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Israeli dancers at Kennedy Center: More than just dance
By Lisa Traiger
Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak don't just make dances, they create fantastical worlds. The Tel Aviv-based choreographer/directors have a knack for crafting out-of-the-ordinary theatrical experiences that can transport willing viewers to places of surreal beauty, uncommon oddity and shadowy depths |  | Modern-day morality play
By Lisa Traiger
The clown prince of Broadway was an angry man. Funny man Zero Mostel, it seems, had a bitter streak that adds heft and intrigue to actor, creator, writer Jim Brochu's one-man bio-drama, Zero Hour, which explores the life of the rubbery-faced actor. | | All-American actress saddenedat never having a Jewish role Piper Laurie directs 'Zero Hour' at Theater J
By Lisa Traiger
As a young Hollywood actress, with her red hair and green eyes, Piper Laurie played the ingenue, the pretty girl, wholesome, all-American. Later she wowed film and television audiences in searing dramas like The Days of Wine and Roses and opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler, for which she was nominated for a best actress Oscar.
In her career's third, but not final, act in 1976, Laurie made a comeback as the off-kilter, religious fanatic mother in the teen horror film Carrie | | Making Chekhov Jewish at Theatre J
By Lisa Traiger
The beauty embedded in the work of early modernist Russian playwright Anton Chekhov rests in its elasticity. There are the period plays, set in Moscow country dachas, the articulate women corseted, the men dapper and talkative in bowlers and suspenders. But Chekhov was, and remains, more than a century after his early death at age 44, a man for all seasons and, so it seems, all eras. Chekhov, of course, was not a Jew, but as a member of the Russian intelligentsia living at the end of the 19th ce | | 'Fat Gay Jew' - surprises with unexpected freshness
By Lisa Traiger
While its title sounds like an epithet, if not a racial slur, Fat Gay Jew, Charter Theater's trio of interrelated one-act plays, contains ample laugh-out-loud moments. | | Prewar Berlin, postwar Atlanta meet in 'Antebellum'
By Lisa Traiger
The year 1939 was pivotal for Jews of Europe -- and the world at large. Within months of Kristallnacht and the 1938 Anschluss, World War II and the Nazi project to eradicate the Jews of Europe swept the continent. | | 'King of the Jews' a morality play on Judenrat
By Lisa Traiger
Playwright and novelist Leslie Epstein is no stranger to controversy. Thirty years ago, his Holocaust novel, King of the Jews, one of the first fictionalized treatments of the Shoah, riled critics for its unflinching, caustic look at a subject deemed sacred, and off limits to second-guessing and novel writing. | | 'The Accident' a portrait of individual, national feelings.
By Lisa Traiger
Blinding headlights, tires squealing, a crash, a door slam. Darkness. Then the bickering and questioning, the accusations and counteraccusations tumble out. Tel Aviv-based playwright Hillel Mitelpunkt wrote a small play about an accident. Its ramifications, on those directly involved and on their loved ones, prove ruinous in this indictment of a segment of Israeli society in the American premiere of The Accident at the Theater J at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. | | Heartfelt, sentimental evening Bikel's 'Sholom Aleichem' a love letter to lost culture
By Lisa Traiger
Just a fortnight ago, not far from Sholom Aleichem's hometown in Pereyaslav, Ukraine, the city of Kiev marked the 150th anniversary of the Yiddish humorist and writer's birth. He is best remembered for the vivid shtetl characters he created: Tevye the Milkman, who takes his complaints straight to God; Menachem Mendel, the luftmensch or dreamer; and Beryl Itzik, misbegotten traveler who reports from the goldeneh medina, better known these days as America. | | The horrors of Bosnian war powerful 'Honey Brown Eyes' parallels Jewish tragedies
By Lisa Traiger
The great majority of Americans experience war from a distance. They watch the news and analysis on CBS and CNN, read firsthand accounts from AP and Reuters in the daily newspapers and then go about their daily lives. When America goes to war, most Americans don't have a personal stake in it. | | Walking through our democratic innards 'Citizen Josh' best after monologue ends
