Five Minutes with the Playwright: An Interview with Benjamin Kintisch
March 14th, 2021
LIFE REVIEW: THE HOSPICE MUSICAL is a recent play you’ve submitted to The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about? From October to April, a new chaplain (Rabbi David Goodman) find hope and healing while ministering to individuals in hospice care. It’s “A Chorus Line” meets “Fiddler on The Roof,” set in a residential hospice. Through comedic, and often dramatic songs, we hear the stories of the patients and those who love them. By the time spring comes, we have lost some friends along the way, even as we’ve found hope in the return of the daffodil blooms.
Please tell us how you approached the writing of the book, music and lyrics to LIFE REVIEW: THE HOSPICE MUSICAL. This creative project began over five years ago, when I was a beginner chaplain in New Jersey. I trained at a residential hospice facility called “Center for Hope” in Scotch Plains and Elizabeth NJ. I had the honor of serving the patients, their family, and caregivers, over the course of a year-long internship. While visiting bedside with individuals facing their end, I often heard amazing stories. There is a technique we learn in chaplaincy training: “Life Review.” I borrowed that term as the name for our play. The idea is you ask people the right questions and they respond with a review of their life – kind of like a highlight reel of what mattered most to them when they were younger and healthier.
I loved these stories I would hear while visiting with patients and their loved ones. There were people who told me stories of lives that were glamorous. or exciting, or impressive (A bandleader’s wife, a spy, and a former professor, respectively).
One evening, driving home from the internship, I called my wife. “Honey – these stories that I’m hearing bedside are amazing. I think they want to be songs.” She replied, ‘Well, get writing!” That night, I wrote what would become our first song – the ballad “Will it still snow?” Since that memorable beginning, we have moved ahead slow and steady for several years. Much love and respect goes to the creative team, which has grown to include composers Jason Spiewak, Michael Miller, Andy Bossov, and Miriam Kook and co-writer Beth Broadway.
The 18 months prior to the current COVID-19 pandemic was an exciting time for “Life Review: The Hospice Musical.” We had two live workshop presentations in that fruitful time, and we were honored to enter the musical in the Baltimore Playwright Festival during the COVID-19 summer of 2020.
The first workshop performance of “Life Review: The Hospice Musical” was presented in July 2019 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, as part of the NewCAJE (Jewish Education) conference. Professional musicians from the Jewish music world performed ten songs in solo and ensemble numbers accompanied on live piano, along with narration in between songs. We got back to work, expanding the play and building more scenes around more songs.
In January of 2020, our second workshop performance was presented at Oakland Mills Interfaith Center in Columbia MD. This time we presented a more robust play, now with dialogue and 14 songs. Local community theater actors performed memorably in the ensemble piece. Local music director Miriam Kook directed music and played piano live during the standing-room-only performance to over 250 people.
Once you began writing your play, did the play proceed as you intended, or were there surprises? The ideas for the songs and the characters who would sing them came to me quickly – often when I was swimming laps or riding my bicycle. I would always try and jot down the song title, and revisit the idea to write lyrics late at night. Some of these songs developed into beautiful gems, while others were duds. To get to those 14 (wait – 16!) songs, we have worked in collaboration for years, and we have also left a lot of ideas as unpolished gems – or just songs that didn’t make the cut. I describe it as a tapestry of sorts – lots of disparate stories that are woven. The passage of time, the loss of old friends and the making of new friends – those are the big stories of the story. That narrative structure is not conventional, but the challenge here is that in a place like a hospice, you have a dramatic story unfolding in every one of 50 rooms and five nurse stations.
Sometimes the idea of a song, say, a clever song title, worked better as a voice memo or a few words at the top of a page than any subsequent attempt to turn it into a song. For instance, I still want to add another dance number. I just have to write it!
Tell us about yourself. I was born in Manhattan and raised in the bucolic historic village of Upper Nyack, New York, nestled in the Hudson River Valley. I loved music and theater from a young age, and I have fond memories of performing in plays as early as third grade, on through middle school and high school. I also remember loving being in the audience for any kind of theater I could see: high school, college, community, regional, and “once in a blue moon” real Broadway shows.
I grew from boyhood into teenage years, and my musical interests grew steadily. I became a 15 year old kid who loved to sing enough to want to start lessons. I have studied voice on and off for two plus decades since. During graduate school to become a Cantor, I had the joy of co-writing several Jewish-themed songs with classmate and friend Lance Rhodes. They were humorous and exuberant lyrics to go with Lance’s spirited melodies. It was the first time I realized I was a lyricist. This project, Life Review, is my first musical.
What are you working on now? With this project, we are currently in the midst of some very exciting developments on our Virtual Tour 2021. I visited a middle school and a high school drama club to share material from the project and to do an “AMA (Ask Me Anything)” about writing a musical. The first cabaret-style virtual performance was in January, presented by Columbia Jewish Congregation (the synagogue where I have worked for four years). Over fifty families attended and asked questions afterwards. More recently, I presented this same virtual cabaret show at Charles E. Smith Life Communities in Rockville, MD. Through the in-house TV channel, several hundred residents had the “show” broadcast to their rooms. Members of the activities team moderated a brief discussion following the performance.
What is coming up next for you? I am doing something called “The 100 Rejection/100 Opportunity Project.” The idea is that I will make 100 attempts at opportunities this year. I am trying to share this project with a variety of different types of venues, so this 100 opportunities includes podcasts, synagogues, professional conferences, hospice providers and associations, and educational presentations with middle school, high school, and college-age learners.
I don’t know how and when live theater will return, but I don’t want this beautiful and important piece of theater to lay fully dormant in the proverbial drawer. Better that I hustle during this time of dormancy so that I can share the moving songs and stories with an ever expanding audience. And, of course, the hope is that at least one or more of this year’s virtual performance partners become interested in hosting the “real live play” with an ensemble cast next year. That would be fabulous. I have at least one large synagogue in the region talking with me about a live show for 2022. Wear your mask everyone!! In the meantime, if you are reading this, and you are interested in bringing my virtual presentation to your organization, please check out our website and get in touch.
