Robin Garbose

Robin Saex Garbose is an American filmmaker and theatre director. Following an early career directing several off-Broadway plays and episodes of the shows Head of the Class and America's Most Wanted, Garbose embraced Orthodox Judaism and founded the Kol Neshama Performing Arts Conservatory, a summer camp and arts conservatory providing an artistic outlet for teenage Orthodox girls. With Kol Neshama, she has produced several projects, including the films A Light at Greytowers, The Heart That Sings (2011), and Operation: Candlelight (2014). Her projects have been screened at the Museum of Tolerance, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Cinematheques, and the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.

Early life Garbose grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in a Conservative Jewish family; her parents belonged to a local synagogue and were active in philanthropy. She later described being surrounded by "Yankee culture" growing up and said that her parents "were very Zionist and involved with the community. But religion was never about God, it was about Jewish culture, tradition and Israel."

After graduating from Williston Northampton School in 1978, Garbose majored in theater at Brown University as an undergraduate student and obtained a degree in theater.

Career While at Brown University and living in New York, Garbose worked with filmmaker Todd Haynes ), in addition to assisting directors at the Circle Repertory Company and Manhattan Theatre Club. She directed a 1982 production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with Production Workshop, Mark Malone's 1984 one-act play A Sense of Loss starring Timothy Carhart and Matthew Penn for an Ensemble Studio Theatre marathon led by David Mamet's Vermont Sketches, and a 1985 production of Brian Friel's Winners starring her Brown classmates John F. Kennedy Jr. and his girlfriend Christina Haag at Manhattan's Irish Arts Center.

Also in 1985, Garbose directed a short-form version of Howard Korder's "Boy's Life" called Life On Earth with Jack Stehlin and Lisa Barnes for Manhattan Punch Line, Bob Morris's The Grandpa Chronicle starring Korder and Bernie Passeltiner for Theater for the New City, and Korder's Lip Service for Manhattan Punch Line starring Peter Riegert and John Hallow. In 1988, she directed Mark O'Donnell's Requiem for a Heavyweight and Howard Morris's Almost Romance starring Fisher Stevens and Helen Slater. In 1989, she directed T. L. Wagener's Marathons starring Ellen Tobie and Michael French, and in 1990, she directed John Burrows's musical comedy about pregnancy It's A Girl, starring Olivia d'Abo, for Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles, and Cynthia Heimel's A Girl's Guide to Chaos starring Ricki Lake, Debra Jo Rupp, Deborah Adair, Kimberly Scott, and Scott Jaeck at Tiffany Theater in West Hollywood.

In 2000, Garbose and playwright Pauline LePor, who had met at Juilliard, founded Bais Miriam, a summer arts conservatory for teenage Orthodox Jewish girls supported by Juilliard and Bais Chana High School. The conservatory's culminating project, a series of five one-act pieces entitled Wonder of Wonders, was staged at Crossroads School Theater in Santa Monica in August 2000.

In 2004, she directed for Bais Chana High School a musical historical drama called Portraits of Faith, written by her husband Levi Yitzhaq Garbose based on a Marcus Lehmann novel and with songs based on Hasidic nigunim; the play was staged in March at Scottish Rite Theater in Los Angeles.

From 2014 to 2017, Garbose ran a summer program at Machon Alte Seminary in Safed, Israel between July 13 and August 18.

Film and TV Garbose's first job in film was as an assistant to director Barnet Kellman on the 1985 romantic comedy film Key Exchange. She directed for the sitcom Head of the Class during its final season in 1991, but ended up leaving sitcoms because, due to her growing Orthodox observance, she was no longer comfortable with some of the messages in the show nor having to work on Shabbat.

As of 2017, Garbose and her husband and writing partner, Levi Yitzhaq Garbose, were in pre-production on a dramedy called Meet The Shustermans, intended as her first general audience project.

Kol Neshama In 2000, Garbose founded Kol Neshama, a summer camp and performing arts conservatory for Orthodox teenage girls based in Los Angeles, with the first session being held in the summer of 2001. and an August 2003 double feature of Hear O Israel and Little Lord Titchwood, also staged at the Ivar Theater. They also produced a direct-to-DVD series called Camp Bnos Yisrael, the first episode of which premiered on November 6, 2006, at a benefit function at the Museum of Tolerance.

Garbose and Kol Neshama produced their first theatrical feature film in 2007 with A Light For Greytowers, a musical historical drama about a young Jewish girl escaping from Czarist Russia and ending up at the harsh Greytowers orphanage in Victorian England, based on a young adult novel of the same name by Eva Vogel and Ruth Steinberg. The film was shot in 2004 at the Rohr Jewish Student Center at the University of Southern California Shown only to all-female audiences in accordance with kol isha, the film premiered at the Sherry Lansing Theater on the Paramount Pictures studio lot in January 2007 ) and saw screenings at Stern College for an event led by Miriam Leah Gamliel's ATARA organization; at the Jewish Children's Museum in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and at the 2009 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. It also saw controversy during its Borough Park screening; Orthodox audiences expressed concern over the presence of male actors in the film and the film was threatened with being shut down, though this ultimately did not happen. the film is a musical historical drama about a young Holocaust survivor serving as drama director at a Catskills camp in 1950s.

Garbose and Kol Neshama released a third film in 2014, an action-adventure film called Operation: Candlelight, partially funded through Kickstarter.

Personal life She moved to Los Angeles in 1988, where she now lives with her husband Levi Yitzhaq Garbose, a musician and fellow baal teshuva, and their children, Menachem Mendel and Chaya Solika, the latter of whom has acted in several of her mother's projects.

Spirituality and beliefs Garbose is a baalat teshuva, having come to Hasidic and Orthodox Judaism in 1991 after attending a Breslov-run kabbalah class; In 2014, Garbose gave testimony at a rabbinic hearing regarding the alleged cult status of the organization Call of the Shofar, appearing before Rabbis Dovid Cohen and Abraham J. Twerski and on behalf of prosecutor Rabbi Shea Hecht. She later contributed an account of the meeting to the Chabad news website CrownHeights.info.

Credits

Film and TV

Theatre

As director Twelfth Night (1982) (Production Workshop) The End of Humanity...As We Know It (1983) A Sense of Loss (1984) (Mark Malone, Ensemble Studio Theatre) Life On Earth (1985) (Howard Korder, Manhattan Punch Line) The Grandpa Chronicle (1985) (Bob Morris, Theater for the New City) Winners (1985) (Brian Friel, Irish Arts Center) Lip Service (1985) (Howard Korder, Manhattan Punch Line) It's a Girl (1990) (John Burrows, Odyssey Theatre) A Girl's Guide to Chaos (1990) (Cynthia Heimel, Tiffany Theater) Portraits of Faith (2004) (Levi Yitzhaq Garbose, Scottish Rite Theater) Roots: The Journey Home (2008) (Ohel Chana High School)

Other

Hackers: A Play in Eleven Scenes (1986; credited as "Comedy Corps Manager" for Manhattan Punch Line)