By Lisa Traiger
Josh Kornbluth's senior thesis is late -- by 25 years. A onetime math whiz who hit the wall with college calculus, the now-middle-aged father and husband was once an overconfident, starry-eyed political science major at Princeton. But he left without a diploma and built a career as a monologist, churning his own oddball life experiences into sometimes funny, sometimes meaningful fodder for one-man shows. | | 'Altar Boyz' is sure to make you laugh or cringe
By Lisa Traiger
If you're going to feel uncomfortable at the sight of a yarmulke-wearing teen heartthrob singing "Give it Up for Christ," then pass on the Bethesda Theatre's production of Altar Boyz. But if you're a fan of boy bands, don't mind a heavy dose of ecumenism -- especially when it's the Jewish boy who brings everyone together -- and can sit through an energetic, ear-blasting 90-minutes of soul-saving, pop music and choreography, then Altar Boyz, onstage through Nov. 2, might be just be your salvation | | Jews Anti-Iraq War play strays into Mideast politics
By Lisa Traiger
It's hard to get rid of the sinking feeling that occurs in reliving the run-up to the most recent invasion of Iraq. In Stuff Happens, onstage at Olney Theatre Center through July 20, British playwright David Hare takes on very recent American history, recounting the maneuvers and backroom alliances made and broken by the Bush administration. Truth and fiction intermingle as we see the folly of a few leaders, enamored of power, tear asunder nations and people. | | The Blessing of a Broken Heart Coping with the unbearable Play based on former Silver Spring resident's book
By Lisa Traiger
When former Silver Spring resident Sherri Mandell's 13-year-old son, Koby, died in a horrific terrorist attack in Israel, she could have stayed in bed, mourning a life senselessly cut short. But Mandell got up. And, as a writer, did what she knew best: She wrote. And in the process, she found a way not only to heal herself, but to aid others who have also suffered tragic losses at the hands of terrorists. | | 'David in Shadow and Light' a massive effort gone awry.
By Lisa Traiger
There are compelling reasons to examine the lives, full and flawed, of our greatest biblical personalities. On stage at Theater J is the latest biblically inspired musical, David In Shadow and Light, a bio-recitative of sorts tracing the life of King David, giant-slayer, poet, dancer, warrior-king, musician, friend, lover, imperfect father and roving-eyed husband. | | 'World of Jewtopia' is great - just ask the stars' moms
By Lisa Traiger
How good is World of Jewtopia, the long-running laugh of a show invented by co-conspirators Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson? Don't ask them. Ask their mothers.
"I've seen it innumerable times," says Linda Fogel, a former teacher, current Hadassah member and National Council of Jewish Women volunteer. She's also Bryan's mom, so when she says about Jewtopia, "It's very funny and very clever ֹ and I hope everybody will come and see it and love it. I'm sitting back and kvelling," you just have to beli | | Arthur Miller's Crypto Jews Arena Stage festival examines two plays
By Lisa Traiger
Even if most of Arthur Miller's prodigious output is not obviously Jewish, American Jews take pride in claiming the playwright as a native son. America's great 20th-century moralist, Miller wrote plays that seem, first, to tell the quintessential American story. From his early works, including All My Songs and The Crucible, to his more meditative later pieces, among them, The Last Yankee and I Can't Remember Anything, Miller explored what it was like to be a man in an era when a good, hard day's | | Prosky's powerful in 'Price' but show needs more force
By Lisa Traiger
At what cost are a father's sins exacted on his sons, and a brother's on another brother? Arthur Miller wrestles down paternal and filial offenses in his 1968 psychological drama The Price, which kicks off a joint Arthur Miller Festival at Theater J of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center and Arena Stage in Arlington's Crystal City. | | A New Play Lifts Veil on Insular Syrian-Jewish Community
By Lisa Traiger
