Amy Kaissar serves as the producing director at Bristol Riverside Theater, a job title that actually undersells how essential she is to its operations. Kaissar served as managing director from 2009 to 2014 and as a trustee from 2015 to 2020 before taking her current post.
Now, her role is mostly about big-picture decisions.
“The job is about the vision for the company. It’s about how we select plays and programs and it’s about how we fulfill our mission in the community,” she said.
A community theater might not seem like the most obvious place to create change, but at Bristol Riverside, the team is positioned to do just that with their newest show, an adaptation of the striking play, “Fires in the Mirror.”
The play recounts the 1991 Crown Heights riots, when a motorcade that included the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson crashed and struck two black children, killing one of them. Kaissar said that, right now, a tough subject like this one needs to be discussed.
“[Bucks County] is a politically divided county and maybe people haven’t communicated the best way that they could have,” she said. “In this moment of rising antisemitism and rising feelings of being not just misunderstood but abandoned, this [allows] you to look at a different time in history in which people felt misunderstood and abandoned and maligned, and in which people were yelling at each other and the temperature was hot.”
Kaissar said that what she loves about this play is that it is not telling anyone what to think, or even what actually happened, as much as it is detailing the perspectives of those who experienced it.
“We’re not coming into this saying these are the same thing, but we’re saying, in a moment in which we’re divided, maybe this is a way that we can all just stop for a minute and listen,” she said.
(Photo by Tori Repp, Courtesy of Bristol Riverside Theater)
A member of Congregation Beth El in Yardley and a resident of Bucks County, Kaissar shares her position with her husband, Ken Kaissar. Together, they are co-directors, which allows them to work closely when organizing the theater’s showings.
While this moment is a poignant one, Kaissar noted that “Fires in the Mirror” has been relevant since it was published.
“I don’t think there’s been a moment between 1991 and now when a play about conflict and antisemitism and clashing communities would not feel relevant,” she said. “But I do think that, certainly in Bucks County, over the last however many years it feels a little bit like we’ve gotten less good at talking to each other.”
That’s why, she said, theater is a necessary vehicle for change.
“It allows us to connect empathetically and thematically. It lets us feel something instead of just thinking about something,” she said. “And I think it allows us to step back a bit and make connections between different themes, people, places and ideas that perhaps give us a new look at something we’ve been looking at straight on.”
“Fires in the Mirror” relies heavily on perspectives of characters that have been lost to time, Kaissar said.
“It says that every single person you’re seeing is a person who feels something, who has a perspective and who deserves your attention for a moment,” she said. “Whether that’s the woman folding her laundry, telling a funny story about this time that she tried to turn off a very loud radio on Shabbos, or whether that’s a middle-school girl talking about how she first learned she was Black.”
For Kaissar, the nature of her work means that she has to consider other people’s perspectives. She is hoping that this show can do the same for those who see it.
“Fires in the Mirror” was chosen long before the election was decided, and Kaissar said that the point of the play, and the reason that it’s being shown, is not to blame anyone or declare anyone correct.
“The point is not what happens. There’s no part of this play that is trying to tell you what actually happened in Crown Heights, or who was wrong or right,” she said. “That’s sort of beside the point. The point is simply to hear people in their own words. And I think this feels like a moment in [which] we need a way to do that in [our] communities.”
