tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-366216342024-03-12T21:24:31.491-07:00Inside TJTBehind the scenes of one of the oldest ensemble theatres in the countrycorey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-85705985924729863842008-07-15T21:12:00.000-07:002008-08-19T12:57:20.450-07:00The Good News Continues!<span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">More good news. </span>Thanks to one new individual donor, we are now <span>much closer </span>to our <span>September</span> <span>30</span> goal of $50,000 from our community. This new donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, will match your contributions up to $25,000! Thus you can ensure that we'll reach our goal by donating only half of it. Once we reach that goal, we'll be able to make a formal announcement of our 30th season.<br /><br />We're grateful and moved by the generous, timely support from all of you who have been helping. We know that there are more claims than ever on your generosity and that knowledge deepens our appreciation. The recent outpouring of help is the strongest validation that we've ever received in our 30 years. It's more meaningful than all the awards and rave reviews because it's coming directly from the community that partakes of our work; the people for whom we do what we do. Please help us make this final hurdle.<br /></span>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-27288387678620910842008-07-02T14:07:00.000-07:002008-07-02T14:21:18.399-07:00TJT Crosses the Road!<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >We’re thrilled (and relieved) to announce that </span><span style="font-family: arial;font-size:130%;" ><b style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold;"><i style="">we have made our goal!</i></b></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" > That is to say, we reached our first benchmark of raising $100,000 from our community by June 30.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" > </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >A big thanks to all who supported our effort.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" > </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >Because of you there is a future for Jewish theatre in the Bay Area.</span><span style="font-family: arial;font-size:130%;" ><o:p></o:p></span> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style="">Now, we have to raise another $50,000 by September 30 in order to be eligible for special funding from a number of foundations who have been supporting us.<span style=""> </span>Please stay tuned <span style=""> </span>for season announcements and up-to-the-minute news.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style="">This would be a perfect time to recite the shehechianu, the prayer that simply expresses gratitude to the creative power of the universe for bringing us to this moment.</span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><i style="">Baruch ata, Ya*, melech/malcha** haolam,<br />Shehechiyanu v'kimanu v'higiyanu lazman hazeh<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:arial;"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><span style="font-family: arial;">Blessed are You Source of Being,</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">who has given us life, sustained us,</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">and allowed us to reach this day, this moment.</span><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;">__________________________________________________________<br /></span><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><span style="">* I’ve changed the traditional <i style="">adonai eloheinu</i><span style=""> </span>to <i style="">Ya. <span style=""> </span>Adonai eloheinu </i>– “the Lord our God” </span></span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><span style="">–</span></span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style=""><span style=""> is, itself, a euphemism for the “unpronounceable name of God.” <i style="">Ya</i> is simply another stand-in for the ineffable that has less patriarchal associations than “Lord.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><span style="font-family: arial;font-size:85%;" >** melech = King; malcha = Queen</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:arial;"><span style=";font-size:130%;" ><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-15512598769512070772008-06-21T18:19:00.000-07:002008-06-21T18:49:35.575-07:00Crossroads Update<span style="font-family:arial;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Since the last post, less than a month ago, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">TJT</span> has had a very gratifying response to the appeal letter we sent out in the first part of May. As of today, Executive Director Sara Schwartz reports that we have received gifts and pledges of $90,000! </span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />That's 90% of our goal. We have ten days to raise another $10,000 to fulfill the criteria set by our foundation <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">funders</span> to begin receiving the extraordinary help from them which -- along with the generosity of our community -- will allow us to keep the doors open and to celebrate thirty years of unique work with a compelling and surprising season of offerings (see previous post, below.) We hope to post a more detailed report in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile we need all the help you can give to spread our good news and to reach the goal that's now so close at hand!</span></span>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-67200489250349868762008-05-29T00:34:00.000-07:002008-05-29T00:48:27.004-07:00TJT at the Crossroads, 2008:<h1><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: "Arial Black"; font-weight: normal;"><br />Questions and Answers.<o:p></o:p></span></h1> <h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Many of you are reading this after receiving our recent appeal letter.<span style=""> </span>Because some of you have raised some very important questions that could not be addressed in a necessarily brief letter, we have posted the following Q and A in order to provide a lot more of the background and history that has led to the present moment.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></h2> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>In our 29 years, TJT has rarely been flush.<span style=""> </span>We have constantly operated close to the edge as we worked to make theatre of consistently high quality while maintaining one of the nations’ few professional Jewish theatre companies in an environment of ever-rising costs and ever-diminishing resources.<span style=""> </span>We have had triumphs and we have made mistakes. And we have learned a good deal along the way. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>About seven years ago, we began a process of serious re-evaluation with a consultant funded by the Hewlett Foundation. The findings led to a number of difficult but essential changes in our internal structure. At the same time we were in the process of developing a new generation of leadership for the company. This double transformation took us from an increasingly dysfunctional artistic leadership set-up of four co-artistic directors with no workable system for decision making to a single artistic director (Aaron Davidman, who had joined TJT five years earlier) responsible for programming, staffing, and long-term planning, all with considerable input from the two founding members (Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman. The third co-founder and the fourth co-artistic director, Albert Greenberg and Helen Stoltzfus, respectively, left TJT at this time.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p>The next seven years saw a blossoming of new creative energy in the form of critical success, awards and audience growth. Among Aaron’s first hires was Sara T. Schwartz who joined TJT as development director and, in 2006 became Executive Director. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>But in the midst of this renascence, TJT’s already high fixed costs were rising along with gas prices, worker compensation fees, cost of material.<span style=""> </span>Earned income reached a ceiling (see below); assumptions that larger cast productions and larger marketing budgets would lead to increased ticket sales did not bear out as we’d hoped. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p>With hindsight, it’s much easier to see that we needed to slow our rate of growth to allow income to keep pace with expense; we needed to give more attention to consolidating before continuing to do more. In the four years between 2000 and 2004 TJT produced 18 plays, 9 of which were original, company-created works that required considerable development time. Even with 6 over-the-top box-office record-setters, we couldn’t keep up with expenses.<span style=""> </span>In many respects, we were producing at the same level as a 1.5 million dollar per year company on a budget of $700,000.<br /><o:p> </o:p><br />With no cash reserve to serve as a buffer, the long-term debt we had been carrying since our major renovation on our theatre in 1997-98<span style=""> </span>(though our $750,000 capital campaign reached its goal, costs went over budget by $200,000.) grew as we drew down our lines of credit.<o:p><br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">We responded immediately by tightening our proverbial belt and deferring salaries, shortening seasons, laying off all but absolutely essential staff. This in turn lowered our ability to fundraise as our presence was diminished.<o:p><br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">We began another re-evaluation and realized that we have one more chance: by assembling our assets; by looking at our recurrent problems frankly, without guilt or recrimination, by constructing a comprehensive plan that does not return to business as usual, we have an opportunity to become<span style=""> </span>a sustainable company<span style=""></span></span><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p>.<br /></o:p><br />What follows</span></i><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> addresses the most frequently asked questions we've been hearing.<span style=""> </span>If you have other questions, please post a comment on this blog (you’ll find a button at the bottom of this page), or if you prefer privacy, <a href="mailto:response@atjt.com">email us</a><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">How serious is the problem?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Critical.<span style=""> </span>Traveling Jewish Theatre has worked to operate on a budget of around $700,000 per year.