It’s provocative and unflinching in its representation of a specific Jewish community as materialistic, close-minded, insular to a fault. Granted, among Adjmi’s other produced works — “The Evildoers,” which packed up a run at Yale Repertory Theatre this past month, and “Elective Affinities,” his meditation following the attacks of September 11, 2001 — his latest has some pointed laughs. But it’s his lurid look at the moral imperatives that inform life and relationships, and his characters who mo | | A female pioneer Monodrama to focus on early psychiatrist
By Lisa Traiger
For half a century or more, Sabina Spielrein had been a mere footnote in one of Sigmund Freud's journals. Carl Jung's first patient in 1904, this Jewish teenager went on to become one of the first women to study medicine and the first woman to practice psychoanalysis in Russia. But first, she had to get better. That's the intriguing story that Swiss actress Graziella Rossi tells in the biographical play Sabina Spielrein Monday and Tuesday at Theater J's Goldman Theater at the Washington DC Jewis | | Taking another look at that venerable Jewish mother
By Lisa Traiger
Love her, hate her, spend thousands on psychoanalysis because of her, the Jewish mother has been around for millennia, offering up equal parts of love, wisdom, guilt ‹ and rugelach. In America, Jewish mother stereotypes abound from The Goldbergs to Fiddler on the Roof, Seinfeld to South Park, Woody Allen to Sarah Silverman, and the Jewish mother has been the butt of jokes. | | Kick back, relax and laugh No tough questions asked in 'Shlemiel the First'
By Lisa Traiger
For the greater part of a decade, Theater J, under Ari Roth's artistic direction, has dared to ask tough questions and dig deep, paring away at fundamental issues of import for contemporary Jews. Gratefully, thankfully even, Shlemiel The First doesn't ask its audience for much. Enough of the high drama, self-examination and flagellation already. Theater J nudges us to snicker, giggle, guffaw. | | Olney Theatre's 'Fiddler' sticks with tradition
By Lisa Traiger
Tradition. It's the bulwark against a fast-changing world in Fiddler on the Roof, the ever-popular Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick musical, now on stage at the Olney Theatre Center. The beloved story of Tevye, the poor milkman, who unabashedly chats with God; his wife, Golde; and their five daughters, Fiddler is a surefire way to fill seats and warm hearts during this winter's holiday season. Director John Vreeke has wisely followed the musical's demand and hasn't broken with tradition | | Female character steals show Mamet's 'Speed-the-Plow' at Washington Theatre J
By Lisa Traiger
American playwright David Mamet doesn't pay much mind to women in his muscular, testosterone-laden works. In his edgy dialogues ‹ duels really ‹ actors often run over one another, words slicing into unfinished sentences, half-formed thoughts undercutting pregnant pauses and a symphony of grunts, snorts and curses. | | Argentine-born playwrightbrings 'Jewish irony' to work Diamant's 'Blind Date' a romantic play
By Lisa Traiger
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. | | 'Accident' a public confessional
By Lisa Traiger
Theater J couldn't have picked a better time to present Accident, the comic adventures of rock singer/songwriter and cellist Amy Ziff. Today, many Jews across the land will find themselves in synagogues making a cheshbon hanefesh, an account of their deeds, the good and the bad, in bidding goodbye to the old year and welcoming in a new one. | | Capital Fringe Festival offers much for Jewish audiences
By Lisa Traiger
When the second Capital Fringe Festival opens today, theatergoers with a Jewish sensibility and an interest in Israel and Middle Eastern politics will have plenty of options to fill their date books. The Fringe Festival, last year's brainchild of Damian Sinclair and Julianne Brienza, features 116 performances ‹ drama, comedy, political theater, contemporary dance, performance art and a few not quite categorizable ‹ over 10 days in July, concentrated mainly in the downtown Penn Quarter of the Dis | | Japanese and JewishThe musical 'Astra' has mixed parentage
By Lisa Traiger
Hard as it is to fathom, a comic book musical crafted in the new age, Japanese graphic-novel style known as manga has a Jewish soul and a pair of Jewish creators.
