Theater

When does idolization cross over into obsession? Cary Hoffman, a shy Jewish kid growing up in postwar Queens, admired Frank Sinatra so much that he dreamed of becoming the singer himself. In Hoffman’s thought-provoking one-man show, “My Sinatra,” now playing Off-Broadway with musical direction by Alex Nelson, the performer interweaves the story of his infatuation with the singing of two dozen of the singer’s standards. His voice is so uncannily similar to Sinatra’s that few can tell them apart.

Whether it is the piles of shoes left behind by Holocaust victims or the countless footwear-inspired idioms — filling someone’s shoes, walking a mile in someone’s shoes, putting the shoe on the other foot — the shoe is arguably our most evocative and symbolic item of clothing.

Anti-Semitism was never far below the surface of the notorious blacklist of the 1950s. Did sexism play a role as well? In Julie S. Halpern’s new play, “Diminished Fifth,” two women with Jewish roots, writers Lillian Hellman (Stacey Scotte) and Dorothy Parker (Jacquelyn Poplar), along with three non-Jewish women, broadcaster Jean Muir (Mary McGloin), actress Margaret Webster (Elaine LeGaro) and civil rights activist Eslanda Robeson (Ronalda Ay Nicholas), grapple with the shattering experience of being blacklisted.

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.

Loneliness, as an old Jewish proverb says, breaks the spirit. In Paul Manuel Kane’s new play, “Sam’s Romance,” set in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, an awkward middle-aged Jewish housewares/hardware store owner, Sam (Ed Kershen) falls for his 20-year-old African-American female clerk, Natalie (Oni Brown). But Sam’s cousin Rose (LeeAnne Hutchison) — who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a wounded vet, Joe (Todd Licea) has another agenda for her cousin — involving her brassy friend Luba (Neva Small).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.