<span style=""> </span>TJT dependably raises 30% of that figure through ticket sales and other earnings; the other 70% comes from gifts from individuals, and grants from foundations and government agencies. Thousands of individuals support TJT through their gifts of time and money.<span style=""> </span>For the past four years, rising expenses exceeded income, and we now face total debt approaching $400,000.<span style=""> </span>This includes bank loans, vendor debt, back pay to our staff and personal loans. To survive, TJT must cut expenses from an already bare-bones budget and develop significant new sources of income.<span style=""> </span>We’ve created a new strategic plan and accompanying budgets that we believe will help us accomplish this.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">What expenses are rising?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Just about every cost of TJT’s operation rises each year.<span style=""> </span>Increased gas costs means that local touring; both main stage and via our Educational, Touring and Outreach Program has become more expensive.<span style=""> </span>Increased lumber prices mean more expensive sets.<span style=""> </span>By far the biggest single culprit in knocking TJT out of balance has been huge increases in health and workers compensation insurance cost.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Between 2001 and 2008, the cost of workers compensation insurance coverage has increased 100%.<span style=""> </span></i>One set of costs that has not increased at TJT in the past five years has been the low wages we pay our actors and staff.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Can’t TJT charge more for tickets?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The top price for a TJT ticket is now $34.<span style=""> </span>We have increased our prices over the past few years and we are now in line with what other local theatres charge for tickets.<span style=""> </span>If we were to charge an even higher price, we would price ourselves out of the market and make our productions inaccessible for many.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><span style=""> </span></span><br /><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">What about grants?<span style=""> </span>Can’t the foundations help out?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Grants do help, and TJT has been fortunate over the years in enlisting some large foundations to support out work.<span style=""> </span>TJT receives support from many local and national funders including the Jewish Community Federation, Grants for the Arts - the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Hewlett Foundation, Haas Fund, Koret Foundation, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, among others.<span style=""> </span>With the help of some foundation staff members, a meeting was called at which we presented the details of the current situation, our plan to transform our organization into one that can be truly sustainable while remaining true to out core mission, and a request for a one-time collective grant in addition to their usual annual support.<span style=""> </span>While we won’t receive an official decisions until later in the summer, we have heard that our presentation was very well received and that a positive response is likely but will be contingent on a demonstration by the community of their need and desire for Traveling Jewish Theatre to continue. This is why your donations and subscriptions will are more important than ever and will really determine whether TJT has a 30<sup>th</sup> season and continues for another thirty.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Has TJT been mismanaged?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has always een frugal.<span style=""> </span>We reuse every paper clip, and watch every penny.<span style=""> </span>Every dollar can be explained and accounted for.<span style=""> </span>We produce professional level productions for a fraction of what other theatres spend.<span style=""> </span>Every dollar from every donor has been used appropriately as that donor intended, and we have produced every production to which we have sold tickets and we have been responsible when we have been forced to cancel a show.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>In terms of accurately predicting future income, we could have done a better job.<span style=""> </span>There were always voices on our Board, from our auditors, in our Ensemble and on our management team that tried to point out warning signs of potential revenue shortfalls. In an ever-optimistic atmosphere of <i style="">“it’ll turn out al right,”</i> such voices can find themselves frustrated.<span style=""> </span>This is especially true when things regularly “<i style="">turned out all right.” </i><span style=""> </span>In any business, if you ignore warning signs you place your business in peril.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>The first step in our new business plan requires that every budget be based on the most conservative projections, that every budget show a substantial surplus, and every shortfall be dealt with immediately.<span style=""> </span>Other changes are described below.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">What has TJT done so far in the face of this crisis?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle"><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has pared our Administrative Staff to cut payroll expense.<span style=""> </span>We are getting by now with only one full-time and one part-time person on payroll.<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has scaled back projects, spending no more than we are certain to bring in. Our last production of <i style="">Dead Mother</i> was a good example of this as the box office met it’s projection. <o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has ceased all programming until we get the situation under control. <o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has met with its foundation funders to fully disclose the situation and ask for help. <o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has ended its commitment to providing guaranteed, year-round work for anyone other than the Artistic Director and the Executive Director.<span style=""> </span>Other staff will be part-time and production positions, including actors, will be on a contract basis. This includes founding members, Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman and represents the most difficult change in TJT’s operation, particularly in light of the lack of any form of pension or other material recognition of 30 years of continuous work building the company and a large part of its repertoire.<span style=""> </span>We hope to remedy this in the future, if and when a sustainable and secure TJT comes to be.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT is appealing to you to help, <i style="">right now.</i><o:p></o:p></span></li></ul> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">In the future, what will be the same at TJT?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">We --Sara<span style=""> </span>Aaron, Corey and Naomi -- will still be involved.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">TJT has built a international reputation for creating and presenting invigorating and relevant, critically acclaimed, original, company-created works and new plays drawn from Jewish culture. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>We intend to continue building on that record.<span style=""> </span>We will remain committed to young people, through our Educational, Touring and Outreach Program, and our Accessibility Program.<span style=""> </span>We will continue to build bridges between cultures through our work.<span style=""> </span>We will create original plays (as funds are available), and we will continue to contribute to the Bay Area’s reputation as a center for leading-edge art and innovative expressions of Jewish culture. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">In the future, what will be different at TJT?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <ul><li><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">We will secure new partnerships with other area organizations, such as the San Francisco JCC as well as theatres of all sizes to strengthen our profile, reach new audiences and to enhance our income potential. <o:p></o:p></span></li><li><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>TJT will eliminate its debt, and then operate in such a way as to create no new debt.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></li><li><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>TJT will build a “Cash Reserve,” a substantial cushion that must be constantly replenished.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></li><li><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> W</o:p>e will cut expenses, and that means for the foreseeable future a smaller staff and artists working only on contract.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></li><li><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p>We will work with a play selection committee that will include artists and representatives of our audience to help ensure seasons that reflect the diversity of our Bay Area community.<o:p></o:p></span></li></ul> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">What if TJT does have to close its doors?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">None of us want this to happen, but if we do close our doors, we will do so honorably. We would hold an event to celebrate the company’s achievements. We would sell our assets with the hope that the sale of our theatre would pay off our accumulated debts (because we have a unique ownership arrangement in a co-op building it is hard to determine an exact selling price at this time). And the Ensemble would go their separate ways, with heads held high for a 29-year job well done, and an ethical end to this institution.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br /><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">How can I help keep Traveling Jewish Theatre going?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The immediate goal is to meet a $100,000 goal in contributed income by </span><st1:date year="2008" day="30" month="6"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">June 30, 2008</span></st1:date><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">.<span style=""> </span>And another $50,000 by </span><st1:date year="2008" day="1" month="9"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">September 1, 2008</span></st1:date><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br /><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The best thing you can do right now is to write a check and send it today. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoBodyText3"><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i><br />If you’re uncomfortable making a contribution to TJT knowing that <span style=""> </span>the prospect of closure does exist, we’ll be glad <span style=""> </span>to hold your check (not deposit it) until we meet our contribution goal. If we don’t make our goal we’ll return your check. Just let us know if that’s the case.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">If things turn around as hoped, what can I expect next season?<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">A No-Holds-Barred Celebration of 30 amazing years of creativity hosted by the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco at Kanbar Hall.<o:p></o:p></span></b></li></ul> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">A revival of one of our best-loved original works, <i style=""><span style=""> </span>The Last Yiddish Poet</i> by Corey Fischer, Albert Greenberg and Naomi Newman, (1980) performed by Aaron Davidman and Corey Fischer, Directed by Naomi Newman<o:p></o:p></span></b></li></ul> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The works of two brilliant Jewish playwrights:<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;"><b style=""><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The Model Apartment</span></i></b><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> by Pulitzer Prize winner, Donald Margulies (Bay Area Premiere)<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in;"><b style=""><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The Floating Light Bulb</span></i></b><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> by Woody Allen<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><i style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></b><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">A Festival of Play </span></b><st1:city><st1:place><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Readings</span></b></st1:place></st1:City><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> by Jewish Women Playwrights<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p><br />We want to hear what TJT means to you, the changes you would like to suggest, your responses to our work and to this posting.<span style=""> </span>We invite you to post your responses here as part of an ongoing community conversation or, if you prefer a more private medium, just send emails to <a href="mailto:sara@atjt.com">sara@atjt.com</a>. We would also like you to consider about joining our Board or volunteering to serve on a committee. If this stirs your interest, please get in touch!<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-69772712815922640302007-09-22T22:55:00.001-07:002007-09-22T23:37:24.062-07:00a look at what's cooking<a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.atjt.com/images/first_poster.GIF"><blockquote></blockquote><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 235px; height: 388px;" src="http://www.atjt.com/images/first_poster.GIF" alt="a hand made poster from our first production in 1979" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:85%;" ><p class="corey" face="arial">(Left: a hand made poster from our first production in 1979)</p></span><br /><p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey">Hi. It's <a href="http://www.coreyhome.net/">Corey </a>posting again. I want to give you an inside look at several projects that we’re currently developing. But first, I want to tell you about an event that Sara Schwartz, our executive director, and I participated in just a few days ago.<span style=""> </span>Along with several other colleagues, we were invited to make a presentation about ensemble theatre to the Arts Loan Fund.<span style=""> </span>ALF is a consortium of the major arts funders in the area including the Irvine Foundation, the Haas Fund and the City’s Grants for the Arts program.<span style=""> </span>This invitation is a clear signal that the work we’ve been doing with our sister companies in the <a href="http://www.ensembletheaters.net/">Network of Ensemble Theatres</a> to raise the profile of companies like TJT and the other 73 member theatres of the NET (TJT was one of the seven original founding companies in 1995) is working!<span style=""> </span>The fact that some of the largest arts funders in California wanted to know about the history, the creative processes and the special challenges of ensemble theatre is a very significant development.<span style=""> </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey">While the definition of <i style="">ensemble theatre</i> is naturally fluid, it almost always embraces the idea <span style=""> </span>that primary decision-making power rests in the hands of the artists who, ideally, have been working together over extended periods of time in some version of a collaborative process. That’s what TJT has been doing, in ever-evolving ways, for nearly three decades. </p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">Right now we have four projects that are all still in very early stages of development.<span style=""> </span>We’re a long way from announcing any of these publicly. It’s certainly possible that not all of them will end up as mainstage productions. </p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey" >First, we’ve commissioned the unusually gifted young playwright <a href="http://www.kqed.org/arts/people/spark/profile.jsp?id=17964">Marcus Gardley</a> to write a play based on the story of civil rights activists <a href="http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2764/Closure_in_the_Goodman_Schwerner_Chaney_case___">Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney</a> who were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members <span style=""> </span>in 1964 in Mississippi.<span style=""> </span>The names of these two young Jews and one young African-American have become emblems of the civil rights movement itself. <span style=""> </span>We feel that theirs is the kind of story that needs to be told if our country is ever going to heal its wounded racial history. [see the works of the brilliant historian and activist, <a href="http://www.manningmarable.net/">Manning Marable</a> for more; as well as the latest from <a href="http://www.chinagalland.com/">China Galland</a><a href="http://www.chinagalland.com/"> </a>(yes, my wife) <span style="font-style: italic;">Love Cemetery</span>]</p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey" face="arial">In the early nineties, co-founder Naomi Newman collaborated on a piece with African-American actor/writer/director John O’Neal, from New Orleans, that examined African-American/Jewish relations (<i style="">Crossing the Broken Bridge</i>).<span style=""> </span>It took nearly three years to complete but went on to tour, for several years, back and forth across America, often bringing black and Jewish communities together, sometimes for the first time. <i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey" face="arial"><a href="http://www.kqed.org/arts/people/spark/profile.jsp?id=17964">Marcus Gardley</a> collaborated with TJT artistic director, <span style=""> </span>Aaron Davidman, on last year’s award-winning <i style="">Happiness is a Dreamhouse in Lorin</i> for Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Together they created a piece of heart-rending, yet ultimately hopeful theatre that galvanized an entire, largely African-American, community who had never had a chance to see themselves and their <i style="">place</i> represented on stage before. </p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey" face="arial">Aaron had dreamed of working with the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney story for years.<span style=""> </span>When he first mentioned it to me, I marveled that someone who hadn’t yet been born when the tragic events took place understood the necessity of not allowing <span style=""> </span>the story to be forgotten. I was nineteen, acting in a college drama festival<span style=""> </span>when I heard that news and wondered why I wasn’t in Mississippi myself. </p> <p class="corey" style="font-family: arial;">A few years after Aaron first mentioned the idea, he met and worked with Marcus. Last November we both saw a reading of one of Marcus’s plays at the Public Theatre in New York.<span style=""> </span>I recognized in this young black writer who’d grown up in Oakland a kindred spirit. Though he often uses history as a source, he’s anything but dry or didactic. He has a kind of x-ray vision that lets him see through the shell of the historical record into the pulsing heart of myth and story that we can all recognize.<span style=""> </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">For the record, Marcus received his MFA from Yale, and has received commissions from the Yale Repertory Theatre, Playwright’s Horizon, South Coast Repertory among others. </p> <p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="corey">As a member of the TJT ensemble, I’m very excited about the idea of Marcus being in residence with us to develop this project even though, at this point, I have no idea what my role will be in it.<span style=""> </span>In an ensemble, anyone’s experience winds up influencing and affecting everyone’s.<span style=""> </span>I love how porous our boundaries have become.<span style=""> </span>In the early days we did everything in-house, but somewhere in the mid-eighties we started working with directors, actors, writers, designers from outside TJT and discovered that our center was strong and flexible and, more often than not, our sense of the ensemble stretched to include the so-called “guest-artists.”<span style=""> </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="corey">Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a break from performing this fall in order to complete the “architecture” of a new, original TJT piece inspired by the history of The Group Theatre (1931-1941).<span style=""> </span>In their ten years of life, this hugely influential company can be said to have invented the American theatre. Much of what we take for granted about theatre and the work of the actor and much of what still seems experimental and risky was first attempted, in this country, by the Group. Interestingly the most famous, eloquent and controversial of its founding members happened to be Jewish. These included Stella Adler and her brother Luther Adler, whose father Jacob Adler was the reigning star of the New York Yiddish theatre for most of its existence; Harold Clurman, the Sorbonne-educated visionary whose mesmerizing discourses galvanized the dozens of actors who formed the first Group Theatre acting ensemble; Lee Strasberg, passionate iconoclast who wound up creating the approach to acting known as “The Method.”