Astra: The Manga Musical About Meteor Girl, the tale of a female intergalactic superhero who battles an evil corporate villain, Dr. Light, makes its world premiere this week at the Warehouse Theatre in northwest Washington. It's one offering in Laptop Ladies Playfest, a fortnight of plays from Washington Women in Theatre, a festival d | | Revisiting childhood 'Brooklyn Boy' evokes a different era
By Lisa Traiger
If great, but short-lived American novelist Thomas Wolfe had been born in Brooklyn, N.Y., rather than Asheville, N.C., Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again might have turned out a lot like Donald Margulies' Brooklyn Boy. | | Ripped from the headlines Stunning 'Pangs of the Messiah' is Israel's tragedy
By Lisa Traiger
The words of Lech Lecha, Genesis 12:1-9, inscribed on the floor of Kinereth Kisch's set, lend a note of biblical prophecy to the proceedings at the heart of Pangs of the Messiah, Theater J's English-language world premiere of Motti Lerner's unabashed look at Jewish zealotry. "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, I will make your name great," God spoke to Abraham. | | A man with a Mona Lisa smile gives fascinating peek at unusual character
By Lisa Traiger
That smile makes Charlotte, the central character he plays in I Am My Own Wife, mysterious, odd, an enigma. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is one among more than 40 roles in Doug Wright's one-man show on stage at the Olney Theatre Center's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab through May 27. But it's really only Charlotte, in her plain black shirtwaist dress and understated strand of pearls, who matters. I Am My Own Wife is Charlotte's story. | | 'Either Or' powerful, provocative, chilling
By Lisa Traiger
Please remove your clothing and shoes," an amplified voice orders in Either Or, the riveting world-premiere play by Thomas Keneally that puts a face, even a soul, on an officer wearing an SS uniform. The audience gazes at four Nazi officers, calm, expressionless, staring blandly back while the instructions proceed: shoes, remove; jewelry and money, turn in at counter. Finally, one jiggles a bucket, gold teeth extracted from the dead. | | Remembering Wendy : 'The Heidi Chronicles'
By Lisa Traiger
Tazewell Thompson misses playwright Wendy Wasserstein terribly. "We used to live about 4 1/2 blocks from each other," says Thompson, the new artistic director of Westport (Conn.) Country Playhouse. "Wendy was always so full of joy and optimism and encouragement," Thompson says. "I never heard a discouraging word from her, ever. . . . I just took it for granted that I would run into her and she would always be there." | | Our story'South Side Stories' chronicles changing neighborhoods
By Lisa Traiger
Louis Rosen grew up on Chicago's South Side. But his story of the turmoil and racial divisiveness that uprooted his middle-class neighborhood of plain, boxy bungalows is my story, and yours, too, if you happen to be 65, or 44 or 29.
And if you happened to come of age during the 1940s, or '50s, or '60s or '70s, in any major American city or suburb. Because, Rosen contends, the story of immigrant and ethnic neighborhood transformations is the story of America, from Chicago to Baltimore, Washingto | | Hold the schmaltz'Family Secrets' has too much Yiddish shtick
By Lisa Traiger
Sherry Glaser spreads on the schmaltz so thickly in her 90-minute homage to the genetically encoded foibles she carries that Family Secrets should come with a warning from the surgeon general: The play you're about to see contains enough kvetching, kvelling, oying and outdated borscht belt shtick to give a Jewish grandmother high cholesterol. | | Liz Lerman's Dance of the Lord
By Lisa Traiger
Prayer makes Liz Lerman uncomfortable. Not the thought of praying, but the word itself, because she doesn’t often find herself in a traditional house of worship with a prayerbook in hand. “I think the word ‘prayer’ is not the most effective word anymore,” she said in an …. interview. “If you took away the word and what we think it is, I probably do pray. It is [prayer] in its largest sense, this idea of the time to contemplate and to reach for something larger than yourself for hope, guidance, s | | 'Hamlet' in Hebrew : Cameri Theatre in Arlington
By Lisa Traiger
Omri Nitzan, the artistic director of the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, among Israel's most prestigious, has transformed Shakespeare's 400-year-old text into a modern, muscular hit. Nitzan's 2005 production won accolades and audiences - more than 400 performances - throughout Israel and at international festivals in Poland and Romania. | | Poetic and charming playwright selected for London exchange
By Lisa Traiger
Every once in a while, one reads a play that has a conceit that operates on such a grand level but also operates on an absolutely beautiful personal level as well," says Ari Edelson. He's speaking about Anna Ziegler's Novel, a new play by a young Jewish playwright based in Bethesda. Earlier this month, Ziegler's Novel inaugurated Theater J's freshest play reading series, "Newish/Jewish," which the Washington DC Jewish Community Center theater company hopes will promote young Jewish playwrights b | | Double your pleasure : Alberstein Broza to perform in the District
By Lisa Traiger
Two of Israel's best-known and beloved singers and guitarists, Chava Alberstein and David Broza, return to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday in a double bill that features the tender ballads Alberstein composed in memory of a world now virtually lost, joined by the eclectic poetic lyrics Broza fused onto folk, rock, salsa and flamenco guitar, creating his signature sound. | | Antidote for cynics'Sleeping Arrangements' at DCJCC
By Lisa Traiger
Director Delia Taylor renders the autobiographical vignettes Cunningham recollected and dramatized ‹ on Theater J's stage at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center ‹ into a bittersweet reverie about her girlhood, when she was called Lily. | | Gershwin redux WHC concert based on 'An American in Paris'
By Lisa Traiger
It's not uncommon for a synagogue to present its cantor in concert every year or so. But this year, Washington Hebrew Congregation did something different.
