We have seen the Shoah treated as somber tragedy, as adventure story, as cartoon, and as farce. Now, in the new play “Eavesdropping on Dreams” by Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg, we have the Shoah as soap opera. The production by the Barefoot Theatre Company directed by Ronald Cohen at the Cherry Lane Theatre unfortunately mistakes histrionics for emotion, and manages to present a two-hour play about arguably the greatest tragedy experienced by a people without a moment of believable feeling in it.
“Eavesdropping on Dreams” focuses on the relationship between three women: Rosa or Raizel (Lynn Cohen) who survived four years in the Lodz ghetto, working as a hatmaker; her neonatalogist daughter Renee (Stephanie Roth Haberle) who devotes herself to saving babies and playing sex games; and Renee’s daughter Shaina (Aidan Koehler), a young woman who dropped out of medical school, broke up with her boyfriend, went on March of the Living to Lodz, and has just returned home transformed. Rosa is also visited periodically by the ghosts of her brother Yakov and Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “king of the Jews,” who turned the ghetto into a workshop in order to convince the Nazis that the residents were too valuable to kill, at least right away.
Was the Israeli kibbutz movement an idealistic social experiment that aimed to create a stronger, healthier, fairer Jewish world? Or was it a wasteful lefty fantasy that resulted in an oppressively conformist society in which everyone spied on his neighbor? According to “Inventing Our Life,” a documentary by Toby Perl Freilich, it depends on whom you ask, which may be another way of saying all of the above. Screening at the Quad Cinema on West 13th Street for the Yom Ha’atzmaut season, “Inventing Our Life” shares a lot of fascinating information about kibbutz life and the history of kibbutzim, but leaves a lot out, as well.
The kibbutz movement was an answer to a pressing economic problem in turn-of-the-20th-century Palestine: There were no jobs for young Jewish immigrants, so many of them turned around and went back home, or decided to try America.
If you saw the much-praised French gangster film “A Prophet,” you will remember Tahar Rahim’s brilliantly chilling performance as Malik, the young man who adapts only too well to the brutal rules of prison life. Rahim appears as a very different type in “Free Men,” currently screening in New York. This solidly suspenseful, if uninspiring, film is set in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1942, and focuses on the community of largely Algerian immigrant workers who found support at the Grand Mosque of Paris. They came there to pray, of course, but also to talk, to rest, and to enjoy the peace of the gardens.
Rahim plays Younes, an apolitical cynic who makes a living as a black marketeer. Although his cousin Ali is a committed communist and anti-colonialist, Younes makes it clear that his only interest is making enough money to go home someday as a success.
There is a good play buried in the three-hour production of “Professor Bernhardi” from the Marvell Rep, but you have to wade through a lot of Germanic bluster and posturing to get to it. Written by Austrian Jewish physician-turned-playwright Arthur Schnitzler in 1912, the play traces the fallout from a bitter confrontation between a respected Jewish doctor and a Catholic priest in 1900 Vienna.
Controversial from its beginnings, “Professor Bernhardi” was banned by Austrian censors before its first production. The Nazis later blacklisted all of Schnitzler’s works, most of which deal frankly with sexuality, describing them as “Jewish filth.” The first full English-language production was in 1936, five years after Schnitzler’s death, in London. The play has been rarely performed in the United States, but this translation by G.J. Weinberger is running in repertory with another controversial play, “The Threepenny Opera,” in a season devoted to “burned & banned” plays.
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.
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.
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.
For its first off-Broadway production in its 62-year history, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting has chosen Israel Horowitz’s “Lebensraum,” and it is not hard to understand why. The piece, in which three actors play 50 different characters, is a bonanza for actors, giving them the chance to create different personalities through their voices, their postures, their accents, and some very quick costume changes.
Adam Gerber, Aidan Koehler, and Mickey Ryan, under the direction of Don K. Williams, go at it with gusto, and their performances range from poignant to funny and back again. Ryan is hilarious when he creates two different old men having a conversation, just by changing his hat.
Two plays based on classic Jewish texts are in performance very far off Broadway. The Castillo Theatre (543 W. 42nd St.) is presenting a musical play based on tales connected with the chasidic master Levi-Yitzhok of Berditchev. Written by Castillo’s artistic director Dan Friedman more than 20 years ago, the play was Castillo’s first production, and is now back to open the company’s 28th season.
Castillo describes itself as an experimental political theater, so it’s not surprising that “The Learning Play of Rabbi Levi-Yitzhok, Son of Sara, of Berditchev” looks for the revolutionary message in the sage’s sayings.
Even though he complained constantly about the pushy Jews who were driving him crazy, Harry Truman was no anti-Semite, says Truman’s former business partner Eddie Jacobson in the play “Harry & Eddie: The Birth of Israel,” currently at St. Luke’s Theater on W. 46th Street. That is just the way Truman talked. His conversation was always laced with profanity, and “Jewing someone down” was an ordinary colloquialism.
Playwright Mark Weston has written what is essentially a one-man play and added two more characters to tell the story of a historically pivotal friendship. Rick Grossman as Eddie is on stage for the whole 90 minutes, with Harry Truman (Dan Hicks) and Bluma Jacobson (Lydia Gladstone) coming on in several scenes for a few minutes at a time. The simple set effectively employs photographic images as time shifts from the beginning of the 20th century until 1948, when Israel was declared a state.
