Philly Fringe 2026: Leila Einhorn’s Days of Awe and Valerie David’s Baggage from BaghDAD

Since the Fringe generally falls around the High Holidays, I rarely get to catch as many shows as I’d like. But when I saw that Leila Einhorn’s Days of Awe would open on September 17, right during those days, I was intrigued. It’s an autobiographical solo show about a poet in recovery who moves home a year after her mother’s death. The anniversaries of a loved one's death are significant in our tradition, and September 17 is my own mother’s yahrzeit.

A midlife coming-of-age story

In the show, Einhorn uses a few wisely chosen props to ground us, while she relies mainly on her strength as a poet to guide us through the turbulence of her adolescence, divorce, mental health struggles, and grief. A large sticky note pad with dates written according to both the Western and the Hebrew calendars appears on the stage. As she moves us through the year of her mother’s death and what follows, Einhorn rips off each sheet. There’s also a single pew, representing scenes in worship services, and boxes taped with duct tape full of childhood journals and books she digs into.

Days of Awe is a coming-of-age story for midlife and its power lies in looking at how the grief from the loss of her mother opens Einhorn to examine her own mortality, at how she wants to live her life.

It’s actually in her telling about her grandmothers’ lives that we learn about the poet’s lineage of activism and feminism. One grandmother cries when Einhorn is dropped off at college, revealing how badly she wanted the chance for an education, an unprescribed life.

Einhorn’s mother is less known to her. The sense that Einhorn felt unseen by her mother lingers through the stage. Einhorn is one who sees, who is curious about the boxes in her grandparents’ attic, who wants to know the stories of the past, of the two-dimensional relatives left in the Pale of Settlement, whose stories were never told.

Comedy and gusto

After the show, I had a 30-minute stretch before returning to the third floor of Asian Arts Initiative to catch Baggage from BaghDAD: Becoming My Father’s Daughter, another solo show, written and performed by Valerie David. Many of the audience members who caught Days of Awe did the same. I’m not sure how intentionally Cannonball organizers set the shows together, but they made an uncanny set of companion plays.

While Einhorn’s words have the precision of a poet, David puts herself and her story right out there with comedy and gusto, belly-dancing her way to the stage. David tells the unique story of her father’s family’s harrowing escape from the 1941 expulsion of the Iraqi Jewish community, and her complicated relationship with him, through the full embodiment of her dramatic and comedic gifts.

When she describes being a new first-grade student in Richmond, Virginia who looked totally different from her other classmates, David becomes that frightened child. She becomes herself at her Bat Mitzvah, which falls at the awkward age of 12, using audio recordings of her actual voice from that time. She is adept at speaking in her father’s (and other family members’) voices as well as her own, which makes the hour-long show both entertaining and engaging.

David’s tale, like Einhorn’s, is bittersweet. Many people don’t know the story of the Farhud pogrom, of what happened to the 150,000 Iraqi Jews who had lived in the region since the 6th century BCE, following their forcible exile by the Babylonian Empire. They were expelled in 1941, but many Jews did not survive the attacks and rapes to even become refugees.

David takes on the painful, difficult task of learning her father’s history to better understand him. He’s a man who chides her for crying when classmates taunt her because Jews have horns, and who hits her when she disobeys him. David approaches her father’s life with grace and compassion and later helps him fulfill some dreams, becoming a party animal on a cruise ship’s disco and getting a taste of show biz when she helps him become an extra in The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington.

Unsettled ghosts

The unsettled ghosts of centuries of persecution run through both Einhorn and David’s very different shows. Each performer bravely engages their family trauma through their unique abilities: poetry for Einhorn and storytelling and comedy for David.

I knew many of the audience members present from the Philadelphia Jewish community. I wish the shows had drawn a more diverse crowd—these kinds of Jewish stories need to be told—but hopefully Einhorn and David will keep on sharing beyond the Fringe.

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