Its two cantors, Mikhail Manevich and Susan Adelman Bortnick, sang for the congregation, but instead of cantorial solos, Yiddish ballads or popular Debbie Friedman standards, they offered up a pair of Gershwin duets as part of The Making of An American in Paris, an evening of songs culled from the incomparable George and Ira Gershwin songboo | | America's troubadour and his Yiddishe connection
By Lisa Traiger
With guitar and harmonica, Woody Guthrie, America's dust-bowl poet and Depression-era balladeer, wrote thousands of songs during his career until about the late 1940s ‹ love songs to America, the nation he crisscrossed hitching onto trains; protest songs decrying the treatment of the downtrodden; funny little children's ditties; antiwar anthems. | | A play that illumines a generation
By Lisa Traiger
Spring Forward, Fall Back is a 21st-century ghost story, its characters haunted by regret, disappointment and dreams shattered. It features men who lost their mothers too soon, boys who never quite grew up and an elderly gentleman who becomes more childlike, his mind innocently and innocuously turning to mush. | | Liz Lerman: Looking Ahead, Looking Back
By Lisa Traiger
There's a small but telling moment in "Still Crossing," choreographer Liz Lerman's 1986 work about the immigrant experience. Dancers -- young, middle-aged and old, trained and novice -- simultaneously strike a pose: right arm lifted proudly like the curving prow of a ship, body facing front, while the left arm reaches back and the eyes follow, gazing into the distance. Those few seconds seem emblematic of Lerman's feelings as Dance Exchange, the critically lauded company she founded and has nurt | | Almost Human : Maya Beiser sings in two voices at Kennedy Center
By Lisa Traiger
Maya Beiser sings in two voices: one from her throat; one from her cello. Saturday, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Beiser's double voice ‹ sung and strung ‹ will be featured in Almost Human, an evening-length collection of six contemporary works that draws from a diversity of musical traditions ‹ Jewish, Muslim, Cambodian and Chinese. | | Drama critic Robert Brustein brings Another coup for Theater J
By Lisa Traiger
Theater J has done it again. The critically lauded theater company now in its 13th season, its 10th at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's 16th Street facility, has in past years offered world and regional premieres by such playwrights as the late Wendy Wasserstein, Joyce Carol Oates and Richard Greenberg. | | 'Cabaret' as a history lesson Musical shows decadence of pre-Nazi Berlin
By Lisa Traiger
When Cabaret strutted onto Broadway in 1966, it was barely two decades after the Nazis decimated Europe of Jews, of gypsies, of political dissidents, of homosexuals and of anyone deemed impure. That original Harold Prince production relished sex appeal, sequins and insinuation, and the brave and brilliant songwriting partnership of John Kander and Fred Ebb made the show a certified hit and Tony winner. | | Is there opera after the Holocaust? 'Sophie's Choice' provides stunning elements
By Lisa Traiger
While two operas written during the Holocaust ‹ Victor Ullman's Emperor of Atlantis and Hans Krasa's children's opera Brundibar ‹ both created in the model concentration camp Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, deal obliquely with the Holocaust, few composers have attempted to face the vastness of the Holocaust tragedy. Little wonder why. Operas frequently mine flawed familial relationships and tragic consequences, yet the Holocaust remains a human-rendered catastrophe of epic proportions. | | Finding her way in America
By Lisa Traiger
Don't be afraid to kick me harder," dancer/choreographer Leah Wrobel urges her partner, Meisha Bosma. Bosma is sprawled on her back, one leg lifted in the air, foot encased in a 4-inch heeled black pump. Wrobel, her forehead inches from that shod foot, hovers over Bosma, who eventually relaxes her ankle and kicked, hard. The pair of dancer/choreographers was at work earlier this month on She's Not at Home, | | How she became 'a Bennington Girl' transforms sheltered Jewish life
By Lisa Traiger
The term 'Bennington girl' connoted someone who was flamboyantly (if not oppressively) artsy, bohemian, and also notoriously easy with sexual favors." So said memoirist Kathleen Norris in her fish-out-of-water coming of age tale, The Virgin of Bennington. The Bennington College that Norris reflected on from the late 1960s was not much different from the Bennington that Washington, D.C.-based playwright Sidra Rausch recalls from her own youth nearly a decade earlier. | | Kushner's Probing the fate of little people at Sanctuary Theatre
