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Lisa Traiger has been an arts writer since 1985. Currently she contributes to The Washington Post Weekend section. From 1998-2006, she wrote freelance dance reviews for The Washington Post Style section. Her pieces on the cultural and performing arts appear regularly in the Washington Jewish Week and on www.danceviewtimes.com . She has written for Dance Magazine, Stagebill, Sondheim Review, Washington City Paper, the Washington Times, Asian Week, the Boston Jewish Advocate, the Atlanta Jewish Times, Intermission, Washington Review and Moment magazine, where she was associate editor from 1989 to 1992. In 2003, Lisa was a New York Times Fellow in the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. A recipient of two Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Arts Criticism from the American Jewish Press Association, in 2004 she earned an M.F.A. in choreography from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and Montgomery College, Rockville. Lisa is current co-chair of the Dance Critics Association -- www.dancecritics.org e-mail : lisatraiger@aol.comc

Argentinean playwright Mario Diament's Blind Date is a tango of chance encounters and missed opportunities, serendipitous meetings and surprise twists of fate. The central plot line features a chance encounter between a man and a woman, one blind and one sighted.

Diament based his central character on the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the poet, essayist and literary hero of multiethnic city Buenos Aires, whose writings were filled with fantasy and political allegory, allusions to great belief systems from Buddhism to Kabbalah. Interestingly, Borges eventually, like his father, lost his sight.

Blind Date, written in Spanish, makes its area premiere this weekend at Gala Theatre at Tivoli Square in Washington, D.C. The production, directed by Jose Carrasquillo, features an English translation by the playwright's wife, Simone, projected in surtitles for non-Spanish speaking audiences.

Playwright Diament, 65, lives in Miami, where he is an associate professor of journalism at Florida International University and a weekly columnist for the Argentine daily La Nacion. His career as a journalist spans four decades as a reporter, foreign correspondent for Argentinean newspapers and executive editor of La Opinion, the renowned daily of Jacobo Timerman.

Yet Diament has still made time for the theater and fiction. His plays have been produced in the United States, across Latin America, in Europe and the Middle East. His The Book of Ruth was based on his mother's story as an immigrant fleeing from Poland and the family members she lost in the Holocaust.

Both Diament's parents settled in Argentina in the 1930s. "Though my family wasn't religious at all," he recalled recently, "I went to a Jewish school and studied Yiddish." It's among the more than half dozen languages ‹ Spanish, English, Hebrew, Portuguese, Italian and French ‹ that he understands, though he doesn't claim much proficiency at speaking the mamaloshen at this point. In 1963, at age 20, he immigrated to Israel where he studied for a time at Hebrew University, served as a soldier in the 1967 Six Day War and began his career as a journalist.

But by 1968, Diament returned home: "After the Six Day War," he said, "I felt there was too much militarism in Israel for my taste. I felt I was very Jewish, but I wasn't an Israeli. I wanted to reunite myself with Argentina."

At that point, Diament said, "It was the first time [Israeli] officers started wearing different uniforms than regular soldiers. It was an atmosphere of triumph that brought the Yom Kippur War." Shortly thereafter he published his first collection of short stories in Spanish, and, in 1971, his first play.

By the time Argentina was heading politically rightward, and editor Timerman was arrested and tortured by the Argentine government for drawing attention to human rights violations, Diament became chief editor at the left-leaning La Opinion. He then left the country to become a foreign and war correspondent in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Timerman once said of Diament's reporting that he "wasn't a journalist who wrote for the theater, [he] was a playwright who did the reporting of a journalist."

Diament's play The Book of Ruth has been produced in Yiddish by the National Jewish Theater in Bucharest, where its run has amazingly continued for four years.

"I wonder," he said, "who in the world would see a play in Yiddish in Romania, particularly about the Holocaust, but apparently it's the young people   who are interested."

Blind Date, his ninth play, is, he admitted, "closest to my heart." The play, he continued, "has the structure of a story by Borges. It's about the possibilities of parallel worlds. It's about missed opportunities. It's about passion; it's a very romantic play." And while Diament was quick to brush aside that anything in the work is specifically Jewish, there's a Yiddish word from his past that suggests otherwise: b'shert, which means preordained and often suggests the discovery of one's soulmate, seems reflective of the play's premise.

Cuban-born director Rafael de Acha has produced a number of Diament's works at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Fla., in recent years. "Mario's writing is a rich and rare amalgam with a very strong dose of Jewish irony, gallows humor and old-world philosophy in a happy mix with a sassy Argentine sensibility born not far from the bordellos where the tango was born," de Acha wrote. "Mario is a true citizen of the world, a pragmatist, a disillusioned idealist with a deep love for theater, life and the arts."

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Blind Date is onstage through Oct. 14 at the Gala Theatre in the District. Tickets, $30-$34, are available by calling 202-234-7174 or visit www.galatheatre.org .

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Source: Copyright 2007, Washington Jewish Week

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