Theater workshops registering

The “fourth wall” in theater describes the invisible barrier between the actors and the audience. In “The Boychick Affair — The Bar Mitzvah of Harry Boychick,” writer Amy Lord takes the fourth wall and drives a truck through it.

“The Boychick Affair” is the latest offering from Lord, who starred in the interactive play “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” before creating “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral” in 1994. This time, Grandma Sylvia’s great-grandson Harry is becoming a bar mitzvah. After a successful two-year run in Los Angeles and a stint in Florida, Lord has brought her madcap creation to New York and everyone — well, almost everyone, according to the program — is invited.

Going to see “The Producers” is fun. Going to “The Boychick Affair” is an experience like no other on Broadway.

Maybe there’s something to all this talk about a resurgence of Yiddish. It seems that there are now two Yiddish theater companies in New York. A scrappy new outfit, the New Yiddish Rep, joins the National Yiddish Theatre—Folksbiene in bringing Yiddish entertainment to the masses. And while there were hardly masses at 45 E. 33rd St. for “The Big Bupkis,” the New Yiddish Rep’s newest production, there was a surprising amount of entertainment.

The star of “The Big Bupkis,” Shane Bertram Baker, may be the new incarnation of Yiddish theater — he’s relatively young, not Jewish, and learned his Yiddish as an adult. A child magician and a participant in the current burlesque revival (what, you didn’t know burlesque was reviving?) Baker is perfectly comfortable on stage and has great comic timing.

To celebrate its 95th consecutive season, the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene is presenting “Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears,” a one-man commemoration of the 150th birthday of the beloved Yiddish humorist and writer. That one man — Theodore Bikel, a renowned actor and folksinger long associated with Sholom Aleichem through his portrayal of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” — is 85 years old. Watching Bikel stride across the stage for almost two hours, speaking continuously, breaking his monologue only to launch into numerous songs, all these birthdays and milestones are much on the viewer’s mind. How could they not be? It’s an amazing accomplishment for anyone (How do actors remember all those lines?), but it would be dishonest (if a bit ageist) to deny that it’s even more amazing for someone his age. Bikel’s bulk and full white beard make for a commanding stage presence; the words flow easily and he never seems fatigued.

In the talkback after a performance of his play “The Punishing Blow,” Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine, acknowledged that it was only after Mel Gibson had his infamous anti-Semitic meltdown that Cohen conceived of a dramatic way to tell a story that fascinated him — the history of 18th-century Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza. That history is still the most vital part of “The Punishing Blow,” a one-man production by the York Shakespeare Company at the Clurman in New York’s Theatre Row, but the frame that Cohen has contrived adds dimension to the issue of anti-Semitism and its manifestations in the 21st century.