A new year— a chance at new beginnings, and most importantly, a new round of Broadway and off-Broadway shows. The fall season brought us singing sponges, live goats, and Amy Schumer. What will the next months bring, and, of course— is it good for the Jews?

It depends on what you’re looking for. While musicals continue to boast Jewish stars (Elsa in the upcoming Broadway production of Frozen went to Camp Ramah!) and creators (shows by writing teams Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe are being  revived), if you want to look for overtly Jewish content onstage, you’re probably going to need to see a play. But on Broadway and off, you’ll have plenty of options, first off-Broadway, and later on in the season, on the Great White Way itself:

Off Broadway:

In the Body of the World (begins performances January 16):

While the play may not have much Jewish content, it is a new autobiographical piece (based on a recent memoir) by an artist of Jewish descent— Eve Ensler, the creator of The Vagina Monologues, has a one-woman show about becoming deathly ill while doing advocacy work abroad.

Jerry Springer the Opera (January 23):

This one is a revival, and, yes, an opera. It actually has fairly Christian themes, but it is what it says on the label: an opera about Jewish television personality Jerry Springer.

Amy and the Orphans (February 1):

This new family drama features a bickering bunch on a road trip on the Long Island Expressway following the death of their father; while the degree of Jewishness is not yet clear, one character is a Jewish convert to Christianity, so it follows that the rest of his family is probably of Jewish origin as well.

Admissions (February 15):

This play is the latest from Jewish writer Joshua Harmon, the mind behind Bad Jews and Significant Other. It features a woman trying to diversify a prep school and explores larger questions of ideology and privilege. The main character’s name is Sherri Rosen-Mason, and like many Harmon protagonists, she is a secular Jew.

Broadway:

Angels in America (February 23):

Tony Kushner’s famous two-part play on New York and the AIDS crisis is revived in New York, by way of London. It features the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg serenading a dying Roy Cohn in Yiddish. Enough said.

Travesties (March 29):

This production is another revival— of a 1974 play by Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard. One of its three protagonists (the other two being Lenin and James Joyce) is Tristan Tzara, the Jewish co-founder of Dadaism.

Photo of Jerry Springer the Opera via Wikimedia

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There might come a time when Angels in America is irrelevant. 2017 isn’t that year. I expect the next three years to be locks as well.

But that’s OK, because isn’t it a magnificent work? Written by Tony Kushner and filled with Jewish imagery (as well as Christian and even a surreal Mormon animatronic puppet show), the Pulitzer-prize winning Angels in America is a seminal notch on the bedpost of Jewish theatrical achievement.

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

The post ‘Angels in America,’ Featuring Trump’s Mentor Roy Cohn, Captures the National Mood appeared first on Jewcy.

Playing on Broadway currently is A Doll’s House, Part 2, a sequel of sorts to Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama about the collapse of a respectable marriage. The play, of course, isn’t about Jews; there were virtually none in Norway until 1892, only about two years before Lucas Hnath’s new play takes place. But there are parallels between the 19th century period drama and a problem in the Jewish community today.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

The “Part 2” to A Doll’s House takes place fifteen years after the conclusion of the original play, when Nora Helmer has finally realized that her marriage is toxic, and that she has no identity of her own outside of that of wife and mother, so she leaves her family. Part 2 begins when she knocks on the door through which she had left. It turns out, despite her thinking otherwise, her husband, Torvald, never filed their divorce. Having made enemies for her radical beliefs about women and marriage, Nora now realizes that she is vulnerable to legal action for acting in a way a married woman in her society may not— like owning property, and having lovers.

But the law has another unfair obstacle against women. A man may quickly, and for no reason, obtain a bill of divorce from his wife. A woman must begin a protracted legal battle, in which she must prove she deserves her freedom, with extreme allegations such as that her husband was abusive.

One strength of the play is how modern it feels; though the setting is firmly nineteenth century, the characters speak with modern voices, and their debates feel fresh, from conversations about feminism to the question of why we even have the institution of marriage. But it is in the inciting action of the play, Nora needing Torvald to be free, that wouldn’t quite apply in today’s society.