<span style=""> </span>I think there’s more than an arbitrary relationship between the Group’s commitment to a vision of a permanent community of actors creating a theatre that would enliven and astonish Americans from all walks of life <span style=""> </span>and mirror back their deepest struggles, dreams and shadows and the Jewish identity of its leaders.<span style=""> </span>In any place besides America, any time before the 30s, Jews like Clurman, the Adlers, Strasberg, Morris Carnovsky and Clifford Odets, would have been rabbis or scholars, scribes or cantors. Eastern European Jews had only emerged from the isolation of shtetl and ghetto a few decades earlier. The generation these people belonged to was still infused with all the pent-up energy that was finally being allowed to run free in the larger, American, secular world.<span style=""> </span>At the same time, they had access to a long and rich tradition of study, of the sanctity and power of language, of the necessity to speak truth to power. So I’m developing characters – both contemporary and historical – and exercises on which to base improvisations.<span style=""> </span>I’m compiling collections of quotes from the Group Theatre members, scenes and fragments from plays by Odets and others that were premiered by the Group and questions that contemporary ensemble theatre makers might ask of our artistic ancestors.<span style=""> </span>All of this material will be explored by a group of TJT and guest actors in a workshop in early summer 2008 that will be sponsored by Theatreworks (the South Bay’s largest resident theatre) New Play Program.</p><p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="corey"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="corey"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">At the same time, our artistic director Aaron Davidman has been researching, writing and workshopping a solo piece on the Middle-East based on a series of shattering interviews he conducted in the U.S., the U.K., Israel and the occupied territories last summer, often with “people on the ground”<span style=""> </span>who are less concerned with ideology than survival. The initial workshop performances of this piece happened at <a href="http://washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/">Theatre J</a> in D.C. with artistic director Ari Roth acting as Aaron’s dramaturg.<span style=""> </span>Aaron will continue to develop this piece in front of audiences in periodic in-progress showings. There may well be some other workshop performances and readings as well, so keep watching this blog or sign up for email updates on our <a href="http://www.atjt.com/form_new.htm">website</a>.</p><span style="font-family: arial;">I've already written about the </span><a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://insidetjt.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2006-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=2">Prayer Project</a><span style="font-family: arial;">, our long-term collaboration with Liz Lerman and the Dance Exchange and there's nothing more to say about it right now.</span><p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><br /></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-13090266655034366362007-08-20T23:25:00.000-07:002007-08-20T23:30:09.474-07:002 X Malamud is a hit in Mountain View<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">We’re about to begin our last week of Malamud in Mountain View.<span style=""> </span>The rave from the Mercury News is appended below.<span style=""> </span>It’s been just as satisfying as I’d hoped to put together The Magic Barrel with The Jewbird., though some of my earlier assumptions have been challenged.<span style=""> </span>See, I’d always seen Saltzman the Marriage Broker and Schwartz the Jewbird as essentially the same character – or at least the same archetype – the trickster/clown/holy fool that pops up in Jewish writing in the legends about the prophet Elijah, Hasidic tales,<span style=""> </span>Jewish jokes and stand-up comedy (think Lenny Bruce).<span style=""> </span>Now there may be some truth in that, but Aaron Davidman said, after seeing an early rehearsal that he saw an even stronger connection between the characters of Leo Finkle in Barrel and Schwartz in Jewbird.<span style=""> </span>Both longing for love and acceptance. Thoughts?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p>Stay tuned for announcement of new Season!<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">`2 x Malamud' takes a magical journey<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">JEWISH COMPANY'S STAGINGS OF WORK NEAR PERFECTION<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="mailto:kdsouza@mercurynews.com?subject=San%20Jose%20Mercury%20News:%20%602%20x%20Malamud%27%20takes%20a%20magical%20journey">By Karen D'Souza<br />Mercury News</a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Article Launched: 08/16/2007 01:50:19 AM PDT<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><script language="JavaScript">var requestedWidth = 0; </script><script language="JavaScript"> if(requestedWidth > 0){ document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').style.width = requestedWidth + "px"; document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').style.margin = "0px 0px 10px 10px"; } </script>To mark its 29th anniversary, San Francisco's Traveling Jewish Theatre has reclaimed its nomadic roots and launched its new season on the road.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The acclaimed troupe opened its homage to Bernard Malamud, "2 x Malamud," over the past weekend at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The company has staged "The Magic Barrel" and "The Jewbird" before, and its depth of commitment to the material has paid off handsomely. Both these one-acts have been burnished to the point of perfection, from their dreamlike tone to their whimsical props. Directed by Joel Mullennix and Sheila Balter, the exquisitely etched revivals show off the artistry of the acting company, as well as the richness of writer's palette.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Staged in the style of the Word for Word company, "2 x Malamud" transposes these short stories verbatim from page to stage. The cast embodies every element in the text, from protagonists to passing clouds, as if each word, each pause, each punctuation were central to the theme. The technique forges an intimacy between the actors and the text, a magical sense of ritual incantation that casts a spell over the audience.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Jeri Lynn Cohen, Max Gordon Moore and Traveling Jewish Theatre founder Corey Fischer etch the key characters in each story. Watching them metamorphose from piece to piece is part of the evening's theatrical alchemy. The scope and depth of the acting gives us a glimpse into the breadth of Malamud's art.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">In "The Magic Barrel," Moore plays the twitchy rabbinical student Leo Finkle, desperately searching for a wife but scared to death of women. Enter the marriage broker, Pinye Salzman (the sublimely funny Fischer), who's eager to make any match that will put a few pennies in his threadbare pockets. They eye each other warily across a dank New York hovel, bargaining over potential brides like so many baseball trading cards.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The rapport of the actors with their characters cuts so deep that the play bristles with life and breathtaking eccentricity. The physical specificity of the performances is as acute as the cadence of the language.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Finkle cowers under the covers of his bed, terrified of life. Salzman sucks the flesh off a tiny white fish like a starving alley cat. As the lonely Lily Hirschorn, Cohen radiates the brittle enthusiasm of a woman out to snatch a husband, driven by the fear that life is passing her by.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">It comes as a revelation to see these actors so utterly transformed in "The Jewbird," a dark little parable about assimilation. If the characters in "The Magic Barrel" are steeped in the past, the figures in "The Jewbird" are hellbent on casting off the old ways.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Respect for tradition is not in Harry Cohen's (Moore) genes. A frozen-food salesman who pairs long black socks with khaki shorts and a fat cigar, Harry has an ego as large as his belly. Moore puffs himself up with the bluster and pomposity of a man who would deny someone else their right to their ethnicity.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">In this instance, Harry takes on the black crow who flies into his Bronx apartment on threadbare wings. His name is Schwartz (Fischer), and he's a herring-eating, prayer-chanting black bird seeking asylum for a world with no refuge for those who want to keep the old customs.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The bird says he's on the run from anti-Semites, which earns him the pity and kindness of Harry's wife, Edie (a graceful turn by Cohen), and their son, Morrie (Tamar Cohn). But not Harry. He responds to Schwartz's neediness with, first, disdain and, then, brutality.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Huddled in the corner, fearful of both Harry and the ravenous family cat, Fischer's bird is as ornery as he is wretched. The actor turns him into a tragicomic figure, a cross between an old vaudeville ham and a latter-day Lear, yearning for shelter from the storm but unwilling to sacrifice his integrity until the end. The gravitas the actor brings to this role elevates the fantastical fable into a melancholy meditation on identity.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">The upshot</span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">: A Traveling Jewish Theater cast a literary spell on its audience with a magical evening of Malamud.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Where</span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">When</span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Through</span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">: Aug. 26<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Tickets</span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">: $15-$44; (650) 903-6000, <a href="http://www.atjt.com/">www.atjt.com</a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style=""> <hr align="center" color="#cccccc" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%"> </span></div> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="">Contact Karen D'Souza at kdsouza@mercurynews.com or (408) 271-3772. See her theater blog at <a href="http://blogs.mercextra.com/aei">blogs.mercextra.com/aei</a>.