That’s what’s on my mind as I sit down to write this preface. From where you sit, you had probably never heard of me until you heard of my play, or saw my play on a shelf in a bookstore or a library, and pulled it down to read it. You first came to know me as a published, produced playwright.

But I have spent much more time in my life being unknown, unproduced, unsuccessful, and anxious. Before Bad Jews, the longest run a play of mine had ever had was three nights, at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY, in a space called “The Wedge,” aptly named, as it was a literal wedge of the lobby they cordoned off so young artists could have small productions of their work. Today, five years after writing the first draft of Bad Jews, the play has been produced around the world. There are South African Daphnas and Canadian Liams, Israeli Melodys and Australian Jonahs. To go from a three-night run in a corner of a lobby to productions happening in multiple time zones simultaneously is a very strange feeling, to say the least.

It’s even stranger because I wrote the play for myself, in total obscurity, with no sense it would ever get produced. It began as privately as anything could. I came up with the title when I was in college, and began taking notes on the characters. When I look back through my notebook at those first notes from 2005, there is Daphna Feygenbaum’s name, staring back at me. Where did she come from? I don’t know. A year later, I was back in New York, riding the subway, and suddenly realized that Melody should sing “Summertime.” Where did that come from? Again, I don’t know.

Six years would pass, as I toiled in day jobs and part-time jobs and went to graduate school, where I wrote other plays. Finally, in 2011, after I realized a different play I’d been writing was not meant to be (aka: garbage), and feeling dejected, I sat down to try writing a draft of this play. I had nothing to lose. I began the draft on a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and finished it just before my 28th birthday, in Atlanta, where I had a year-long fellowship at Actor’s Express, thanks to the National New Play Network. When I finished that first draft, I was convinced it was the worst thing I had ever written. Driving to the airport on I-75, to fly back to New York for the first read-through of the play, in the throes of a full-on panic attack, I called a friend and, with the windows down, started screaming, “I’m a fraud! I’m a failure.” Today, that is a fond memory.

Less fond is recalling that during previews for the London premiere, I had to change a line of dialogue. Toward the end of the play, Daphna says, “Now when it’s easier to be Jewish than it’s ever been in the history of the world, now when it’s safest, now we should all stop?” But the London premiere came just after the January 2015 attacks in Paris at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, where four Jews were gunned down and murdered. The line rang false. It didn’t feel safe to be Jewish anymore.