Manhasset’s Pauli Rose Libsohn had never considered the idea of writing a play until an offer came in June 2019 to write a one-act play for a contest hosted by the public access television station in Lake Success.
The contest was eventually canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the offer produced Libsohn’s seventh book, “The Ballet With Encores.” The play is about a chance encounter her parents had as young lovers after not having seen each other for a number of years. It was pieced together by Libsohn from poetry her late mother, Mitzi, had written years before.
Libsohn said at first writing a play seemed like a daunting task.
“I sat down and I said ‘how am I ever going to write a play?’ I started and I didn’t know what to do but I said to myself, this is really a poetic story and then I realized that I could take the lines of my mother’s poetry and create dialogue,” Libsohn said.
Aside from the play the book contains the story of a wooden box that Libsohn originally encountered as a child and was told had been brought over from Russia in the 1890s. She rediscovered it last year in storage and found that her mother had filled it with poetry and correspondence between her and Libsohn’s father. Those notes are published in the book as well.
Libsohn said part of the reason she wanted them published was to give a glimpse into what relationships were like in the past and show that the way people interact has changed drastically over time.
“Nobody communicates like people long ago used to. They don’t write poems, they don’t write letters today. People really adored one another, they took time to fall in love whereas today you don’t find that,” Libsohn said. “It’s fast sex all the way, there’s no courtship and no romance.”
Libsohn said the prevalence of social media in today’s interactions has changed the way people communicate and their ability to spell and write.
Libsohn had originally thought the series on her parents would be over after her last book came out, but with the discovery of the wooden box and her playwriting debut, she decided a seventh book was in order, but this will be the last one.
Her focus has now shifted, saying that memories of her childhood and relationship with her parents have inspired her to begin writing children’s books. The first three of these books are stories written by her mother that she adapted for children. She expects them to be published in October.
She is also working on a series of seven books based on a title character named “Penelope” that are based on her experiences. She expects them to come out in late spring. Libsohn grew up in Fresh Meadows and Great Neck.
Since beginning her writing career in 2014, Libsohn has written about and adapted her parents’ writings, poetry and essays on Shakespeare. She said her parents were close and she recalls a time when she was at C.W. Post College (now known as Long Island University-Post) when she received an assignment to write a poem.
Not knowing what to do, she brought the assignment home to her mother, who had been an English major at Queens College. Libsohn wrote the poem “Imitation of a Poem” with the help of her mother. From there, she said, she and her mother began an almost daily tradition of sitting at the kitchen table and writing poems together. That tradition lasted about 35 years.
Libsohn was nominated for one of Blank Slate Media’s Best of the North Shore Awards for Best Author in 2020.