</span></i><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><a href="javascript:%20popup(%22RePrint%22,%22http://www.reprintbuyer.com/mags/knightridder/reprints.html%22,600,400);"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" spt="75" preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:formulas> <v:path extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" connecttype="rect"> <o:lock ext="edit" 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vml 1]><v:shape id="_x0000_i1030" type="#_x0000_t75" alt="" href="javascript:%20popup(%22email%22,%22/portlet/article/html/fragments/email_article.jsp?article=6637064&hostName=www.mercurynews.com&section=/arts%22,600,400);" style="'width:12pt;height:12pt'" button="t"> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\HP_ADM~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\03\clip_image004.gif" href="../../My%20Webs/tjt/reviews/07-08_2xmalalud_SJMN_files/icon-email.gif"> </v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><span style=""><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/HP_ADM%7E1/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/03/clip_image004.gif" shapes="_x0000_i1030" border="0" height="16" width="16" /></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><a href="javascript:%20popup(%22email%22,%22/portlet/article/html/fragments/email_article.jsp?article=6637064&hostName=www.mercurynews.com§ion=/arts%22,600,400);">Email</a> <a href="../../My%20Webs/tjt/reviews/07-08_2xmalalud_SJMN.htm#top"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="_x0000_i1031" type="#_x0000_t75" alt="" href="file:///C:\Corey\My%20Webs\tjt\reviews\07-08_2xmalalud_SJMN.htm#top" style="'width:12pt;height:12pt'" button="t"> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\HP_ADM~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\03\clip_image005.gif" href="../../My%20Webs/tjt/reviews/07-08_2xmalalud_SJMN_files/icon-uparrow.gif"> </v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><span style=""></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><a href="../../My%20Webs/tjt/reviews/07-08_2xmalalud_SJMN.htm#top"></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="corey"><o:p> </o:p></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-88954466535617431792007-07-29T15:52:00.000-07:002007-07-29T16:12:06.677-07:00TJT's 29th Season Begins<p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">We’re about to begin our 29<sup>th</sup> season with an experimental three-week summer run in Mountain View in which we’re bringing together parts of two previous “hits.”<span style=""> </span>From 2000, Malamud’s <i style="">The Jewbird </i><span style=""> </span>and from last year, his <i style="">The Magic Barrel </i><span style=""> </span>will be paired in <i style="">2 X Malamud.<span style=""> </span></i>These two masterful short-stories will be performed in the verbatim style pioneeered and developed by San Francisco’s <a href="http://www.zspace.org/wordforword.htm">Word for Word Performing Arts Company</a>.<span style=""> </span>Below, you’ll find the history of our collaboration followed by reviews of <i style="">Barrel</i> and <i style=""><span style=""> </span>Jewbird</i> and, at the end of this post, quotes from other writers about Bernard Malamud. Read on. <a href="http://www.atjt.com/">(For more info on the August 9 – 26 run in Mt. View, click away)</a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Founded in 1993 by Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter, Word for Word is a professional theatre company that stages short stories, performing every word the author has written. Their goals are to excite people about the written word, to inspire them to read more, to create new audiences for the theatre, and to share the world's diverse cultures and stories. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">"Their brilliant inventiveness in performance, choreography, and staging, has created a new art form, and a deeply affecting experience."<br />-- Tobias Wolff</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">The collaboration between Traveling Jewish Theatre and the Word for Word Performing Arts Company (a project of the Z Space<span style="color: rgb(51, 153, 102);"> </span>Studio) began in 2000 as a natural outgrowth of the many values the two companies share.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Since TJT’s own esthetic<span style=""> </span>has always drawn on the vital tradition of Jewish storytelling and places the act of “telling” at the heart of the theatrical experience, it seemed <i style="">bashert</i> (Yiddish; adj: <i style="">destined</i>, <i style="">fated</i>) that the two companies would work together.<span style=""> </span>Add the attraction of the short-story for Jewish – and especially American Jewish – writers, several of whom are considered masters of the form, and the partnership becomes irresistible.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Our collaboration started with two of those American masters, Grace Paley and Bernard Malamud<span style="color:black;">,</span><i style="">Goodbye and Good luck </i><span style=""> </span>and <i style="">The Jewbird</i> directed by Word for Word Charter Group member Wendy Radford and long-time W4W collaborator, David Dower (the former artistic director of the Z Space Studio and current artistic associate at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage).<span style=""> </span>The response from audience and critics was so thoroughly positive that the two companies continued to look for more opportunities to work together.<span style=""> </span> </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">That opportunity came three years later.<span style=""> </span>This time, the unabashedly post-modern celebration of narrative, <i style="">Finkelstein’s Fingers</i>, by the stunning gen-x German Jewish writer, Maxim Biller (directed by David Dower) was balanced by two mordant and moving stories by Paley, <i style="">Wants</i> and <i style="">Conversations with my Father</i>, and one of Malamud’s earliest stories, <i style="">Spring Rain</i> (all directed by Joanne Winter, co-founder of W4W).<span style=""> </span><i style="">Windows and Mirrors</i>, as the evening was titled<span style="color:black;">,</span> was another unqualified success.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">In 2006, the companies returned to Paley (<i style="">Mother</i> and <i style="">The Story Hearer</i>) and Malamud (<i style="">The Magic Barrel</i>).<span style=""> </span>Directed by Joel Mullennix, a frequent W4W collaborator, the evening was titled<i style=""> Family Alchemy </i>and once again both companies’ audiences showed their enthusiasm for the continuing collaboration and once again <i style="">The Chronicl</i>e’s “Little Man” was airborne.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Realizing that <i style="">The Jewbird</i> could be read as a set of variations on the themes of <i style="">The Magic Barrel,</i> we decided to bring the two stories together in an all-Malamud evening for our growing Mountain View community. In spring, 2008, 2 X Malamud will travel to Toronto for a three-week residency.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Word for Word Perfuming Arts Company and Traveling Jewish Theatre plan to<span style=""> </span>continue their productive and mutually satisfying collaboration in years to come.<span style=""> </span>Stay tuned.<span style=""> </span>In the meantime, be sure to see Word for Word’s latest offering:<span style=""> </span>Cornell Woolrich’s Noir thriller, <a href="http://www.zspace.org/angelface.htm"><b style=""><i style="">Angel Face</i></b>,</a> opening in San Francisco August 10. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Reviews of last year’s <i style="">The Magic Barrel</i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">"The evening's best match of text and mise-en-scène comes with Malamud's 1956 piece <span style="font-style: italic;">The Magic Barrel</span>, the title story from his National Book Award–winning collection. The clever comic story of a lonely young yeshiva student (Max Gordon Moore) who reluctantly employs the services of a threadbare matchmaker (Fischer) to find him a bride, Malamud's sly narrative has unexpected turns and depths that give full rein to the agility and imagination of performers and director alike (as well as some cunning work by props master Adriane Sherburn-Zimmer), and is pretty well a hoot from start to finish. Every gesture of Fischer's marriage broker seems both larger-than-life and inescapably human, while newcomer Moore delivers a priceless performance as the easily exasperated, spiritually doubting protagonist, thus holding his own in the midst of an expert ensemble, which includes more fine work from Cohen and Newman in a variety of supporting roles. Moreover, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Magic Barrel</span> excels in the Word for Word style, a form bound to — but also independent of — the page, where the strong and inventive staging becomes its own (albeit integral) delight, a kind of harmonic line appearing above the principal voice, offering audiences the thrill of following simultaneously the written word and the theatrical invention illuminating and responding to it."<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">-Robert Avila, <i style="">SF Bay Guardian</i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">"<span style="font-style: italic;">The Magic Barrel</span> introduces San Francisco newcomer Max Gordon Moore, burning with joyous intensity as Leo, a young rabbi in training who hires a marriage broker (a transformed and hollow-faced Fischer) to find him a wife, and in the hilarious process finds his faith. Short story as theater is a risky endeavor, but TJT never drops the ball, and the result is pure storytelling -- simplified, thrilling, and vigorously reinvented, a slap in the face to anyone who has ever said theater is dead.” </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">-Nathaniel Eaton, <i style="">SF Weekly</i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">“Played with magnetic youthful seriousness by [Max G.] Moore, Finkle is a scholarly recluse who's decided that a wife will help him land a better congregation when he becomes a rabbi. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">"Not knowing any other way to go about it, Finkle contacts a matchmaker -- who turns out to be the terribly down-on-his-luck, infirm, clumsily but slyly manipulative Pinye Salzman (a brilliantly comic but lovingly conceived portrait by Fischer as what's left of the old shtetl profession in 1940s New York). <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">"[Jeri-Lynn] Cohen adds luminous grace notes as two of Salzman's hopeful clients. Fischer is a continual delight in his shabby suit, peeling and consuming sardines with consummate care. Moore embodies Finkle's pursuit with carefully calibrated degrees of frustration, resignation, determination and growing self-knowledge. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">"The barrel of the title -- Salzman's claimed repository of marital prospects -- doesn't really exist. Malamud and the company leave it somewhat open to doubt whether Finkle succeeds in his romantic quest. But he, and we, are enriched by the pursuit." <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">-Rob Hurwitt, <i style="">SF Chronicle<o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />Reviews of <i style="">The Jewbird</i>, 2000<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style=""><o:p></o:p></b>“Fischer brilliantly reaffirms his standing as one of the Bay Area's acting treasures. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">"In <span style="font-style: italic;">Jewbird</span>, he's Schwartz, the bird itself, a magnificently bedraggled old specimen with the comic gravity of a raven, wheedling tone of a sly old beggar and Yiddish inflections and sentence construction of a first-generation immigrant. His tattered scarf alone is a thing of wonder, a prayer shawl one moment, a bird hand puppet the next -- more often, spread over his fluttering hands above his shoulders, it's a pair of remarkably expressive wings. It's a performance to savor and store in the memory.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">-Rob Hurwitt, SF Examiner<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal" ><span style="font-size:100%;">“Like all Word for Word productions, this one renders every line of the text. Dower makes the most of it, turning the frozen food salesman Cohen (Albert Greenberg), his pneumatic '50s wife Edie (Jeri Lynn Cohen) and their dim adenoidal son Maurie (Sheila Balter) into a yammering chorus at the top of the narrative. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal" ><span style="font-size:100%;">“Fischer's delicate, ``dissipated crow'' cuts through with his strangled squawks, gawky slow flights around the room and patient gaze framed by wire- rim spectacles. Edie takes pity and feeds him herring and rye bread. Maurie takes him on as a tutor and sees his grades and even his screechy violin-playing improve. Even the skeptical Cohen softens a little. The bird reveals his name: Schwartz. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal" ><span style="font-size:100%;">“Peace is short-lived. A cat (the twitchy, self-possessed Balter) arrives. Cohen picks a fight. Schwartz, with his vibrant prayer shawl, exacts some blood. But the Jewbird is expelled. The story ends with an eerie final image, of Fischer holding his own crumpled life in his hands. Some people smell because they don't bathe or because of what they eat, we remem ber Schwartz saying. Others smell because of what they think.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal" ><span style="font-size:100%;">-Steven Winn, SF Chronicle<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">Writers on Malamud<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p><b style="">Richard Gilman</b>, writing in <i style="">The New Republic</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">“[Malamud was] a storyteller in an era when most of our best writers have been suspicious of straightforward narrative.<span style=""> </span>He was both a realist and a fantasist.<span style=""> </span>I don’t mean he alternated between reality and fantasy, but that at his best the line between the two was obliterated.<span style=""> </span>Observation gave way to imagining…a story like the Jewbird (to my mind perhaps his finest), a piece that appears all whimsy and allegorical effort, is anchored in pebbly actuality.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p><b style="">Cynthia Ozick</b>:<span style=""> </span>“Is he an American Master?<span style=""> </span>Of course.<span style=""> </span>He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh placticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations…He wrote about suffering Jews, about poor Jews, about grocers and fixers and birds and horses and angels in Harlem and matchmakers and salesmen and rabbis and landlords and tenants and egg candlers and writers and chimpanzees; he wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p><b style="">Daniel Stern</b>:<span style=""> </span>“[Malamud] came as close to making a religion of art as is possible; a religion of suffering and comedy, taking the Jew as his starting point for what was most human in humankind.<span style=""> </span>All men are Jews – perhaps his most famous and most mysterious line.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p></o:p>From <b>Saul Bellow's</b> eulogy, given at a memorial tribute to Malamud, 1986: <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">“Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">Walter Goodman</b>, reviewing <i style="">The Complete Stories</i> in <i style="">The New York Times</i>, <span style="">September 28, 1997:</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">“He burst fully into allegory in the 1950's with ''The Magic Barrel,'' probably the most famous of his shorter works and the title story of his first collection, which brought him the first of two National Book Awards. Here Malamud's strengths came together: the feelings for the outsider Jews; the joy in Second Avenue vaudeville shticks; the direct, unadorned yet flavorsome storytelling; the skeptic's fascination with Hasidic mysteries; the ruminations on the meaning of love. If you're looking for influences, try Isaac Bashevis Singer. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">“This fable about the business doings between Leo Finkle, a lonely rabbinical student, and Pinye Salzman, a matchmaker, is still as funny and sad and searching as it was at first reading… The story's final, unsettled lines remain powerfully unsettling. As another Malamud character, in ''The Girl of My Dreams,'' says of a piece of fiction he happens across, 'The story socked in the belly.’'' <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-72081914060629659792007-06-09T15:55:00.000-07:002007-06-09T16:26:53.080-07:00Last Two Performances of Salesman!<p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style="">As we prepare for the last two shows of this ten-week run, we wanted to post some additional responses.<span style=""> </span>Here’s a letter from <span style="font-weight: bold;">Michael Addison</span> to director Aaron Davidman.<span style=""> </span>In his long and impressive career, Michael has been chairman of the theatre department at U.C. San Diego and artistic director of the Berkeley/California Shakespeare Festival and has followed TJT since he brought our very first piece of work to La Jolla nearly thirty years ago!</span></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">I want to tell you how profoundly moved we<span style=""> </span>were by the production.</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">The play, of course, but even more richly wrought than I had remembered, including the elements that evoke the structure of Greek tragedy, though cast in a modern frame. One can't call "Salesman" realism, in spite of its intense reality: the mythic struggle of the aging hero is central to an action that reverberates through family to the whole social entity.</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p>And the work of you and the cast (particularly Corey) realized this and more. The actors showed that sort of forceful subtlety in their work that you dream of, with ease and economy that created characters that were at one and the same time haunting archetypes of the family as well as singular mirrors of our present reality.</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">Your work was definitive. Creation of yet another example of the work of one of America's few true ensemble theaters, orchestrating voices, gesture, movement, and all with spare but rich visual statement that revealed meaning. And the final choice of the ritual funeral, men wearing yamulkas as they poured the earth, was breathtaking: it stripped away the thin veneer of assimilation and revealed the heritage of yearning, effort, and pain that makes the play so truly universal, American, and – yes – Jewish.</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p><br /></span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">Thanks, Aaron, to you and the cast for an evening rare and beautiful.</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="font-size:10;"> </span></i><br /><span style="">And here are excerpts from a review from the Berkeley Daily Planet</span></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style=""><o:p><br /></o:p></span></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style=""><a href="http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=06-05-07&storyID=27216">Full Review</a></span></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style=""><o:p><br /></o:p></span></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style=""><o:p></o:p>By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet</span><span style=""> (06-05-07)</span></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style=""><i style="">There’s been much talk of Traveling Jewish’s intention to make this a Jewish show with a Jewish Willy Loman. The notes in the program recall the Yiddish theater translation and production of 1951, with a review speaking of that show “bringing the play ‘home’ ... [catching] Miller [son of immigrant Jews], as it were, in the act of changing his name.”</i></span></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><span style=""><i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">True to their principle of being inspired by Jewish experience, Traveling Jewish has fashioned less a tragic look back at the Jewish diaspora in America than a true, multifaceted revelation of American experience through a Jewish perspective. “I still feel kind of temporary about myself,” says Willy.</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style=""><o:p><br /></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">Because this production’s accents, inflexions and mannerisms give this monumental play a different and fascinating texture, a new syncopation of street and domestic rhythms, it is a truly New York City Death of a Salesman—Manhattan-born Arthur Miller brought home…</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span>Willy is beyond both sadness and happiness, rapt in his passion, oblivious as he walks the line down the road that runs downstage through the middle of Giulio Perrone’s splendid, spare set.