“My first thought was, ‘You have to be kidding me,’” Malinsky says. “And then we proceeded to have one of the loveliest, most open conversations I've ever had with anyone.”
The interaction inspired Will You Be Praying The Entire Flight?, a feisty, confronting comedy about womanhood, God, and the preconceptions that keep us dangerously siloed. Malinsky has been staging the play for small audiences in New York over the past few years, inviting others to join her in questioning what Jewishness means to women on opposing ends of the religious spectrum.
Gili Malinsky is the playwright behind 'Will You Be Praying The Entire Flight?', a comedy that explores the tension between secular and Orthodox Jewish women.[Missing Credit]
“I think for the Chasidic woman, who's Satmar specifically, her Jewish identity is probably her primary one –
I think that's a bigger identity for her even than being a woman,” says Malinsky. “And for the secular character, who’s loosely based on me, I've had to think a lot about: what does Jewishness mean to her? How does she identify as a Jewish person? How did that play out in her life?”
The conversation she had on that transformative plane ride forced Malinsky, a playwright of more than a decade, to revise her own prejudices about Orthodox women, something secular audience members at Will You Be Praying The Entire Flight? might find themselves doing, too.
“I remember [the Satmar woman] kept saying, ‘don't feel bad for us,’ because she knew that there was judgment coming from our side where it's like, ‘you don't have any opportunity to make your own choices with how strict your lifestyle is.’ But for her, this was the choice; she wanted it and everything that came with it,” says Malinsky. “It was a really eye-opening experience and obviously one that I needed to have, because I stepped away from it being like: ‘Wow, you really need to stop judging people.’”
Writing Will You Be Praying The Entire Flight? – and continually reflecting on the conversation that sparked its creation – has pushed Malinsky towards broader questions about her own religious values as well as the ways in which secular women, just like Orthodox women, continue to chafe against their own set of societal expectations.
“It was such a natural opening for me to indulge in the conversations I have with myself anyway: do I believe in God? What are the parameters presented to women, even outside of an ultra-Orthodox world? Like, there are expectations that we get married, there are expectations that we have a family, and there's a lot of judgment around whether or not that happens,” Malinsky says.
“I think there's something bigger here than just the Jewish overtones – the conversations are really about these big and small choices that we make and think about on a regular basis.”
Will You Be Praying The Entire Flight? is on at Lower Theatre at theSpace @ Niddry St from August 11-16.
