Staging People and History

CUNY Martin E. Segal Theater-Centro Primo Levi Playwright in Residence Program.

Refreshments will be served. Reservations: rsvp@primolevicenter.org

Workshop with Nurit Chinn, recipient of a Martin E. Segal Theater-Centro Primo Levi Playwright Residency to create a play based on a memoir by Maria Eisenstein, Internee Number 6, first published in the aftermath of the liberation of Rome, in 1944. 

A critical edition of Maria Eisenstein’s account of her arrest and detention in a Fascist concentration camp for women was recently published in English by Centro Primo Levi. It is the only document of its kind.

INTERNEE NUMBER 6 is an extraordinary document on the sudden incarceration of “foreign” Jewish civilians in fascist Italy and a subtle fresco of the cultural and psychological atmosphere of the time.

In her work, Nurit Chinn explores the spaces between people and the spaces within people, the gaps which make communication fraught, self-knowledge elusive, and connection mysterious, the gulf between individuals and systems; between intimacy and alienation; between the embodied and the cerebral. Chinn is fascinated by people: their insecurities, their wounds, their inability to say what they mean and mean what they say. 

Nurit Chinn is a playwright from London currently based in Brooklyn. Her plays have been developed at the Alliance Theatre, BAM, the Center for New Jewish Culture, the Royal Court Theatre and others. She is a 2024/25 New Jewish Culture Fellow, a 2025 Alliance/Kendeda finalist and the Playwright-in-Residence at Centro Primo Levi, where she is also under commission. Nurit is the Co-Director of Exponential Festival 2026. MFA: Brooklyn College, Playwriting.