Arts & Culture | Theater

Yiddish Theater, On The Margin

11/01/2012 | Ted Merwin | Theater

Little did the theater director David Herskovitz know, when he caught The Jewish Museum’s 2008 exhibit on Marc Chagall and the Russian Jewish Theater, that he would end up spending the next stage of his career staging forgotten Yiddish works. Herskovitz’s theater company, Target Margin, is discovering that rescuing Yiddish plays from oblivion can transform audiences’ expectations.

The Jewish Immigrant Experience, In Song

10/16/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special to the Jewish Week | Theater

Of all the enticing myths about America that drove Eastern European Jews to uproot themselves and immigrate to these shores, perhaps the most seductive was that the streets were paved with gold. Nor was it just the streets — America itself was known as the “goldene medina.”

Can’t Buy Me Love

10/10/2012 | Ted Merwin | Theater

It scandalized audiences with its lurid tale of greed and forbidden love. When Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance” opened on Broadway In 1923, it caused such a furor that the entire cast was thrown in jail. Now the play returns in a new production at the Marvell Rep, as part of a series of plays that were “banned or burned” at some point in their production history. Directed by Lenny Leibowitz, the play runs through the end of the month in Midtown.

Searching For Himself, And His Birth Mother

10/03/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Is any human need deeper than the need to know where we came from? In Rock Wilk’s one-man show, “Broke Wide Open,” directed by Stephen Bishop Seely, the poet and performance artist explores his conflicted identity about the time he was given away at birth and then adopted by Jewish parents. The play opens this weekend at the 45th Street Theatre for a month-long run.

Sign Of The Times

09/25/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Communication between parents and children is often fraught with misunderstanding. But few children are frustrated even by the simple mechanics of relating to their parents. Gloria Rosen’s one-woman show, “Listen … Can You Hear Me Now?,” is the autobiographical tale of a hearing child with two deaf parents. When it ran on the West Coast, the Santa Monica Mirror hailed the show as “amazingly funny,” adding that “audience members, regardless of their backgrounds, identified with it.”

Who Will Live…

09/19/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Pregnancy is almost always both physically and emotionally discombobulating. But nothing could have turned Alice Eve Cohen’s world upside down more than learning, at the age of 44, a decade after she had been told that she was infertile, that she was carrying a 6-month-old fetus. Cohen’s new one-woman show, “What I Thought I Knew,” recounts her agonized struggle, during the period between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur in 1999, to decide whether or not to give birth. The show is being performed as part of the All For One Theater Festival in the West Village.