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To answer your questions –

I chose the year of the play to be around the time I remember being very conscious of overhearing many of these conversations going on within my extended family and larger community.  I chose the exact date because it was a Friday night (the same reason I chose conspicuously unkosher food) to highlight the irony I see in a lot of Jewish communities, where religious identity is waning but ethnic/cultural identity is so strong as to be constraining.  I also liked the idea of the women ordering in Italian because it represents another irony where some Jewish people see themselves as being able to assimilate into other American cultures, but reject the idea that any outsider could really join their community.  The location is one place where I’ve observed these tensions, and the silence I was trying to portray, and is also an area where there tend to be highly concentrated Jewish communities.

The silence actually isn’t about intermarriage per se, but rather the implicit notion that there is a collective “Jewish experience,” which is never really defined, but that many Jewish people seem to assume is felt by all Jews, especially those raised within certain communities.  Part of the understanding that comes from this “experience” is supposedly the intuitive feeling that intermarriage is wrong – due to religion, tradition, and perhaps most importantly, historical events of the last century.  Moreover, at least in my own experience, it seems like many people assume that these inherited understandings of cultural heritage and experience are impenetrable by non-Jews. I think the fear of intermarriage has less to do with fear about the literal number of Jews in the world and more to do with fear of people distancing themselves from the past and “forgetting what it means to be Jewish.”  But what these inborn understandings of group experience actually ARE never gets verbalized.  In my opinion, that is the silence in the community.

To be totally honest, I’d assumed that you would pick up on the meaning behind the play, because I’d sent it to a friend (whose family I partially ripped off with the light bulb fiasco) and she immediately understood what I was trying to get across, and what silence I was referring  to.  But maybe you need to have lived it to immediately get the meaning…