Cantor Robin Joseph Premiers Her Play with Westchester Collaborative Theater

From Friday, July 22 through Sunday, July 31, Westchester Collaborative Theater (WCT) returned with an outdoor production of Parking Lot Plays, with five short new works featuring a mix of comedies and dramas from its play development program. Each site-specific play integrates Ossining’s parking lot into its story as the characters navigate the terrain of this location while they tell their stories. The production was co-directed by WCT’s Melissa Nocera of Yorktown Heights and Susan Ward of Ossining and featured an ensemble cast of WCT member actors.

The 2022 edition of Parking Lot Plays was performed outdoors in the satellite parking lot adjacent to the WCT Theater at 23 Water Street. 

“WCT playwrights have done a masterful job of seamlessly blending the location into a sometimes farcical, often zany, always engaging mix of plays that manage to provoke thoughtfulness and hilarity simultaneously. Covering a wide range of timely topics from climate change to cognitive behavioral therapy to unconscious bias, all are sure to enthrall audiences,” says WCT Executive Director Alan Lutwin.

One of the plays was written by Cantor Robin Joseph of Temple Beth Shalom in Hastings on Hudson. Called Something to Lose By, was a question from a stranger that causes a young woman to rediscover a part of herself that she had lost—or was hoping to lose.

Westchester Collaborative Theater is a multicultural, cooperative theater company located in Ossining, dedicated to developing new work for the stage and bringing live theater to the community. It is comprised of local playwrights, actors, and directors who employ a Lab approach in which new stage works are nurtured through an iterative process of readings, critiques, and rewrites. When work is ready for production, it is presented to the public at its new theater space. 

WCT is committed to furthering theater arts in the community. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and a recipient of production grants from ArtsWestchester and New York State Council on the Arts.