Real chutzpah

TV series Kid Sister is a comedic crash course in Kiwi Judaism, written and somewhat reluctantly starring in-demand local screenwriter Simone Nathan.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Close to home: Simone Nathan and Paul Williams in Kid Sister.

Simone Nathan has to think for a while when the Listener asks about her first experience of others performing her work. She recalls that, while studying for her master's degree in drama writing at Tisch, New York University's school of the arts, students from the acting department would come in and perform her and her classmates' scripts. It was, she says, either amazing or horrible.

But then she recalls with a laugh the sketches and songs she wrote for her Auckland Bnei Akiva Jewish youth group camps as a teenager. Ones which came with titles like "Winnie the Jew" and "The Avenjews" and "The Zion King".

"Those camps are definitely a good place to start your Jewish pun comedy," she says.

The likes of Sacha Baron Cohen and Seth Rogen started performing at their respective Habonim Dror Zionist youth camps. But for Nathan, the goal from an early age was screenwriting, not performing or making films.

"A lot of the stories that you hear from screenwriters are 'I didn't even know screenwriting was a job. I always knew. Maybe it's just that Jews know screenwriting is a job. Pretty singularly, since I was a kid, I was trying to do this."

Post-Tisch, that ambition has taken her into the writing rooms for Netflix series Bloodline (as a writer's assistant) and the Taika Waititi-Rhys Darby HBO pirate romcom Our Flag Means Death (she wrote the pivotal episode six).