In Bubie’s Tapes, the act of preparing matzo ball soup, on stage becomes a portal to history—blending personal narrative, family lore, historical, and personal traumas with the immersive power of food, recorded audio, and projection.
About Bubie’s Tapes
As Jon Hedderwick prepares a pot of matzo ball soup on stage in this one-person show, audiences are welcomed into his family kitchen as he recounts for his daughter, his great-grandmother, Bubie Sarah’s harrowing journey—from the Russian Revolution, through the horrors of the pogroms in Eastern Europe after World War I, and beyond.
When Jon was a child his Bubie, Sarah (his great grandmother), was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and couldn’t live alone anymore. He went to her apartment with his family to help with the boxing and sorting. While packing, Jon was told he could have two cassette tapes that he found in the drawer of her dining room hutch. Jon threw the tapes into a box, planning to make a couple of mix tapes. That evening in his bedroom, listening to the Weekly Top 7 at 7 Countdown on AM640 finger on the record button of his boombox, the thought occurred to him… “How do I know this is a blank tape?”
Just as the song he was waiting to hear was being introduced by the DJ, Jon decides to push play instead of record. The tape wasn’t blank: Bubie’s voice… an early memory of hers recorded before she would lose them all. A soldier harasses people in a marketplace in a Polish town; ransacking Jewish stores and looting with his friends.
Being only seven years old, and realizing what he found was important, Jon stopped the tape, ran to tell his mother, and… she took the tapes away. After years of asking for the tapes to be returned, and speculation as to why they were taken in the first place, Jon finally learns why they were taken away and what he was too young to hear at 7 years old.
Now, as his daughter prepares to leave home for the first time to attend school, Jon decides that he needs to share the story with her. Using intimate, raw voice captured in Sarah’s actual cassette tape recordings and filling in details from his own life and research, Jon teaches his daughter about their shared history.
Bubie’s Tapes explores the lasting impact of antisemitism on the Jewish diaspora. Bubie’s Tapes reveals much about the current rise in antisemitism alongside Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, while also looking at the ways that charges of antisemitism have been mobilized to forestall legitimate criticism of Zionism and the State of Israel in Canada and around the world.
About Jon Hedderwick
Jon Hedderwick is a spoken word poet, playwright and performance artist of mixed Ashkenazi Jewish and Scottish heritage based in Nogojiwanong/ C.K.A. Peterborough, Ontario. Jon is the Artistic Director for the Peterborough Poetry Slam Collective, one half of the spoken word performing duo WordCraft, and a co-creator of the Take-out Poetry Project. He is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and two one-person plays. He has performed poetry across Canada, and his work has been featured at national and provincial poetry and storytelling festivals and conferences.
Artist’s Statement
When I first began working on the script for Bubie’s Tapes–as an artist in residence at the Precarious3 Festival, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic–what I wanted to do was share a nearly-lost-to-history story about my family, and the unlikely way in which I became aware of these events. I could not have imagined then that the work would become so tragically timely. As I prepared to bring it to the stage for the first time in January 2024, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia were steadily on the rise. At the same time, charges of anti-Semitism were being and have continued to be used by some to shut down legitimate criticism of the war crimes committed by the Israeli government in response to the attack committed by Hamas on October 7th, 2023: this being the latest episode in a 75-year cycle of violence.
As I write this, I’m trying to imagine what I would tell my child about the world in which she lives–just as in Bubie’s Tapes I imagine what I might tell her about her history, and the millennium of violence and hatred experienced by Jewish people in Europe and beyond. I cannot tell you what it felt like to be a Jewish person having to even contemplate, for the first time, the use of the word genocide to describe the actions of a government that claims it is acting in the name of all Jewish people, myself included. For me, being the inheritor of a history steeped in genocide and ethnic cleansing means it is intolerable to see fear and grief weaponized, used to dehumanize, and as a justification for anyone committing the kinds of atrocities that my family survived, no matter the circumstances. It is with this in mind that I continue to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
I long for a world in which there is no hatred, and in which there is a just and lasting peace. No play can promise to bring this, though I believe it is the job of the artist to imagine the world better than it is. With Bubie’s Tapes, this is what I have endeavoured to do.
Jon Hedderwick, Playwright/Performer
January 2024
Director’s Note
When the lights come up, theatre can feel like magic. It certainly does for me: I have chosen to dedicate years of my life to sitting in the dark while people shape enchantment with only their bodies, voices, bits of clothing, light and shadow.
But it isn’t magic, not really. It takes a lot of support and hard work and faith to make a theatre show.
Jon started workshopping this piece in a residency with Trent Radio, inspired by audio tapes left behind by his great grandmother. He unpacked the personal and political history revealed by her stories – the tumultuous, often appalling events of the time – and also his own emotional responses to the material. Then in 2021 Jon and I started working on this piece as part of Precarious3 Festival. Plagued – literally – the festival had to be postponed no less than 3 times; we finally delivered it as an artist-in-residency program. Jon came in with a wonderful scaffold of a semi-improvised script, ideas for a sophisticated set of projections, and a strong vision. And soup!
Public Energy provided more support in 2023, and so we were able to further workshop the piece. As we were beginning to organize ourselves for this phase, an armed conflict erupted between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups. The ways in which history impacted Jon’s Bubie Sarah suddenly came into sharp relief, right here in the present. We had to allow the show to change. There was no way to proceed with integrity unless we did. Jon’s courage, care, and compassion have characterized every moment of the work. None of us are free unless every one of us is free. It has been an honour and a great learning for me to be a part of this process.
Kate Story, Director/Dramaturge
January 2024
Contact us.
jonhedderwick@hotmail.com