Vera Joseph is a character in two of Amy Herzog’s plays. After the Revolution is set in 1999, and introduces Vera as the recent widow of Joe, the celebrated patriarch of a Marxist family. In the play, Vera’s granddaughter Emma has just learned that Joe spied for the Russians during WWII, which throws Emma’s moral and political center into question. Vera defends her husband’s decisions as Emma wrestles with how to make sense of this new information in light of her lionized view of her grandfather.
While Vera only appears in three scenes of After the Revolution, she takes center stage in 4000 Miles. Set about ten years later, Vera is now 91 and still living in the West Village apartment she shared with her late husband; his name is still on the buzzer. This is the first thing her 21-year old grandson Leo mentions when he shows up unexpectedly at the apartment in the middle of the night. The play explores the relationship between the two, who are separated by 70 years but united by their playfulness and occasionally abrasive compulsion towards honesty.
Herzog’s inspiration for Vera is her grandmother, Leepee Joseph, who made a brief appearance under her own name in one of Herzog’s solo pieces. Joseph is now 95 and lives in the West Village; Herzog describes her as “funny, dry, sassy, and devastating.” Joseph is a long-time member of the Greenwich Village Society for Peaceful Priorities. She has supported countless radical causes—including campaigning for founding feminist Bella Abzug’s congressional runs, and more recently the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also has her own connections to the stage, having worked in the theatre section of the Works Progress Administration, as well as for Cheryl Crawford, a co-founder of The Group Theatre.
Herzog and Joseph lived together for six months after Herzog graduated from college, an experience that was formative for the writer, but not entirely smooth sailing. “She isn't very grandmotherly, despite being extremely affectionate,” Herzog says of Joseph. “She doesn't assume that grandmotherly posture of sweetness and deference and distance with younger people. She just gets in the ring and engages with you, which can be wonderful and can be hard. I encountered what it’s like to be her roommate; we got in some fights, which I now think is completely remarkable. I worked through fights with my grandmother. Very few people can say that.”
Herzog and her grandmother share a mix of inquiry, generosity, and clear-eyed honesty, attributes that are richly apparent in Vera Joseph and the rest of Herzog’s characters. Will Vera make it into a third play? Herzog has begun thinking about a final play that will feature the fictional Joseph clan, although neither the plot nor cast list has taken shape yet. It probably won’t deal explicitly with plot points from either of the other Joseph plays, but is likely to pick up on the emotional complexities of the Joseph family and their intersecting legacies. “I don’t know anyone who is present and thoughtful going through their whole lives,” Herzog observes. “The things that we inherit from our families are the things that we really question.”
—Adrien-Alice Hansel