Arts & Culture | Theater

Labor Pains

06/13/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Its premiere was a watershed in American theatrical history, galvanizing an audience caught in the throes of the Great Depression.

Jews And Hues

06/05/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Colorblind people see the world in a different way. In Jessica Fleitman’s “Deuteranomaly,” now playing at the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, a Jewish family struggles with a son’s visual deficit. Based on the scientific term for a relatively mild form of colorblindness — which affects mostly men, making it difficult for them to distinguish between red and green — “Deuteranomaly” uses the boy’s condition as a metaphor for the flaws in human relationships.

Simmering On The West Bank

05/29/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Food sums up the culture and history of a people. Just ask the Palestinian family in Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader’s seriocomic new play, “Food and Fadwa,” which opens Off-Broadway in the East Village next week. Even as they struggle with life in the West Bank under the Israeli occupation, the family remains bound together by the food that they prepare and eat together. The groundbreaking production is the first by the Noor Theatre Company, an Arab-American collective sponsored by the New York Theatre Workshop.

The Ghost Of Bubby's Past

05/22/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

How deeply do we have to bury the past to keep it from erupting into the present? In Andrew Rothkin’s “Bubby’s Shadow,” in which the playwright also stars, the spirit of a deceased grandmother reunites a deeply divided Jewish family and restores its connection to Judaism. The play, an earlier version of which ran Off Broadway in 2008, returns starting June 3 at a theater in the West Village.

Kafka’s Rage — Toward His Father

05/15/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

As they reach maturity, children sometimes feel obliged to pour out their resentment and rage toward their parents, whom they blame for the deficiencies of their childhood. In his vituperative “Letter to My Father,” the Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka excoriates his father for abusing him both physically and psychologically.

The Mame Loshen Has Legs

05/08/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

‘Yiddish is my mother language, and a mother is never really dead,” reflected Isaac Bashevis Singer in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1978. Indeed, the mame loshen continues to play a vital role in the cultural life of the city, as one gathers from two overlapping productions running this month — one a translation of a rarely seen Yiddish play, and the other an evening of Yiddish music and poetry.