</i><i style=""><span style="">..</span></i></p><p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><br /><i style=""><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><i style=""><span style="">The mood swings of Willy and his family are the pivot, in Aaron Davidman’s excellent directorial conception, for the true theatrics of the play, reflecting Miller’s innovations as a former radio playwright adapting the multiplex style of the medium to the live stage. Jim Cave’s spot-on timing with lights and sound design by Rex Camphuis (also production manager) and cellist Jessica Ivry’s original music help deliver the goods to this audience, which is on three sides of the action, up on stage left and right as well as in the orchestra section in front. Few productions ever get the humor, the lyricism (which Miller would hauntingly refer to), the synthesis of approaches that catches up the social, the psychological, the moral, the sheerly pathetic content up into a vortex that sways back and forth until, as Antonin Artaud said of Euripides’ tragedies, “the floodgates are open ... and we don’t know any more just where we are.” <o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><br /><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="corey" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-61726008415349647852007-05-29T22:16:00.001-07:002007-05-29T23:20:00.203-07:00Last Two Weeks for "Salesman"<span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" >First, some of Ken Friedman's production photos:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;"> </div> <div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYO_kdkOQYzYMU0MPJ88qlBQo3mvZ4FI9szCPUsdPCsDDTixI2rcWKKNEVUzIGAF-6V3L6rupPqfAL0kt6vr40apZ1FlvdTP-sALChYk0cVKUjmMrXjgrxrgpSGH8otKp30B3Z/s1600-h/interrupt.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYO_kdkOQYzYMU0MPJ88qlBQo3mvZ4FI9szCPUsdPCsDDTixI2rcWKKNEVUzIGAF-6V3L6rupPqfAL0kt6vr40apZ1FlvdTP-sALChYk0cVKUjmMrXjgrxrgpSGH8otKp30B3Z/s320/interrupt.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070222827045920786" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Above, from left: Biff (Michael Navarra), </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Willy (Corey Fischer), Linda (Jeri Lynn Cohen) </span><span style="font-size:85%;">and<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">Happy (John Sousa)<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsPJJgG0nQo1MiJtCdxH1qJSNIsIeG_sJ_zsMR68TIYmPQ3ATmREFUGYl8r4_MQzhGUXubNzSQQwyIEmN8Qyn_yHu9faKMnCxJqiZq8Z-0tznRECbXwO4o9mOgegZuRvfd2Lyz/s1600-h/ben-family.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsPJJgG0nQo1MiJtCdxH1qJSNIsIeG_sJ_zsMR68TIYmPQ3ATmREFUGYl8r4_MQzhGUXubNzSQQwyIEmN8Qyn_yHu9faKMnCxJqiZq8Z-0tznRECbXwO4o9mOgegZuRvfd2Lyz/s320/ben-family.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070234054090432562" border="0" /></a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >Ben (Julian Lopez-Morillas), Biff, Happy, Willy, Linda</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left; font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGWWrmHbTIex6k9Bu3eXycoj4eUZGDWIAmzM9n81I6rojlbsAuWehqgy9ZVpwy26KWTHXj4ATWABA8kPbJXpcVPLQKcq9eG9Yl2tSDXVMvrypwuhcr01tnIe0FjYa69cqEM2e8/s1600-h/bern-willy.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGWWrmHbTIex6k9Bu3eXycoj4eUZGDWIAmzM9n81I6rojlbsAuWehqgy9ZVpwy26KWTHXj4ATWABA8kPbJXpcVPLQKcq9eG9Yl2tSDXVMvrypwuhcr01tnIe0FjYa69cqEM2e8/s320/bern-willy.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070219172028751778" border="0" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Bernard (Zac Jaffe) and Willy</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHPA1Kn9LiYWsZF4DsZdlVwdKI6GMREbQDo0TfUNWA3yLhIBQQPL6edCkAoGSnnL5nCiYC1HLy9ezrd0BN4PmtBq5UEyU4joSTaLablqiJY8bzIzgu8dliVnPH_O0qE04c7LlU/s1600-h/l-phone.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHPA1Kn9LiYWsZF4DsZdlVwdKI6GMREbQDo0TfUNWA3yLhIBQQPL6edCkAoGSnnL5nCiYC1HLy9ezrd0BN4PmtBq5UEyU4joSTaLablqiJY8bzIzgu8dliVnPH_O0qE04c7LlU/s320/l-phone.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070219180618686418" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:85%;">Linda<br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRx7xTTMyoL-FnSGUQzPVAlHC7Hm028y8ROzFSfFKx4Jfc26lyGzSnbca2JH1dKhHjLKwwtPYRzZVDG_w_j_EBtt6nhev8kddOTmQotaVbWNqI40XlIareh70ZZl3rzunHMsr3/s1600-h/poles.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRx7xTTMyoL-FnSGUQzPVAlHC7Hm028y8ROzFSfFKx4Jfc26lyGzSnbca2JH1dKhHjLKwwtPYRzZVDG_w_j_EBtt6nhev8kddOTmQotaVbWNqI40XlIareh70ZZl3rzunHMsr3/s320/poles.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070222831340888098" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">Biff, Linda, Willy and Happy<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7PP1P03IshcptAyRcDBYfDsXnecTRvHAqTg-q-bg-XDkIxy5Kuu9fKrvcfGyOE1AmCwwRNM1G7Nlo86vIAZNpcwNFJ30e6uzSPly1elMqqeXmAzCroIclB6Rgrxx6aslrNGrh/s1600-h/will-charley.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7PP1P03IshcptAyRcDBYfDsXnecTRvHAqTg-q-bg-XDkIxy5Kuu9fKrvcfGyOE1AmCwwRNM1G7Nlo86vIAZNpcwNFJ30e6uzSPly1elMqqeXmAzCroIclB6Rgrxx6aslrNGrh/s320/will-charley.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070222818455986162" border="0" /></a>Willy and Charley (Louis Parnell)<br /><br /></span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeVQMNLQIGEoMNHdtBm8GBUB3a6kQNAaG1Fy35vEwu6XmQ3lqH57z3exYujmgsKgWGPR0rSye2eHzNlsmkSHs3PLkfFryOe7AWPAAcYJVUW9ekHDujBF0y5HJURMLtiditJTcj/s1600-h/bar-slap.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeVQMNLQIGEoMNHdtBm8GBUB3a6kQNAaG1Fy35vEwu6XmQ3lqH57z3exYujmgsKgWGPR0rSye2eHzNlsmkSHs3PLkfFryOe7AWPAAcYJVUW9ekHDujBF0y5HJURMLtiditJTcj/s320/bar-slap.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070219167733784466" border="0" /></a>Biff, Happy, Willy<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-sP-hZ4BLDZoTGJYzbO5vDoAkjONqch1Uh73Ug6EaQu25vRqey1YrcYI2V7IFn6n1V8wc-I6cG1nciDAbpzB6GqhFnN1JCzinWF2uwSi5X5my9T15WVL8LI10TyVrjws_SNb8/s1600-h/hap-girls-bar.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-sP-hZ4BLDZoTGJYzbO5vDoAkjONqch1Uh73Ug6EaQu25vRqey1YrcYI2V7IFn6n1V8wc-I6cG1nciDAbpzB6GqhFnN1JCzinWF2uwSi5X5my9T15WVL8LI10TyVrjws_SNb8/s320/hap-girls-bar.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070222818455986146" border="0" /></a>Letta (Meghan Doyle), Happy and Miss Forsythe (Juliet Strong)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivyUNVdlMTTibarbJzp9R97HlVlI8v23IlAhKY8V9qu35lGBQklgi11cW6-RclSOpzgUGVQWXBzSvhmigRCBXWq1gG15UpR6GKlBjA6WDY36yjNCbn41LV0ytzJ2wPqTM10gZ1/s1600-h/w-jen.Jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivyUNVdlMTTibarbJzp9R97HlVlI8v23IlAhKY8V9qu35lGBQklgi11cW6-RclSOpzgUGVQWXBzSvhmigRCBXWq1gG15UpR6GKlBjA6WDY36yjNCbn41LV0ytzJ2wPqTM10gZ1/s320/w-jen.Jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5070222822750953474" border="0" /></a>Willy and Jenny (Juliet Strong)</span><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"> <p class="corey"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" >Here’s the latest sampling of reviews and responses that continue to appear. Remember, only ten more performances. Go to </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.atjt.com/">www.atjt.com</a></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" > for tickets and schedule.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style=""><o:p></o:p>From Stephanie Hunt, actor, director, teacher and charter member of Word for Word<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">At the end of the year wrap-up class for our theater going class, [Stephanie teaches at Sonoma State] we ask the students what stayed with them – what images, productions, performances stayed with them.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Many students chose <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i>.</span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Below is Maria's [<b style="">Maria Magdalena Giordano</b>, a student] impassioned letter for me to pass on (not her formal paper for class).</span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">“I have never seen a Linda Loman like that before.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">She was a powerhouse, so real, and deeply moving.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Everyone did a truly amazing job.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Biff was heartbreaking and perfect, really captured the ruined glory of the American Boy.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Happy, a role that can frequently fade into the background of the play, stood out as a truly sleazy character, who was always the second favorite son, and who turned to vengeful immorality to get his own back.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I never realized what a "bum" Happy really is, until I saw this production. It's always a greater challenge to play a character that is irredeemable, but this actor excelled at it.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Kudos.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Every member of the cast was excellent.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">And Willie was brilliant.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">His fate, his hope, his disappointments, I was hanging on every word, totally connected to his psyche.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I started to cry even before the culminating moment.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The tragedy was like an inescapable hell hound, that would not let me go.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The moment of Willy's death, when Linda screamed, it was like I was finally grabbed by the neck and shaken by the dog.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I began to weep, sob, and I kept crying uncontrollably for the rest of the play, through the curtain call and half of the drive home.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I have never been so moved in a theater, in my life.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I may cry, I am a sympathetic/empathetic person, far from made of stone, but this was an experience I have never had before.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Just thinking about it again, I have water all over my face.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I am supremely grateful to these performers.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is an excellent play, but they brought it to life in a way I would never have imagined possible.