Torrey Townsend's JEWISH PLOT World Premiere to be Presented at The Brick
Performances take place October 16 - November 1, 2025.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Sep. 26, 2025
Torrey Townsend will return with a new work of excoriating, disconcerting meta-theater. An adaptation of a fictional long-lost Victorian masterpiece, Jewish Plot erupts into an emotional and theatrical appeal to what it means to be an American Jew today. Directed by Sarah Hughes (Daphne, A Woman Among Women) at The Brick (579 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn), and produced by Tony Award-winning Lucas Katler Productions, the world premiere production today announced its full cast.
Jewish Plot features Neil D'Astolfo (Off-Broadway: Mister Miss America, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Tess Frazer (Off-Broadway: The Perplexed, Mary Page Marlowe; TV: Godless), Eddie Kaye Thomas (Off-Broadway: The Wanderers, Golden Age; Film: American Pie), and Madeline Weinstein (Broadway: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; Off-Broadway: The Ally; Film: Between the Temples).
The plot: a playwright named Torrey Townsend has dedicated five years of his life to adapting the fictional I.W. Bruntmole’s now-forgotten English melodrama, Jewish Plot, a rare depiction of Jewish life and the toll of prejudice that unleashed a grand furore upon its premiere in 1889 London. With unflinching candor, the fictional Jewish Plot confronted the timeless question of whether love across the borders of identity will inevitably end in tragedy. As he reconstructs the play, this Townsend scrambles to situate himself within today’s theater industry’s desire for authentic storytelling and discourse’s tendency to concretize identity as an object one possesses. To do so, he turns toward his own “Jewish identity.”
By writing an artistically, ethically, existentially flailing portrait of an alternate self into his play, real-life Torrey Townsend grapples with his own family’s legacy: his grandfather’s speech-writing for Golda Meir and pivotal role raising $35 billion for the foundation of Israel after World War II. Jewish Plot captures the complex and crazy-making reality of Jewish American life amid unfolding, distant daily horrors carried out in the name of identity. The performance runs approximately 90 minutes, with no intermission.