Well, in today’s secular, American society. While divorce is largely a lengthier process than a trip down to the town clerk, it tends, at least on paper, to provide equal footing to men and women alike. Not so in Judaism (and by extension, Israel), where a marriage ends when a man presents a woman with a divorce document. Even when men eventually relent and grant their wives divorces, it often puts them in positions of power, having the upper hand in negotiating finances, custody of the children, et cetera.

In A Doll’s House, Part 2, Nora finds herself similarly beholden to Torvald, after taking it on blind faith over a decade ago that he would do what they agreed. Although their marriage has been over for fifteen years, she suddenly finds herself coaxing, pushing, even manipulating to make a formal end of things that would set her legally free. All he has to do is sit there and become convinced, or not.

Torvald is clearly not a bad man. But as the man, he holds the power, and while it doesn’t exactly corrupt him, he’s not eager to level the playing field. Nora, the early feminist, is furious at the unfairness of it all. Even outside of her own circumstances, she wants the release of women everywhere from the bonds of marriage; she considers it a cage.

How upset would Nora be that over a century later, even when so much has changed about marriage and women in society, some women are still stuck in shells of former marriages, because the man refuses to relinquish his power over her?

And how much of a shondeh is it that it’s happening in parts of our community?

Photo of Chris Cooper and Laurie Metcalf in A Doll’s House, Part 2. By Brigitte Lacombe. 

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If you’re in New York before the end of August, you should absolutely see Oslo, the new off-Broadway play at the Lincoln Center Theater. If you miss your chance, fear not! Lincoln Center has announced the play’s Broadway transfer for March 2017.

The J. T. Rogers piece follows the famous 1993 peace accords through the lens of a Norwegian couple (real-life acquaintances of the playwright) that played a key role in the negotiations behind the scenes. It opened earlier this month to rave reviews, including the Times.

Jewish media also favored the play overall (making diplomatic conversation entertaining for three hours is no easy feat), but was wary of the sunny political messaging.

“No inherent criticism of the Accords is permitted, and with this absolute certainty comes a lack of nuance,” wrote the Forward, for example, adding that it lacks “historic weight and immediacy.”

Well, now you’ll have ample opportunity to decide for yourself. The play runs at the Lincoln Center Theater through August 28th, and will begin Broadway previews March 23rd for an April 13th opening.

Image: Michael Aronov, Anthony Azizi (foreground), and Jefferson Mays (background) in Oslo. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

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In actual camp programming, the only vestiges of real Hebrew education were our daily proyekt class, run by the extremely attractive Israeli soldiers familiar to anyone who has attended Jewish camp in the United States. Proyekt really translates to “skip class and avoid eye contact with staff members.” So, the only real Hebrew content of the summer was in the plays that every age group put on. Highlights of my own camp performances include Rocky Horror Picture Show, She’s All That, and The Prince of Egypt, staged with varying degrees of coherence and faithfulness to the original source. In my last summer as a camper, we put on Tommy, which makes surprisingly frequent appearances in the camp repertoire thanks to a truly impressive translation. Israeli theater producers: take note.

I spent one summer as a camp counselor. That year, thanks to our Jewish day school education, my friend Ilana and I were asked to write the script for the play my campers would perform—101 Dalmations. I hope that when I die, I am primarily remembered for my Hebrew version of Britney Spears’  “Toxic,” about Cruella DeVille.

For campers, play performances were among the grand events of the summer. One night, the summer before seventh grade, as I squeezed onto the floor of an unventilated wooden barn directly behind a boy a foot taller than me, I was ready for a magical performance of The Wizard of Oz. I had no idea I was about to experience the most meaningful Hebrew educational moment in my 10 years at camp.

I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz far more times than is healthy, and I spoke Hebrew just about as well as anybody at camp. So, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the plot. The first act went exactly as I expected. But when Dorothy and Co. finally reached Oz, events took an unexpected twist.

During the Scarecrow’s big moment with the Wizard, the crowd suddenly went wild—or at least the part of the crowd who knew Hebrew. I did not get the joke. I turned to my counselor, bewildered, who generously explained that instead of saying, “I wish for a brain,” the brilliant 14-year-old performer had turned to the Wizard of Oz and said ten li rosh—“give me head”.

So, that emphasis on the Hebrew language paid off after all, as I got a handy lesson in describing the act of fellatio in the holy tongue. Thanks, Camp.

Shifra M. Goldenberg is an arts administrator and freelance web designer.

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