Hello!

I'm Gili Malinsky, playwright and reporter in New York. And my play "Will You Be Praying the Entire Flight?" has been accepted into the biggest theatre festival in the world: the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This is a huge opportunity to get the show seen by its largest audience yet, including people from all over the world and industry folks who could help it get to a professional stage.

Besides this show, I've written one full-length play, a parody of the D.A.R.E. program called "The Drug Stoppers" which I Kickstarted and produced in a Brooklyn classroom in 2015, and a monologue, "This is My First ADHD Support Group," that I performed at the New York Theater Festival in June 2022 based on my own experience discovering I have ADHD. As a journalist, I've been published in The New York Times, NBC News, Glamour.com and many others.

My director, Dylan Zwickel, is an NYC-based writer and director. Her plays have been finalists or semifinalists for the Orchard Project, the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, the Jane Chambers Prize, the Princess Grace Award and the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference. She served as Director's Assistant on the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect and runs a murder mystery party company, Ghost Ship Murder Mysteries. Her play The Moss Maidens won Best Play and Best Ensemble at the 2023 SheNYC Summer Theater Festival and an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Parity Development Award, and she recently served as sensitivity consultant for The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show. 

We're currently doing a new round of casting. 

I've been working on "Will You Be Praying the Entire Flight?" for about two and a half years. It's based on an experience I had sitting next to a Hasidic woman on a long flight. I was not thrilled to be sitting there but we ended up having one of the loveliest conversations I've ever had.

I started writing the show in September 2022 and thus far have done four table reads, including one through The Uptown Collective, a reading with more than 30 audience members at the Dramatists Guild Foundation in March 2024 and a two-night staging of the show at Arts on Site in fall 2024 that brought in more than 100 audience members and a sold out second night.

The show explores themes like the existence of God, expectations around marriage and womanhood, modern dating and conflict in the world, all through a comedic and Jewish lens. We want to bring this conversation to audiences abroad to give another perspective on these ideas. And we want to see how we can make the show even better!

In terms of how the production will break down this summer, we hope to do about three weeks of rehearsal beginning in mid July, fly out to Scotland and have our tech rehearsal August 8-10, then do our six shows August 11-16. We'll be in a hundred-person venue in a really central location in Edinburgh. 

We'll likely have a cast and crew of six, including three actors, a stage manager, Dylan our director and myself, the playwright. 

Costs for this production will include flights (about $6,000), stay in Scotland (could be as much as $7,000), pay for everyone's labor ($500-$1,000 each), rehearsal spaces ($1,000), costumes and props ($200-$300), plus whatever surprise costs are sure to arise. 

We're asking for $20,000, which should cover all of these costs. 

If you like the sound of what we're doing or have seen the show and want to keep supporting us, please consider giving! Donations could be tax deductible and we have various gifts for each level: 

Thank you so much for taking the time to dip into our fundraiser. We hope to see you at one of our shows!