Award-winning Roanoke playwright premieres new play in a church kitchen

Even before its premiere, Roanoke Valley playwright Meredith Dayna Cope-Levy’s “The Bread Baking Play” has generated a lot of dough.

Not to mention, fully baked loaves. 

“So much! So much bread every night!” said the play’s director, Lauren Brooke Ellis, when asked how much bread the actors have baked during rehearsals. Not to mention, “It’s not like we’re making sourdough. We’re making this very specific Eucharist bread.”

All kidding aside, the authentic bread baking serves as a framework for a serious drama set in the kitchen of an Episcopalian church. A pair of sisters who have grown apart get caught up with each other’s lives and air out uncomfortable grievances, all while working together to make the bread promised in the title. The women have been brought together by the death of their brother, who was the church’s pastor, as was their father before him.

To add to the verisimilitude, these premiere performances of “The Bread Baking Play” take place in an actual Episcopalian church kitchen, amplifying the impression that one might be a fly on the wall observing real conversations. 

St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke will host the play, with shows this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Though St. Elizabeth’s has an established track record of showcasing the arts, “to my knowledge, we’ve never had a play in the kitchen, and in my time here, almost seven years, there hasn’t been a full play put on here before,” the Rev. Karin MacPhail, the church’s rector, wrote in an email. 

MacPhail called the play “terrific” and wrote that the church’s lay leadership board enthusiastically approved it after review. “St. Elizabeth’s really likes to welcome the community onto our grounds and into our building as much as we can, and this seemed like a great fit with that mission. Staging the play in an actual church kitchen is such a creative, out-of-the-box idea, and I love that we’re able to help make Meredith and Lauren’s vision for their play a reality.”

Partnership forged at Hollins

One of the challenges involved in crafting and revising the play, Cope-Levy said, was that dialogue and occurrences had to be timed so that the actual processes of making the bread — from rolling the dough to warming the oven to removing the finished loaves — interlock naturally with the script. 

As an example of the challenges posed and overcome, “Lauren texted me a couple of weeks ago when I was out of town,” Cope-Levy said. During a rehearsal, Ellis explained, “We put the bread in the oven, and then we read all the dialogue that you have, and then we get to the page where they take the bread out of the oven. We still have 6 minutes of baking time.” The director asked the playwright, “How are we going to fix that problem?” 

During conversations about Roanoke’s growing reputation as a hotbed for the creation of new plays, Cope-Levy’s name tends to crop up. Her historical drama “Decision Height” has been performed more than 100 times since its publication in 2014 by Samuel French, the leading publishing house for plays.

A native of Bergen County, New Jersey, Cope-Levy majored in theater at Hollins University in Roanoke County. “Decision Height” was her senior thesis, first produced in 2012 in the black box theater on the top floor of the Hollins Theatre building. She enrolled in the Hollins Playwright’s Lab graduate program, where she continued to develop “Decision Height,” and also took a job in the university’s Institutional Advancement Office, where she still works.

“I came for Hollins and I never left,” Cope-Levy said with a laugh.

“Decision Height” won the 2013 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival New Play Award before its publication by Samuel French. Among the honors Cope-Levy has received since, two of her plays — including “The Bread Baking Play” — were named as finalists in the annual new play competition run by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center∙National Playwrights Conference. O’Neill, the conference’s namesake, was the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning author of the classic dramas “The Iceman Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey into Night.”

Not surprisingly, Ellis met Cope-Levy through the Playwright’s Lab. “I joined the Playwright’s Lab in 2016, and their new play directing program, and that’s where I met Meredith my first summer,” said Ellis, who originally hails from Aiken, South Carolina. “We started collaborating then.”

With Ellis directing, the collaborative partners and friends took Cope-Levy’s play “She Made Space” on a regional tour starting in 2017. Though it takes place in 1920s Paris, “She Made Space” requires only one actor, making it ideal for this experiment in do-it-yourself play production. Cope-Levy herself sometimes played the part of the narrator and main character, Echo. They took the play to venues and festivals in Washington, D.C.; Lexington, Kentucky; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Raleigh, North Carolina, 

That experience proved the spiritual predecessor for their new project and its unusual launch, the pair’s first project post-COVID shutdowns. “It’s getting the band back together, absolutely,” Ellis said.

‘Part of our community’

“The Bread Baking Play” takes inspiration from the story of Lazarus in the Gospel of John, and from Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha. The play also draws from Cope-Levy’s own experiences growing up in the Episcopal Church. As the sisters debate, they discuss matters that seem likely to resonate with those of many faiths, as one sister has stayed in her community to raise a family and volunteer with her home church, while the other sister has traveled the world doing missionary work.

Ellis maintained that viewers do not need a religion-steeped background to connect with the play. “Really, it’s about two sisters trying to navigate life post-grief with each other and learn to be OK with each other. That’s such a universal theme.”

Nonetheless, additional resonances will apply to those who have that background. During a break in a recent rehearsal, actor Alex Voeller, who portrays the character of Oliver, mentioned that rehearsals in the church kitchen had brought back strong memories. 

“As someone who grew up in the church, who grew up in very small churches like this one, and with parents as the pastors, it’s like this just weird niche subculture,” Voeller said. “And so to have the audience in here as well, with some of these mannerisms and stuff that I grew up within, that I’m intimately familiar with … They are in a sense our congregation, even though there’s no overt religious message.”

He hopes that the audience, on seeing the play in that perfectly matched setting, will sense that “you’re part of our community. You are here and you are with us, participating with us, in a very loving, intimate way.”

As for that large quantity of Eucharist bread, Cope-Levy is giving it to the church.