Pleasant Dreams

Written and Performed by Robin Hirsch

part of TNC’s New City, New Blood Reading Series at Dream Up Festival 2026!

Monday August 24th, 2026 at 6:30 PM
Run Time: 90 minutes
COMMUNITY SPACE

FREE

$5 Suggested Donation

Reservations can be made at tncdreamup@gmail.com

THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th & 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003
Directions

Pleasant Dreams
30 years ago: The director of a Jewish Festival in Berlin uses my café (The Cornelia Street Café in the West Village) to scout talent for his Eleventh Annual Jewish Days of Culture; he buys a copy of my book (Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski . . . ) and invites me to come to Berlin to perform and give a lecture; on the way I stop in Amsterdam with my sister from London to unveil a stone at the grave of our uncle Georg, philanthropist, refugee advocate, Auschwitz survivor. In Berlin we discover the graves of our grandparents, whom we had never known: both our parents had managed to escape; both our grandfathers had died before Hitler; both our grandmothers had lived to die in concentration camps. On my last night I perform in the ruins of the synagogue at which my parents worshiped, in front of a backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge, and invite the audience to follow me over the bridge for a nightcap at the Cornelia Street Café.

Bio (Robin Hirsch, writer/performer):
Robin Hirsch was born in London during the Blitz to German Jews who had escaped Hitler. This complex inheritance informs much of his work both as a writer (LAST DANCE AT THE HOTEL KEMPINSKI–“one of the best books ever written on the long arm of the Holocaust” according to Jewish Book News, and perhaps the only Holocaust-related memoir to have been called “very funny” by the New York Times) and as a performer (MOSAIC: FRAGMENTS OF A JEWISH LIFE, a seven-part solo performance cycle, called “completely glorious” by the Village Voice, with which he has toured all over the US and several times in Europe).
He is a former Oxford, Fulbright, and English Speaking Union Scholar, a two-time NYFA Fellow and the recipient of numerous other awards, but the titles of which he is proudest were self-bestowed: Minister of Culture/Wine Czar/Dean of Faculty at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, which he started with two other artists as one room with a toaster-oven, but which grew over its 41-year existence to include three rooms upstairs, two bars, two kitchens, and a performance space downstairs in which he curated some 700 shows a year in every conceivable genre (and quite a few inconceivable ones). In 1987, on her tenth anniversary, Mayor Koch of blessed memory proclaimed Cornelia “a culinary as well as a cultural landmark.”
Every word of both KEMPINSKI and MOSAIC was written to be first uttered chez Cornelia. Robin currently has a book of café stories, THE WHOLE WORLD PASSES THROUGH: STORIES FROM THE CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ, scheduled to be published (in England!). PLEASANT DREAMS was originally written for that collection. This is the first time that it will be performed in its entirety.