Arts & Culture | Theater

Jewish Theatre Of NY’s Latest Censored?

06/14/2011 | Amy Spiro | Editorial Assistant | Theater

Tuvia Tenenbom is no stranger to controversy. He has staged plays about love letters to Hitler, Arab virgins being raped by Israeli soldiers and the sex lives of chasidic Jews.

But only recently did the U.S. State Department step in.

Read My Script Now!

06/07/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Against the most insurmountable odds, everyone in Hollywood is trying to peddle a screenplay. In Catherine Schreiber and Josh Grenrock’s one-act stage comedy at the Union Square Theatre, “Desperate Writers,” a pair of frustrated authors, who are also lovers, take extreme measures to win a hearing for their film script. When the show ran two years ago at the Edgemar Theater in Santa Monica, with Schreiber and Grenrock both in the cast, F.

Crying For Argentina

05/31/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special to the Jewish Week | Theater

When we think of Jewish immigrants, many of us recollect those from Eastern Europe who came to New York around the turn of the 20th century. But the city continues to be a haven for Jewish immigrants from all over the world. In Graciela Berger Wegsman's "Memory is a Culinary Affair," a young Jewish woman from Argentina struggles to rebuild her life in New York as she grapples with her mother's disappearance at the hands of the military dictatorship in her country. The play opens next Thursday evening at the Red Room in the East Village.

Wyatt Earp’s Jewish Wife Gets Her Due

05/24/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

She was the wife of one of the most famous gunslingers in the history of the Wild West, but today few have heard of her. Josephine Marcus escaped her Jewish family in San Francisco and married Wyatt Earp, whose extraordinary legend she helped to craft and perpetuate. In “I Married Wyatt Earp,” an all-female musical now running Off Broadway, she finally gets her due.

A Night In Tunisia

05/17/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special to the Jewish Week | Theater

Some wars are fought more in the bedroom than on the battlefield. In Tuvia Tenenbom’s new play, “Saida,” the aging leader of the Palestinian secret service (Robert Tekavec) and his young Israeli counterpart (Sergei Nagony) vie for the hand of Saida (Anita Clay), the most beautiful woman in Tunisia. An allegory for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Saida” opened last weekend at the Kraine Theatre in the East Village. Jeffrey Coyne and Adam Shiri are also featured in the cast.

Birth Pangs Of A Dad-To-Be

05/10/2011 | Ted Merwin | Theater

Few things in life are more stressful than becoming a parent for the first time. In Jonathan Marc Sherman’s new play, “Knickerbocker,” a 40-year-old Jewish man, Jerry (Alexander Chaplin, who played the speechwriter James Hobert on the ABC sitcom “Spin City”) comes to grips with his own fears of impending fatherhood. Directed by Pippin Parker, who chairs the playwriting department at The New School, “Knickerbocker” opens next week at the Public Theater Lab, just a few blocks away from the eponymous restaurant where it is set.