LookingForLouie.com
Title
Looking for Louie by Stacie Chaiken .. Booking A Performance
Description
Stacie Chaiken spent her childhood making up fantastical stories about this so-called Louie, the mysterious Russian great-grandfather -- the one who came over from the Old Country--about whom nobody would ever speak. "You don't want to know," Grandpa Irving, Son of Louie, would warn. Oh yes she did! Looking for Louie chronicles her dogged search for him.
When Chaiken finally persuades her grandfather to break his 90-year silence by promising to bring a video camera ("I'm gonna be famous on the TV!"), she finds herself face to face with the shattering history of her family's arrival in the US, and the source of the shame and rage she has sensed rippling down through the generations.
I've performed "Looking for Louie" for people from many different backgrounds. As personal as my Russian Jewish immigrant family story may be, I've discovered that it is an immigrant story, a family story. My friend Juan, who came here from Mexico at age 11, says it's his story. Irish, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, African Americans -- whenever they came to the US -- say the same. The specifics may be different, but the soul of the experience of immigration is the same, cross-culture, cross-generation, cross-era.
Contact
- what's the story
-
- los angeles CA
- US 90012
-
- 108
