Meet the cast: Maya Boudreau

Maya Boudreau plays Hannah, Miriam and Aaron’s older daughter in Hatboxes. She graduated with a BFA in Theatre with honors from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in just three years.

Maya grew up in a small town in Illinois. It was here that Maya developed a strong sense of who she was. From a young age, Maya was involved in community and school theatrical productions.  At age fourteen, Maya and her parents moved to Chicago where she went to Walter Payton College Prep High School. 

While living in Chicago, Maya took advantage of every cultural experience that she could. Chicago became her home. Maya had the honor of studying and performing with such prestigious and innovative companies as Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Lookingglass Theatre, The Second City, American Theatre Company and Piven Theatre Workshop, among others. 

Hatboxes glossary: Havdalah

Once the Saturday evening sky becomes dark enough to see three stars, the Havdalah ceremony may begin, marking the end of the Sabbath.


Celebrants recite the blessing over a cup of wine, symbolic of joy.  They pass around a container of sweet spices, like cinnamon and cloves, which symbolizes the pleasure of the Sabbath. A braided candle calls to mind the multiple but unified strands of Judaism in the world, and its extinction in the remainder of the wine evokes the sadness of the end of the Sabbath.

Miriam and Nadine observe Havdalah in Hatboxes

How do you mark the difference between workaday life and a more special time?

Hatboxes Will Screen at Reeling 2013: The 31st LGBT International Film Festival

Yahoo!

Hatboxes will screen at Reeling 2013: The 31st LGBT International Film Festival in November.

Running from Thursday, November 7, through Thursday, November 14 at venues all over the city, Reeling will feature films from Chicago-based filmmakers and from as far away as Brazil and Austria.

Reeling is sponsored by Chicago Filmmakers, which Hatboxes has a special relationship to:  not only did its script take shape with the help of a Screenwriting II session at Chicago Filmmakers, all its scenes save one were filmed within steps of the Filmmakers’ office on Clark Street in Andersonville.

Stay tuned for screening details...

Hatboxes glossary: gossip

In a tense scene in Hatboxes between Miriam and her estranged husband, Aaron expresses concern about people in their community bearing tales about Miriam.

Aaron collects the last of his things in Hatboxes

Gossiping is considered one of the gravest sins in Judaism, reflecting an understanding of the power of speech:  the world was brought into being by the spoken Word; of the 43 sins enumerated in the main confessional prayer on Yom Kippur, at least a dozen are sins of speech. Tale-bearing is considered a sin on the level of murder, idol worship, and incest/adultery, and even sharing a piece of information that is true, that is not negative, and that would not hurt the subject is considered a violation of two commandments articulated in Leviticus:  "Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people," and "ye shall not wrong one another [with speech]" (Lev. 19:16 and Lev. 25:17, respectively).

The harm that speech can do cannot be repaired in the same way that a stolen bracelet can be returned or damage to a car repaired.  In Hatboxes, Aaron worries about Miriam's well-being even if true information were to circulate among her neighbors ("Miriam and Aaron are getting a divorce" or "Miriam has made friends with a woman who wears trousers").

In The Big Chill, the Jeff Goldblum charater asserts that no one can go a week without making a rationalization.  Who can go a day without gossiping?

ANOTHER FESTIVAL

Yes. There's more good news for HATBOXES.

We've been accepted at the 12^th Annual Route 66 International Film Festival.

 

The festival will be held on November 1-2, 2013, at the screening room adjacent to The Capitol City Bar and Grill, Springfield, Illinois. 

We're not sure exact timing yet for the screening, but details will be available soon at their website.

Is anybody up for a trip to Springfield?

Hatboxes glossary: keeping kosher 2

A kosher kitchen requires separate utensils, tableware, and cookware for dairy and meat products, and some folks even use separate appliances and linens.

Rendering a kitchen kosher, called kashering, can seem intimidating:  everything must be deep-cleaned, pots and pans have to get submerged in boiling water (or hot coals get dropped into them as they boil water so the water surges over the lip), and silverware has to get boiled, too.  Things with porous surfaces may have to be disposed of altogether.

Miriam and Nadine kasher Nadine's kitchen in Hatboxes

Keeping kosher is a way of paying attention to what goes into your mouth in addition to what comes out of it and serves as a constant reminder of of a Jew's place on the spectrum of Jewish life and observance.

What food customs root you to your culture?

Hatboxes glossary: clip-on earrings

Miriam and Nadine shop together in Hatboxes

In Hatboxes, Miriam exclaims, "You never see such nice clip-ons," as she peruses a whole tree of earrings in Lena's boutique.  "I think I'll get two."

Some observant Jews do not pierce their ears because it may be considered immodest. Tzni'ut (Hebrew: צניעות) is a body of Jewish law concerned with comportment, including dress, and relations between the sexes.  Tzni'ut is rooted in concepts of of humility and modesty, articulated repeatedly across the Bible as ideal traits, and it forms the basis of an enormous body of jurisprudence.

Ear-piercing sometimes gets included among the prohibitions against mutilating the body:  "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor imprint any marks upon you: I am the LORD." (Leviticus 19:28; the Talmud identifies tattooing as an idolatrous practice, but the rabbis disagreed about whether including the name of a deity was what was prohibited or the entire act itself.  800 years ago, Maimonides concluded that tattoos are entirely prohibited.)  In Exodus 32, Aaron collecting the earrings from women, sons, and daughters, but maybe melting them down to use as the Golden Calf casts a taint on piercings still, thousands of years later.

Is modesty a part of how you choose to dress yourself?