Ivanhoe, Missouri by Sherry Kramer

Please join us for a cold reading of "Ivanhoe, Missouri," a new play by Sherry Kramer, freely inspired by Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe." Limited seating available.

Ivanhoe, Missouri

A new play freely inspired by Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe

By Sherry Kramer

Some of our most famous works of literature were written to attempt to correct a social ill. Sir Walter Scott's influential novel, Ivanhoe, which we think of as just a swashbuckling tale about jousting, was actually written to try to counter the anti-Semitism that had filled English literature with depictions of Jews as monsters, like Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and the most famous Jewish character in all literature, Shakespeare’s Shylock. Scott wrote a Jewish money lender who was kind, generous, and brave. 

There are 12 towns in America named Ivanhoe, after the novel. Sherry Kramer didn’t grow up in one of them, but she did grow up in a town that was just an hour away from Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where a man known as the American Hitler—Gerald L.K. Smith—lived and preached white nationalism: hatred for all people of color, Catholics, and Jews. He had his own private army, called the Brown Shirts.  

In Ivanhoe, Missouri, Kramer folds Smith’s character into Scott’s novel, placing the story in 1960’s America during the Vietnam War and faithfully depicting the magic spells the hill people in her childhood believed in. When Smith and his white nationalists plot to overthrow the government, a young Jewish doctor and her father band together with the hill people to save each other and America while taking part in a Passion Play and a NASCAR race…all at the same time.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke 

"Anti-Semitism is the world’s second oldest profession." - Sherry Kramer