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.
Perhaps the most surprising shot in Jeff Prosserman’s “Chasing Madoff” is of Bernard Madoff himself. The silver-haired financial “wizard” lounges in a chair, amusing the surrounding crowd with his observations on the fallacies of the financial markets.
He’s funny, confident, and charming; why would anyone doubt him? Then we see Harry Markopolos, earnest and awkward and self-righteous, repeat yet again that he warned the Securities and Exchange Commission 10 years before Madoff’s final fall that the hedge-fund manager was a crook, that his astonishing returns were a fantasy, that Bernie Madoff was running the largest and longest-lasting Ponzi scheme ever.
Those politicians who are quick to declaim “class warfare” whenever a legislator wonders why people making a lot of money can’t pay higher taxes to help bring down the deficit or fund services for the poor have no idea what class resentment sounds like. We’ve come so far from real animosity between the rich and the poor that the mildest expression of concern about growing income inequality brings forth a torrent of rebuke from people who see themselves as the defenders of capitalism. If you want to hear someone urging real class war, go to the Portmanteau Theatre’s production of Clifford Odets’s agitprop play, “Waiting for Lefty,” at Hartley House, 413 West 46th St., in Manhattan.
Born in Haifa, Israela Margalit first made a career as a concert pianist and then switched to writing. That deep familiarity with the world of classical music informs her play “First Prize,” at the Arclight Theatre at 152 West 71st Street. With a talented cast of four, the play examines the decades-long career of Adrianna, a gifted young pianist who sacrifices a great deal to achieve her dream. Lori Prince plays Adrianna as a young woman, and Susan Ferrara, who portrays her teacher at the start, takes over the role of the mature Adrianna, along with several other characters. The other cast members, Brian Dykstra and Christopher Hirsh, also play numerous characters — businessmen, managers, boyfriends, fans, and conductors. Director Margaret Perry expertly keeps all this moving at a brisk pace, and the play zips along in an entertaining way, with Dykstra and Ferrara giving standout comic performances.