By Lisa Traiger
An old photograph inspired Tony Kushner to write A Bright Room Called Day. The photo showed a Nazi rally, all, save one lone woman, raising their arms in that unforgettable and sinister Nazi salute. Who was that lone woman, why was she at the rally, what happened to her? Kushner probes what happens to the little people, the loners, the ones too fearful to act in the face of great catastrophes. First produced in 1985, A Bright Room Called Day is a provocative look at the insidious rise of Nazism | | Black maid stands at center of Southern Jewish family Civil rights era
By Lisa Traiger
A $20 bill turns young Noah Gellman's world upside down in Caroline, or Change, the ambitiously imaginative musical from the prolific pen of playwright Tony Kushner. Kushner is the much decorated author of, among other works, A Bright Room Called Day (now onstage at Washington's Rorschach Theater); the politically charged treatise, Homebody/Kabul; and the sweeping meditation on fin de siecle America, Angels in America. The Studio Theatre's new production features a top-of-the-line cast, a meticu | | Capote's 'Party of the Century' premieres at Theater J's 'Bal Masque'
By Lisa Traiger
For the Chinese, it's the year of the dog. For Americans of a certain literary bent, it seems to be the year of Truman Capote, what with the recent Academy Award-winning film, Capote, a book just out on the author's crowning nonliterary achievement, his 1966 Black and White Ball, and, on stage at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's Theater J, Bal Masque, playwright Richard Greenberg's world premiere about what happens to three couples immediately after that illustrious party was over. | | Inbal Pinto Dance Company in "Oyster"
By Lisa Traiger
"Oyster" is Inbal Pinto's circus of the strange. An evening-length dance-theater work, it features a bizarre catalogue of freakish characters, assorted oddballs, the monstrously ugly, the aged and clownish, the bizarre and the untouchable. This Tel Aviv-based choreographer seems matter-of-fact about the vivid and quirky, the horrid and comic vignettes she dreams up and then fashions for the stage. | | Valerie Harper, non-Jewish Zionist, is Golda'Golda's Balcony' star sees Meir as role model
By Lisa Traiger
I'm a Zionist," Valerie Harper proclaims proudly. "I'm not Jewish, but I guess I've always been a Zionist without a word for it." So it comes as little surprise how ardently this one-time Catholic schoolgirl, born in Suffern, N.Y., has taken to playing one of Jewish history's ur-Zionists, Golda Meir. Starring in William Gibson's Golda's Balcony, which with Tovah Feldshuh at the helm set the record as the longest-running, one-woman show on Broadway, Harper takes on the role of the hard-nosed but | | The Dybbuk as love story for new generation
By Lisa Traiger
The Talmud tells of four sages who entered Paradise: "One peeked and died; one peeked and was smitten; one peeked and cut down the shoots; one ascended safely and descended safely." Read as a rabbinical prescriptive for those who study Kabbalah, the mystical texts that delve into life's creative forces, this story warns against going too far, reaching too deeply, starting too young to get to the core of the most profound secrets of the universe. | | A play for today's immigrants with grand dreams Brilliant production, still resonates
By Lisa Traiger
Clifford Odets was, perhaps, America's first street poet. He didn't idealize his nation for its broad and expansively beautiful landscapes like Walt Whitman. He didn't pen rhymed couplets or sonnets of passionate love. Odets listened hard to working-class American voices and found inspiration and purpose in the lives of downtrodden Depression-era bootstrappers. | | A Scholarly Yet Gripping Debate
By Lisa Traiger
At the time of his death in 2004, Maccoby was an internationally acclaimed British scholar of rabbinic history who delved deeply into centuries-long issues in Jewish-Christian relations. The Barcelona Disputation of 1263-- an actual debate between Nachman and monk Pablo Christiani (Edward Gero) -- formed the basis for "The Disputation," which dissects the fundamental theological differences between the two religions. But Bikel, who speaks five languages, insists that Maccoby's historical drama i | | The feminist rockers are back in town
By Lisa Traiger
