During the pandemic, when Peterborough poet Jon Hedderwick first began working on the script for his one-man show Bubie’s Tapes, he could not have foreseen he would be staging it in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war.
“What I wanted to do was share a nearly-lost-to-history story about my family, and the unlikely way in which I became aware of these events — I could not have imagined then that the work would become so tragically timely,” Hedderwick says in an artist statement.
“As I now prepare to bring it to the stage, antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise. At the same time, charges of antisemitism are being used by some to shut down legitimate criticism of the war crimes committed by the Israeli government in response to the terrorist attack committed by Hamas.”
Presented by Public Energy Performing Arts at The Theatre On King in downtown for five performances from January 17 to 21, Bubie’s Tapes sees Hedderwick on stage preparing a pot of matzo ball soup for his daughter while he recounts personal and family experiences from the Russian Revolution through the Holocaust and beyond, as told by his great-grandmother Bubie Sarah in cassette tape recordings she left behind.
In real life, Hedderwick had first discovered his Bubie’s cassette tape after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and could no longer live alone. While at her apartment with his family to sort through and pack her belongings, he found what he thought was a blank cassette tape in the drawer of her dining room hutch. His family told him he could have it.
That evening, when he just about to record on the tape, Hedderwick decided to play it and discovered it wasn’t blank after all — instead he heard his Bubie’s voice recounting an early memory. He stopped listening to the tape and told his mother what he had found. She took the tape away but eventually, after years of requests from her son, gave it back to him.
Through the use of storytelling, recorded audio, projected images, and food, Bubie’s Tapes explores the lasting impact of antisemitism on the Jewish diaspora, as a father tells his daughter the sometimes funny and sometimes traumatic story of his Bubie’s forced migration to Canada during the pogroms in Eastern Europe that emerged in the aftermath of World War I. Audience members will hear Sarah’s recordings and, following the performance, will be invited to share the soup that her great-grandson has been preparing.
The premise of the show — a father revealing to his daughter the history of their Jewish family — has special resonance for Hedderwick given the Israel-Hamas war.
“As I write this, I’m trying to imagine what I would tell my child about the world in which she lives — just as in Bubie’s Tapes I imagine what I might tell her about her history, and the millennium of violence and hatred experienced by Jewish people in Europe and beyond. I cannot tell you what it felt like to be a Jewish person having to contemplate, for the first time, the use of the word genocide to describe the actions of a government that claims it is acting in the name of all Jewish people, myself included.”
Hedderwick originally performed Bubie’s Tapes as a work in progress during his residency with Fleshy Thud’s Precarious3 Festival in 2021. Since then, he has further developed the show with direction and dramaturgy by Kate Story.
Hedderwick will perform Bubie’s Tapes at 8 p.m. from Wednesday, January 17th until Saturday, January 20th, with an additional 2 p.m. matinee performance on Sunday, January 21st. All performances will be presented as relaxed performances, which use subdued lighting and sound effects to make theatre more accessible to people with learning disabilities or autism or anyone who would benefit from a more relaxed environment.
Tickets are sold on a sliding pay-what-you-can scale from $5 to $25 and can be reserved online at www.eventbrite.ca/e/704688992747.
Hedderwick is a well-known poet in Peterborough. One half of the spoken word performing duo WordCraft, he is also the author of five chapbooks of poetry and two one-person plays, a co-creator of the Take-out Poetry Project, and is also known for his work as artistic director of the Peterborough Poetry Slam Collective.
He is currently an artist in Public Energy’s Creative Generator program that supports the creation of innovative performance work, and received funding to stage Bubie’s Tapes through the Electric City Culture Council’s and the City of Peterborough’s grants for individual artists program.
Hedderwick, who himself continues to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza, hopes Bubie’s Tapes will provide some important historical context.
“For me, being the inheritor of a history steeped in genocide and ethnic cleansing means it is intolerable to see fear and grief weaponized, used to dehumanize, and as a justification for anyone committing the kinds of atrocities that my family survived, no matter the circumstances,” Hedderwick explains.
“I long for a world in which there is no hatred, and in which there is a just and lasting peace. No play can promise to bring this, though I believe it is the job of the artist to imagine the world better than it is. With Bubie’s Tapes, this is what I have endeavoured to do.”
For more information about Public Energy’s 2023-24 season, visit publicenergy.ca/performance-season/2023-2024/.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a long-time media sponsor of Public Energy Performing Arts.
