Alison Luterman

Creative Writing Teacher and Free-lance Journalist

Biographical Statement

Alison Luterman wrote “See How We Almost Fly,” a choreopoem, produced and performed by the Mendana Dance Theatre in San Francisco, “Oasis,” a one-act produced by No Nude Men Theatre in San Francisco, and “Saying Kaddish With My Sister,” which was produced by the Jewish Ensemble Theatre of West Bloomfield, Michigan.

Her poems have appeared in The Sun, Poetry East, The Brooklyn Review, Oberon, Kalliope, and many other magazines and anthologies. Her first book of poetry, The Largest Possible Life, was published by Cleveland University Press in 2001. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Modern Love section, The Sun Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, The San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and performs with the improvisational dance theatre troupe, Wing It!

photo credit: Gerry Thrash

Play Roster

Saying Kaddish With My Sister: A Comedy
(full-length)
Lorraine Horowitz is dying, attended by her performance-artist daughter Lydia. When Rahel, the long-estranged older daughter, rushes in, Lorraine dies, leaving the two younger women to work out a peaceful co-existence with each other—if they can. Rahel, who was always drawn to extremes, has become a born-again Orthodox Jew and a settler on the Gaza strip, recently evicted from her home by Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, Lorraine’s afterdeath adventure continues, as she finds herself conducting a Life Review with Oprah sitting in for God (“I take the form of whatever you worshipped in life.”) There are appearances by Max, Lorraine’s long-dead husband, as flashbacks reveal the family at different stages of its evolution. The play takes great leaps across the time-space continuum, cross-cutting between past, present, and eternity. The daughters, who have been left a complicated legacy of love, conflict, thwarted dreams, and unresolved questions, wrestle with these issues as best they can; Rahel through her religious practices and her faith in God; Lydia through her art.


Eva Pearl
(full-length)
Eva and Sam Pearl, 26 and 33 respectively, have been married “forever,”—nine years. Sam has a degree in philosophy but works in a grocery store, where he enjoys creative camaraderie with his friend and co-worker Cesar Gonzalez, a Guatemalan performance poet, and his boss, Joe Ling, a Chinese poet-philosopher. Food is Sam’s passion, but he nurses a private sense of failure, both in his career and his marriage. When Eva goes back to community college to complete the education that was interrupted when she dropped out of school years before, she takes a poetry class with Vivian Houston, whose gift for teaching outstrips her personal judgment. Eva is surprised to discover within herself a gift for language that launches her on an unexpected internal odyssey. The power of image and metaphor overwhelm her, shaking her up, and changing her and Sam’s lives irrevocably. Her friend Shelley Boudreau accuses her of “becoming a dyke” but that’s not the half of it. Below the surface, a secret Eva and Sam have carried together for years erupts, setting them both free to write their own next chapters.


The Hot Tub Defense
(45-minute one-act)
Olivia Hotchkiss, 38, an elementary school teacher, and Jack Woolf, 58, a defense lawyer were lovers but broke up eighteen months before because of his infidelity and her neediness. Jack works to save accused murderers from the death penalty; his motto is “everyone deserves a second chance,” Unfortunately Jack’s laudable politics are matched by his less-than-laudable sense of personal responsibility and integrity. Olivia has a few problems in that area herself. After her car dies on a dark freeway and he rescues her with his Triple A card, she invites him to take a “friendly” hot tub in her backyard. Both have hidden agendas, which are revealed over the course of the long night as they argue, laugh, reminisce, make love, fight, make up, lie, confess, and come close to both murder and salvation.


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