The girls are back in town. The Betty grrrrls, that is. The D.C.-bred trio of women rockers took Washington DC Jewish Community Center's audiences on a rollicking roller-coaster ride seven months ago in a sold-out run of Betty Rules, their hard-driving yet sentimental rockumentary detailing the tribulations of being outspoken women in an industry that remains predominately male dominated. And now they're back in town, to play it again, loudly. | | Truth or lies? Israeli choreographer creates new work in D.C
By Lisa Traiger
Ask Israeli choreographer Amir Kolben his age and he says with a wink, "Should I tell you the truth or should I lie?" He's not joking because lies rest at the center of a new piece he is creating at Dance Place, the contemporary dance center in Northeast Washington, D.C. Finally, the Jerusalem-based choreographer, comfortable in track pants and black sneakers, says he's 51. It sounds right, and Kolben swears he's telling the truth. But to believe? | | Nuremberg in dance Choreography on Nazi war trials premieres in DC
By Lisa Traiger
Why are we doing this?" Liz Lerman asked somewhat plaintively of her Harvard Law School friend Martha Minow back in July. A choreographer, Lerman was in the midst of wrestling with immense questions of truth, justice and reconciliation surrounding this year's 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials. The internationally acclaimed dancemaker, a MacArthur Award-certified genius who has pushed contemporary dance into untested territories by teaching older adults to dance, and communities to express | | 'Passion Play, a Cycle' is a masterful effort
By Lisa Traiger
Hot young playwright Sarah Ruhl, in her latest production, addresses what she describes as "the nexus of religious rhetoric, politics, love and theatricality." In other words: big ideas writ expansively on the canvas of her new three-act play, Passion Play, a Cycle, which itself spans 3 1/2 hours. Her work, in its debut as a sprawling triptych at Arena Stage through Oct. 13, deals mightily in weighty issues that lie at the core of today's society. For her framing device, Ruhl has chosen the anci | | It's Woody as intellectual, with another, it's sitcom
By Lisa Traiger
Woody Allen has been America's neurotic Jewish comic laureate for decades. And Jews proudly claim him for his undeniably nebbishy persona. But, like fellow comic Lenny Bruce (whom Allen admired, but did not quite like) once said, "To me, if you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish." That explains Allen's popularity, p | | The Last Five Years at MetroStage deserves better production
By Lisa Traiger
Jason Robert Brown, not quite or not yet a household name, has penned a smart, scintillatingly perceptive chamber-sized musical.
Perfect for this age of alienation and disorientation, The Last Five Years tells the provocative tale of a doomed marriage from both sides and both ways: Jaime, the male lead, tells his story forward from first meeting to painful breakup; Cathy, the female lead, unspools her story backward, from breakup to an initial anticipatory meeting. | | Thought-provoking examination Love story wrestles with questions of morality, ambiguity
By Lisa Traiger
Arendt's theory, promulgated with clarity when she covered the trial of the century, Israel's of Adolf Eichmann, subtly weaves itself through Theater J's Hannah and Martin, a thought-provoking and high-strung examination of the tortured love affair and subsequent distancing of Arendt and her mentor, the renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger. Theater J at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center prides itself on producing plays for the thinking person, so it didn't shy away from the tough and ch | | Michael Tippet work 'A Child of Our Time' to mark Shoah remembrance at Kennedy Center
By Lisa Traiger
A known pacifist, an agnostic and a humanist, Sir Michael Tippett in 1938 composed one of the most deeply moving -- and spiritually uplifting -- contemporary choral works of the 20th century. On Sunday, The Washington Chorus, under the direction of Maestro Robert Shafer, marks the 2005 Holocaust Days of Remembrance -- May 1-8 -- as well as the centenary of Tippett's birth with a performance of his 75-minute oratorio. | | I Am My Own Wife at the National Theatre in the District
By Lisa Traiger
It took a little black dress to overcome playwright Doug Wright's writer's block. He couldn't get beyond the problems he saw in his subject until his friend, theater director Moises Kaufman, showed up at rehearsal wearing a dress.
