STORIES
Career comes full circle by Greg Burliuk
You have to be part nomad to have a career in the theatre and Sarah Garton Stanley has certainly been that. But sometimes the wandering can become cyclical. Now she’s back in Kingston and Queen’s University where it all started.
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Musical play puts inclusion at the forefront by Jennifer Roberts
Life didn’t come easy for Judith Snow. Born with quadriplegia, Snow encountered many obstacles growing up, but none of them ever got in the way of her living her life to the fullest.
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Michael Rubenfeld’s The Book of Judith by Paul Gallant
The biblical book of Judith (or story, depending on your denomination) is about a widow who seduces and then beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes, who has been put in charge of subduing the Jews of Bethulia. Judith’s victory song celebrates how the “beauty of her countenance undid him.”
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NOW Magazine Article by Jon Kaplan
How do you feel when you meet someone with a disability?
Probably as awkward and uneasy as writer/actor Michael Rubenfeld did.
Rubenfeld didn’t know what he was getting into when a good friend, personal assistant to quadriplegic Judith Snow, asked him to help find a lover for Snow, an advocate for inclusive community living.
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Life is a five-star performance by Diane Flacks
“It’s my birthday today,” says Alex Bulmer slyly, her legs curled up underneath her on a sofa, catlike.
“As of today, I have been living with the idea of blindness longer than I’ve had sight. Finally … finally, it’s Day 1.”
Bulmer, 43, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare degenerative disease, when she was 21. “In my early 30s, it took hold like a vicious little bulldog. That’s when I started to write Smudge.”
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Andrew Penner in the NATIONAL POST
The Book of Judith is a new production by acclaimed Toronto playwright Michael Rubenfeld, with a score written by Andrew Penner of the Sunparlour Players. The play came about after Rubenfeld met a quadriplegic woman in 2005 named Judith Snow, an author, lecturer and authority on inclusive communal living.
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Michael interviewed on Singinglamb.ca
How did The Book of Judith come about?
Michael Rubenfeld: In 2005, a good friend of mine who was working as a personal assistant to a woman named Judith Snow, who was a quadriplegic woman; he came up to me and asked me if I knew of anyone would be interested in making love to her.
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Mythology or Gospel truth? by Mike Zettel
Let’s start by separating fact from fiction.
Judith Snow is a real person.
And Michael Rubenfeld, co-creator of the musical The Book of Judith, did meet Judith Snow, a quadriplegic woman. In the play, a theatre artist (just like Rubenfeld and, incidentally, played by him) named Matthew Goldberg has a chance meeting with the disabled Judith and “sees the light.”
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REVIEWS
The Book of Judith by Byron Laviolette
Labeled as a “healing crusade,” Michael Rubenfeld’s The Book of Judith is one-fourth public service announcement, one-fourth choir-fueled, faux-Christian church service, and one-fourth personal exorcism — of Rubenfeld’s own inner difficulty in facing another individual’s disabilities head on.
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The Book of Judith by Paula Citron on Classical 96.3 FM
Sadly, the run of The Book of Judith is over, but it was a fascinating theatrical experience. It took place in a tent on the grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health so that it would be completely disabled-friendly. The format of the play was an old-fashioned revival camp meeting.
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Reviewed on Panic Manual by Brian Pike
Sometimes I think maybe it would be fun to go to an evangelical church service. Not like Billy Graham evangelical or televangelism, more like the fictional evangelical stuff that you see sometimes, like in Blues Brothers where the late James Brown is the preacher, he’s in a room full of people with a band and a choir on a beautiful summer’s day, and everyone is so into the sermon they randomly jump out of their pews to shout, sing, and dance.
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Play Anon Blog by Catherine Kustanczy
Know the anxious, wearing feeling you get when you really want to do something outside your usual comfort zone, but this little gnawing voice inside you keeps whispering, in that tiny, tinny, maliciously-snickery way, “you can’t… you can’t… ” ? You know that going through with whatever task it is will, in some way, be an important step in terms of development, but there’s that constant voice – mocking, questioning, criticizing –making you question your judgment and motivation, making you weight the outcomes, blowing the putrid stench of fear all over your best intentions.
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