In Memoriam: ELSA RAEL

ELSA OKON RAEL (October 22, 1927-December 24, 2020) received a NY State CAPS Grant for Playwriting and First Prize in the Atlanta Theatre Guild Playwriting Competition. She has nine plays produced in regional theatres that are still periodically running. Two have been published by Samuel French.

In 1985, in partnership with Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre, she founded and produced POW - Professional Older Women’s Theatre - a festival of 33 plays in which the main character was a women over the age of 50. For this project, the Governor of New York State presented Rael the Eleanor Roosevelt Centennial Award. 

She has written special material for Walter Cronkite, Kaye Ballard, Christine Andreas, Marsha Mason, Beatrice Straight, and a book commissioned and published by the State University of New York -  (SUNY) -  Women in a Changing World.

Invited to the White House by President Clinton for three successive Easter celebrations, Rael read her book, Marushka’s Egg, to children. Three additional books for young readers, written to highlight Jewish ethics, published by Simon & Schuster, received multiple awards, two of which received First Prize in The Sydney Taylor Librarian Award. Both of those books, What Zeesie Saw on Delancey Street and When Zaydeh Danced on Eldridge Street, have become musicals written with Shellen Lubin (lyrics) and Matthew Gandolfo (music). When Zaydeh Danced on Eldridge Street was presented at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in 2022 with a LMCC Creative Engagement grant.

Rael’s play, The Secret of O-Sono, written in haiku, linked renga, and choka Japanese poetic forms in English, was produced Spring 2009 by Pan-Asian Rep, Off Broadway in New York City. At the same time, she contributed material to On the Line written by six LPTW playwrights and directed by Shellen Lubin at 78th Street Rep, and has been included in festivals at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 13th Street Rep, the Lambs, and more.

In 2014, the Women in the Arts & Media Coalition (which Rael co-founded in 1990 as the New York Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts & Media) named an award for her: the Elsa Rael VintAge Award - for Advocacy for Women Aging in the Arts and Media. She has also served on the board of the League of Professional Theatre Women, which is the founding organization of the Coalition. 

She was married to Sol Rael, who died in 1997, and is succeeded by her two sons, Jonathan (Jody) Rael and Matthew (Morgan) Rael, her grandchildren Rebecca, Galadriel, and Benjamin, and her great grandchildren; by her adopted son, Gerard; and by all of the theatre women who have collaborated with her and been her friends and allies.