It’s 1957. Ten-year-old Deborah Lubar and her White Plains pals are squirming around her best friend’s kitchen table. Lunch is served — creamed mushrooms — and a predictable protest ensues. Until, that is, The Mom silences the lot of them with one sentence: “Let me tell you about eating what’s in front of you.”

As the woman continues in a thick Polish accent, Lubar’s carefree middle-class foundations start to crack. Now 48, Lubar remembers the day she heard the tale of her neighbor’s two-and-a-half years in Auschwitz as the moment “the world split in two. I was a suburban kid trying to sort out how there can be suffering in one place and not in another.”

Lincoln’s Deborah Lubar is still sorting it out. Onstage. For the past 10 years, the performer-playwright has put her “low-tech-high human” spin on the modern condition with one-woman shows designed to “grapple with the world on a human level.” Her latest effort, A Story’s a Story, explores the friendship of two Lower East Side immigrants — Italian Catholic Luigina Ponzoni, and “another shopping-bag mystic,” Rose Solomon, a Polish Jew. Like Lubar’s 1982 quick-change portrayal of six Palestinians and Israelis, Blood and Stones, the play presents its message simply. With minimal props and sets, the tale is delivered by women telling their own stories. The resulting effect is as intimate and immediate as a story shared, say, across a kitchen table over creamed mushrooms.

“Times of crisis and transformation in women’s lives really draw me,” Lubar says. “There’s this flame inside them. It can be very inspiring.”

A Story’s a Story was born two years ago, from tales Lubar longed to share of shtetl life. While she searched for a character to tell the stories, inspiration arrived in a pair of “awful lavender shoes” from her “rummage sale maven” mother. “If I live to be 105, I would never buy these shoes,” Lubar explains. “But as soon as I put them on, I felt like one of my grandmother’s friends. I thought this is somebody who can tell these stories.”

As her characters took shape, Lubar was mindful of her belief that “nobody needs their eyes opened” by an evening at the theater. Steering clear of plays that are “too bludgeony, that tell you what to think,” she aims to create drama to “give us some courage and joy with humor that isn’t superficial.”

Raised by a writer mother and a theater-loving father who put “his creative juices into advertising,” Lubar grew to become the very picture of the classic Western academic — until seven years ago. A tenured member of the Smith College drama faculty, her credentials included a masters in fine arts from Rutgers, training from the American Conservatory Theatre and 15 years as a drama teacher. But Lubar’s acting techniques were starting to reflect a growing interest: drama as healing art. The interest turned into a course of study — six years’ worth — including “healing the human energy field” and Resonant Kinesiology — “healing with the human voice.”

Lubar’s approach to theater, and to her life, began to transform. In 1992, she took a leave from Smith, “breaking with being part of an institution.” Within the year, she moved to Lincoln, Vermont, joined the staff at the Awakening Center in Shelburne and started designing healing-focused acting workshops. She’s now writing a book on “forms of performance which, in and of themselves, are acts of spiritual healing for both audience and performer.”

She also changed her approach to character development for her one-woman shows. In addition to her established research routine of interviewing women, she began to “rehearse from what I felt were the strengths and weaknesses in their energetic field.” If audience response is any gauge, it all seems to be working.

“People came up to me who were in Polish shtetls and said, ‘We felt so at home,'” she says smiling. “They said, ‘You got it. Only you’re pronouncing Cossacks wrong.'”

Bolstered by such favorable reception, Lubar plans to expand her tour circuit beyond its current New England territory — a goal aided by the new show’s consciously portable “two-suitcase” design and her decision to hire a booking agent for the first time. Wherever her work takes her, Lubar’s goal remains the same. 

“If I can move people one millimeter closer to facing reality with humor and compassion,” Lubar says, “then that’s what I want to do.” 

This article appears in November 15 • 1995.