Alma: Can you bear it?

Teresa: If I can withstand the fires of the Devil, I can withstand this.

Alma: You are branded apostate, confined in the solitude of the Convent of Incarnation.

Reading these words, it's easy to imagine the play's premier with Elizabeth Clark-Stern as Teresa and Lindsey Rosen as Alma on a stage with minimalist sets, haunting guitar music and the play of darkness and light between the scenes, bringing back into the temporal world the spirit and relevance of a saint who lived over 400 years ago.

A note at the beginning of the book states that while dance was a central element in the original full production, the play can also be presented as a reading with the "text providing its own 'dance' of symbol, theme and characterization." This dance is, perhaps, the book's greatest triumph for even in a silent reading of the words from the printed page, Teresa and Alma console, debate and uplift each other in words and actions that feel like old and fondly remembered music.

In her "Biographical and Imaginal Origins of the Play" in the back of the book, Clark-Stern says that as she "allowed the characters to write the play" they both emerged as Amazons and as Medial Women who are "entirely human, filled with dread, shame, passion, doubt, a longing to belong, and to connect with a world larger than themselves." She says she was surprised at that. Perhaps readers will be surprised, too, that a Christian mystic and a Jewish mystic can simultaneously share a synchronizing harmony of transcendent focus as well as the hopes and fears common to all of us. Their humanity is a powerful foundation for their spirituality.

On the Doorstep of the Castle is more than a well-written book; it's an intuitively written book and an inspiring experience.

By Naomi Lowinsky, author of THE SISTER FROM BELOW, THE MOTHERLINE, and MARKED BY FIRE: STORIES OF THE JUNGIAN WAY (with Patricia Damery). Review from Naomi's "News From the Muse" (here abridged)

Elizabeth (as Teresa) and her colleague, the wonderful dancer Lindsey Rosen (as Alma), performed the play one evening. In the way of synchronicity I found myself weeping, not only because the play is extraordinarily moving, and Elizabeth and Lindsey are fine actors and movers, but because it hit on of so many of my obsessions: Catholicism, The Jews in Medieval Spain, The Inquisition, Conversos who are secret Jews, Kabbalah and the Feminine Face of God, Active Imagination and its earlier incarnation as mystical prayer.

The conceit of the play is fabulous. A young converso, Alma de Leon (Lindsey), who is a descendant of the famous Kabbalistic rabbi Moses de Leon, applies to become a novice under the tutelage of Teresa of Avila (Elizabeth), a Carmelite nun said to be “the most awake woman in Spain,” “a woman who receives raptures from God.” Alma is suffering from an “aridity of soul.” She wants to learn how to receive the divine. She also clearly needs a sanctuary from the dread hands of the Inquisition.

Teresa is able to convey the experience of being answered by an inner voice, by another who has a different point of view, a larger wisdom. Teresa prays to her God for counsel about whether to take in this young converso who knows Teresa’s secret and could betray her to the Inquisition. Should she take this risk? With Alma’s encouragement Teresa has the courage to write down her encounters with the divine, risking the fires of the Inquisition. With Teresa’s guidance Alma finds her way into her own Kabbalistic vision of the feminine face of God. The two women struggle with each other, support each other, go out into the world to touch the lives of the poor.

Elizabeth has the courage, the creative freedom, to bring together a historical figure, Teresa of Avila, and a fictional figure, a creation of her own imagination, Alma de Leon. She says:

“I was aware of the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Edith Stein, who chanced to read Teresa’s autobiography and realized it was what she had been searching for all her life. She converted to the Carmelite order, yet could not curb her criticism of the Pope, who turned the other way while the Jews were being led to the death camps from Italy. Her public denunciation eventually resulted in the Gestapo escorting Edith and her sister, Rosa, to Auschwitz, where they were exterminated in 1942. 

“I was so moved by this story I began to imagine a young Jewish woman, living in 16th century Spain, who, like Edith Stein, was searching for something to feed the longing of her soul. ‘What if Teresa and Edith met?’ I thought, with a sense of great excitement. I did not transpose Edith directly to the 16th century, but began to research the story of the Jews at that time. The character of Alma, Spanish for soul, emerged in vivid dreams and images from the dusty plains of central Spain. I tossed out my preconceptions and ideas about the story, and just let the characters guide me. Alma had Edith’s courage, but was not a philosopher. She was a woman of the senses, the earth, the arts.”