Greek word for theater, ‘theatron’ literally means ‘a place of seeing’.  In this theater of poetry and seeing, Irena looks fearlessly at her early years as a child refugee out of the ashes of the Warsaw Ghetto to becoming a ‘stranger in a strange land’.  She turns her eye on her own struggle between the necessity of work and the yearning to have the luxurious time needed to loaf and daydream as a poet.  She looks at the everyday loving acts of being in a long relationship and the painful price of loving someone–the possibility of loosing them.  In doing so, she organizes through the revolutionary act of writing, a way to befriend her shadows rather than become undone by them.  Resigned to her nature as an ‘outsider’, Irena  looks, observes, interprets and participates in the writing of her own story in her own hard won unique voice—always a cause for celebration—giving us, her audience, permission to do the same.