Here's how Kaufman recalls it: "I used this theater technique É in which we bring in a theatrical object, a prop, a costume, a light, or some music, to create a theatrical moment with the material. É And I brought a dress because I was really interested in the idea of | | Anti-Semitism plays role in Joyce Carol Oats play With powerful performances at Theater J
By Lisa Traiger
A tattoo is a desecration, not a decoration; a work of malice, not art; a defilement of the body rather than an adornment, that is, at least within the confines of traditional Jewish practice. The tattoo also carries for many, even today, connotations of the Holocaust, of sequential and orderly numbers forcefully embedded into forearms of Jewish men, women and children. The marker, unerasable, became for many the ever-present reminder of the unthinkable.
For prolific novelist, playwright and Pr | | An emotional tour de force Politically charged 'Tale of a Tiger' brings audience two endings
By Lisa Traiger
Sometimes political allegory is a hard nut to swallow, what with its exhortations to change minds and propagandize audiences. But like the slightly bitter but wholly nurturing tiger's milk that centers in Dario Fo's one-act A Tale of a Tiger, allegory served up with an admixture of the sweet along with the bitter, can go down as pleasantly as a spoon full of sugar. | | Paul Taylor Dance Co. to celebrate Jewish life
By Lisa Traiger
Over a half-century, he's created more than 120 dances, built a company renowned throughout the world, and received a slew of accolades, from a Kennedy Center Honor to the MacArthur "genius" grant. These days Taylor is a living icon, linked in dance history to earlier groundbreaking choreographers, including Martha Graham, for whom he danced for seven years. It's coincidentally also the 50th anniversary of Taylor's company. The work, Klezmerbluegrass, was commissioned by the National Foundation | | Odets' 'Paradise Lost' onstage at the American Century Theater
By Lisa Traiger
The American Century Theater, an Arlington-based company committed to breathing new life into 20th-century classics, has taken on Odets' little-seen 1935 work, resuscitating its middle-class aspirations and anti-war message for a new generation. Running through Dec. 18 at Theater II of the Gunston Arts Center in Arlington, Paradise Lost is a tough sell, but standout performances and the smoldering language heard once more make it an intriguing revival. | | The Diary of Anne Frank at Round House Theatre Bethesda
By Brad Hathaway
The essence of this play is to let you understand the horror of the holocaust on a personal level. The carefully orchestrated routines they go through in between the acts keeps it from seeming a dramatic recreation and elevates it to something deeply personal and more real than mere reality. The result is a harrowing emotional experience. The first act of this superb production is gripping. The second act is devastating. But it is what comes in between that sets this experience apart from just a | | Carla Perlo Saves the Last Dance
By Lisa Traiger
Perlo, 52, views her career as deeply related to her Judaism and her Jewish upbringing. She calls her farewell to performing "Save the Last Dance for Me," but, like everything Perlo has done throughout her career as an arts educator, she won't be dancing solo. Joining her on the stage will be members of Carla & Company, her troupe of eight professional dancers; students from her popular adult modern dance classes; kids from the Brookland neighborhood in Northeast Washington where Dance Place set | | Dredging up a painful past 'Kindertransport' onstage at the Gaithersburg Art Barn
By Lisa Traiger
The last time Esther Rosenfeld Starobin saw her parents she was 27 months old. It was June 1939. Today she has no memory of boarding a train and then a boat and traveling with a group of Jewish children to Norwich, England. Her parents soon perished, among the six million trapped in Hitler's killing machine that he innocuously named the Final Solution. The production examines the ramifications of a life lived keeping secrets. We first meet 9-year-old Eva (Sarah Lasko) and her doting mother, Helg | |
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