Miriam Rinn
‘Imagining Heschel’: A review
We want to know more than the play reveals
Just as its title promises, “Imagining Heschel,” the current production of the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater Company (the professional company of the Stella Adler Studio), imagines a series of conversations between Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Cardinal Augustin Bea about the time of the Second Vatican Council, when Pope John XXIII reconsidered the church’s relationship to the Jews.
This change in church teachings, which removed the charge of deicide, would prove to be immensely significant, but that remains in the future at the time of the play. Cardinal Bea has come to meet with Heschel to convince him to travel to Rome to help the council formulate its new approach. Heschel is cautious, probing to see if the church is serious and ready to apologize for millennia of persecution, and willing to give up its determination to convert his co-religionists.
The culture of an ‘ideal’ camp
Ambitious Terezin exhibit offers unique look at Nazi showplace
Hanna Arie-Gaifman has deeply personal reasons to be gratified at the 92nd Street Y’s presentation of a multi-disciplinary series on the Nazi transition camp in Terezin, Czechoslovakia. “My mother’s family went through Theresienstadt [the German name for the camp], and they all perished in Auschwitz,” says the director of the Y’s Tisch Center of the Arts. The camp, which was billed by the Nazis as an ideal community for the Jews, absorbed her interest from childhood. Born in Czechoslovakia after the war, Arie-Gaifman immigrated to Israel with her family when she was 14; by the time she was 18, she was cataloguing artifacts from Theresienstadt at The Hebrew University.
‘Shlemiel the First’ a charmer
Yet, alas, some of its Yiddish flavor is lost in translation
With a new executive director, the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene is heading in a different direction. Both its productions this season are in English, and that is a big change right there.
Executive director Bryna Wasserman is no stranger to Yiddish theater, certainly. For years, she led the Montreal Yiddish theater named after her mother, Dora Wasserman. It was there that she built relationships with other theater companies, and where she developed a particular interest in working with young people.
Wasserman said in a recent interview with The Jewish Standard that she wanted to build bridges to a diverse audience in New York, as well. “We are looking to the future to make this a Jewish theater,” said Folksbiene trustee Judith Rosen, “not just a Yiddish theater.” There is no plan to change the theater company’s name, Rosen insisted.
