When the Stern College Dramatics Society (SCDS) decided to present Journey Through Ruth in December 2025, it was a moment of creative and spiritual convergence for playwright Amy (Gordon) Guterson ’86S, one that connected her earliest artistic instincts, her formative years at Stern College for Women and a lifelong commitment to exploring faith through theater.
Guterson grew up in Woodmere, New York, in a Modern Orthodox home, attending Hillel School in Lawrence and later HAFTR when the schools merged. From an early age, she felt the creative urge. “School had very few artistic outlets,” she recalls, “and I spent much of my time at my desk doodling, or creating a film or play in my head.” It was during summers at camp that her imagination found room to breathe. Camp theater became her entry point into directing, choreography and collaborative storytelling, experiences that would shape her path forward.
That path became more clear to her during her early admissions interview at Stern College . Asked about her interests, Guterson told then-Dean Karen Bacon that she wanted to direct theater. Rather than questioning the practicality of the goal, Dean Bacon asked what she loved about directing and what it entailed. “Her interest in me left me with very positive feelings about the possibility of going to Stern,” Guterson says.
Soon after, she was accepted as Stern’s first — and at the time, only — theater major, a program shaped around her interests and guided by close mentorship.
Central among those mentors was Professor Peninnah Schram, head of the Speech and Drama Department and a well-regarded Jewish storyteller. Guterson immersed herself in speech, theater history and storytelling, while also pursuing a minor in art, studying drawing, painting and sculpture. She supplemented her coursework with acting classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio in Greenwich Village (now known as The HB Studio), earning Stern credit while training professionally. “Being the one and only theater major meant that it could be shaped by my interests and through the experiences of my mentors,” she reflects.
Equally formative was her involvement with SCDS. Guterson served as stage manager, actor, director and eventually president of the group, starring in multiple productions and directing a play during her senior year. “I loved the hands-on immersive learning,” she recalls, “and loved bringing what I learned in class to the stage.”
After graduating in 1986, Guterson continued her professional training, studying with legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen and joining the inaugural year of the New Actors Workshop, where she learned from director Mike Nichols and improvisational theater pioneer Paul Sills. She earned her Actor’s Equity card and performed Off-Broadway in Yiddish, Jewish and Classical Theatre.
Yet even as her career advanced, Guterson found herself confronting deeper questions of identity and purpose. “I began to realize that my happiness and identity could not rely on whether or not I won the role,” she says. Ultimately, she made the difficult decision to step away from acting in order to live an observant Jewish life, trusting that somehow creativity and faith would find their way back to one another.
That trust proved well placed. After marrying and settling in Pittsburgh, where her husband, John (Yaakov) Guterson, a 1987 graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, practices as a psychiatrist, Guterson co-founded Kol Isha in 1995, a Jewish women’s theater collective spanning denominations and backgrounds. As artistic director, she led the development of original work rooted in Jewish womanhood, unity and difference. It was there, in 1997, that she wrote Journey Through Ruth, reimagining the biblical story through the voices of contemporary women navigating loss, faith and transformation.
Nearly three decades later, the play returned to Stern College in a production by SCDS, resonating powerfully with a new generation of students. “I am delighted to pass this special play on to the women of Stern College,” Guterson said, describing the experience as a creative inheritance passed from one circle of Jewish women to the next. (Read more about the performance.)
That intergenerational continuity is not only artistic but deeply personal. Three of Guterson’s children have studied at şÚÁĎÉç All. Her daughter, Tanya, attended Stern College for one year, studying music. Another daughter, Tamar, graduated from Stern as a music major and psychology minor, was active in SCDS, and continued her studies at Wurzweiler School of Social Work. Her son, Tzvikah, is currently a junior at Yeshiva College majoring in psychology, with plans to pursue semicha and social work at YU.
Guterson’s commitment to integrating Torah and creativity also found expression in her founding of Tzohar Seminary in 2011, a gap-year program now in its fifteenth year, where young women study Torah and Chassidut alongside intensive training in the arts.
“What started as a kosher place for young Jewish women to explore the arts,” she says “has become an experience of groundbreaking growth for each student, as a young Jewish woman, as an individual and as an emerging artist with something to say.”
Now moving forward from daily leadership in order to have freedom to create and spend time with her children and grandchildren, Guterson continues to write and develop new work. Her recent play, Immanuel’s Dream, received its first professional reading, and she hopes to collaborate with other spiritually driven artists in the U.S. and Israel.
For Guterson, the connection between Torah and theater is elemental. “In the way a play or screenplay is a blueprint for the world within the play,” she notes, “the Torah is G-d’s blueprint for the world. When we create, we are living in G-d’s reflection.” She believes that the creative act is extremely spiritual, and to be able elevate the world around us through the arts, especially when sharing an element of Torah, “feels like a gift to participate in.”
The opportunity to share Journey Through Ruth with the Yeshiva university community, with SCDS performing a play about women and personal growth through Torah, brought Guterson back to where her first understandings of the link between art and faith took root. Throughout her career, Guterson has learned that faith and creativity need not compete but can illuminate one another on and off the stage.