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I will never forget this show.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I've been marked on my soul.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Bravo & Brava.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I'm an actor myself and this production only confirms why theatre is my religion.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Catharsis doesn't even begin to cover it.” </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style=""><i style=""><span style="">'Death' offers fresh wisdom </span></i></b></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span><a href="mailto:pcraig@cctimes.com?subject=ContraCostaTimes.com:%20%27Death%27%20offers%20fresh%20wisdom">By Pat Craig</a>, <a href="mailto:pcraig@cctimes.com?subject=ContraCostaTimes.com:%20%27Death%27%20offers%20fresh%20wisdom">CONTRA COSTA TIMES</a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Article Launched: 05/22/2007 03:03:52 AM PDT<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p>It shouldn't be surprising a lot can change in 40 years.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">The first time I saw Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," 40-some years ago, I was a son in my mid-teens.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">When I saw it a few weeks ago, at A Traveling Jewish Theatre's stunning revival, my eyes were those of the father of a grown son.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">A lot of water had churned beneath the bridge during those four decades, bringing new perspective and considerably more appreciation of Willy Loman's futile battle against the invincible foes, time and change.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">That sort of personal perspective on Miller's 1949 classic is probably nothing unique. The play has wisdom and poignancy by the case-full. But you tend to forget that.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">That is one of a number of things making A Traveling Jewish Theatre's revival such a treat. There simply hasn't been a first-rate new production of the play in some time, which leaves it recalled in only the most vague terms.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">But, to steal a line from Willy, attention must be paid -- the work is far too important, far too well-written and far too meaningful to be slipped into the deep pocket where old plays are hidden.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">Enriching the TJT production, too, is the exploring of the play's "Jewishness," something that is certainly there, if you look for it. And in this production there are dozens of tiny details that make the Jewish side of the play quite evident and visible.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">Yet it remains a universal story about the son of immigrants, Willy (in a stunning, tenderly nuanced performance by Corey Fischer) assimilating into America and the American way. He is a salesman, after all, and there's nothing more American than a drummer out on the territory looking for business.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">But the orders haven't been coming for Willy for some time now. He's even been borrowing money to get by until the dry spell blows over. He hasn't told his wife, Linda (Jeri Lynn Cohen, breathing intensity into a memorable character), just like he hasn't told her about, you know, the other gal (Meghan Doyle) on the road whom he's been seeing for a while now. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">And the boys, Happy (John Sousa) and Biff (Michael Navarra) -- they haven't worked out the way Willy dreamed they would. Of course, the old man has disappointed them about as much as they've disappointed him.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">In fact, the air is thick with disappointment and shattered dreams, including the American Dream, which has somehow eluded the entire Loman family.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">The story and the acting, and Aaron Davidman's direction, however, are golden, filled with beautiful flourishes and details that make the play breathlessly alive and remarkably meaningful for anyone who has been bruised or disillusioned, even ever so slightly, by life.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">What makes the production even more impressive is a tone that flits between dark and light, holding out hope, then snatching it away in the most brutal way. This story of Willy Loman is not a pretty thing, but it is impossible to believe there are not countless Willys out there, silently waiting to die, yet dreaming of somehow pulling off a big finish.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p><b style="">From a high school student’s English class report:<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">…King Lear made me feel that he is still a child and Willy made me feel the same.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The woman who played Linda was great because she made me feel the hardships of being a mother.</span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">I agree that the theme is universal because any family can relate to the play… It seemed like the family as a whole were all at fault.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Willy for having too much hubris, Linda for being too lenient, and the two sons for being selfish.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The sons really reminded me of my Dad’s side of the family, blaming everything on living in Vietnam and not even trying to make a living….</span></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span> </p><p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">From author William Poy Lee<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <span style="font-size:100%;">I have not seen "Death" since I use to usher for ACT in the 1960's. This version was brilliantly performed and portraying Willy as Jewish explained so much. Truly Miller had created a crypto-Jewish character. I don't know if you've been able to read much of The Eighth Promise, but the themes of assimilation at the cost of one's old roots, wisdom tradition, and ethnic identity resonate strongly in my book too, only openly. I mean roots also in the sense of being connected to soil that grows and sustains you, that "smells" like you and is in your nutritional system and into which you deposit nitrogen fertilizer in return.<br /><br />Interesting, that my father who wanted so badly to assimilate completely and be successful in the way that Willy hungered for also wanted to plant vegetables after his major heart attack. He was able to do so in my back yard while recuperating here. And every day, he went out and watered the plants and veggies and my lawn until he was well enough to return to Chinatown. Unlike my mother, my father had turned his back on our old ways -- and here he was, reaching out to soil and its cycles of flowering when death came visiting.<br /><br />With deep gratitude, William Poy Lee<br />For information on William's new book about gtrowing about Chinese-American in San Francisco, visit <a href="http://www.theeighthpromise.com/">www.theeighthpromise.com<br /></a><br /><b style="">From friend and fan, Elaine Starkman (a writer and editor)<o:p></o:p></b><p></p> <p class="corey">What an absolutely stunning play and stunning performance. You must be utterly<br />exhausted when you finish & twice in one day? Wow!<span style=""> </span>was reminded of my beloved father, but he was less ambitious for his two daughters and by the time he hit 60, he learned to relax, a kindly soul.</p> <p class="corey"><o:p> </o:p><br /><b style="">By<span style=""> </span>Richard Connema on the <a href="http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/sanfran/">Talkin’ Broadway</a> website<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="corey">I have seen many actors play Willy Loman, including Lee J. Cobb who originated the wonderful character. Since then I have seen George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Quinn and Brian Dennehy in the role. Willy Loman and his family were anonymous, and those actors offered a generalization of a kind of American everyman. The character was stripped of a particular milieu and culture.</p> <p class="corey">Corey Fischer is superb playing a salesman with a New York Jewish accent. He plays the role as a character with one foot in Brooklyn and the other in the shtetl. There is a Jewish quality about Miller's masterful dialogue in the conversations between Willy and his wife Linda. Willy's schizophrenic conversations between real people and his dream people are engaging. The conversations with Uncle Ben, played strongly by Julian Lopez-Morillas, are striking.</p> <p class="corey">Jeri Lynn Cohen is perfect as Willy's wife Linda. She is crucially passionate and affectingly as Linda preserves the magnitude and self-esteem of her husband.</p> <p class="corey">Michael Navarra gives an outstanding performance as the salesman Biff. His changing from a high school football star to a man in his thirties who can't find himself is first rate. John Sousa is fascinating in his portrayal of Happy, the younger brother, an over-anxious man/child who wants desperately to be loved by his father.</p> <p class="corey">Louis Parnell gives a good performance as the smug Charley who is defiant in his ignorance of things American, especially sports, but is still sympathetic to Willy's problems, even when he is being insulted by the salesman. Zac Jaffee gives a fine performance as Bernard.</p> <p class="corey">Meghan Doyle, Juliet Strong and Danny Webber give sharp performances in supporting roles. Aaron Davidman's direction is excellent as the scenes between fantasy and reality flow smoothly. Giulio Perrone's set is sparse which allows the audience to concentrate on the great performances of the cast. The production is enhanced by a live performance of a lovely, sorrowful score by cellist Jessica Ivry throughout the drama.</p> </span></div></div>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-88674727087296213852007-04-11T21:36:00.000-07:002007-05-09T21:50:20.716-07:00Responses to "Salesman"<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbGAxGnB1U14GT94YAktA5CIPlkFVMghRX0Rh8PmguNhVBFUxlvpPE5_ZfmaSndQnPDUlQhWckneT8J0IVU9d9b9DPZXQ9BvZkj7S3XfnqIpZiVPu68hyymza1g9uHRtS0eh40/s1600-h/07_dos_w-b.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbGAxGnB1U14GT94YAktA5CIPlkFVMghRX0Rh8PmguNhVBFUxlvpPE5_ZfmaSndQnPDUlQhWckneT8J0IVU9d9b9DPZXQ9BvZkj7S3XfnqIpZiVPu68hyymza1g9uHRtS0eh40/s320/07_dos_w-b.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5052396901227068226" border="0" /></a></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Death of a Salesman opened Sunday, April 8 to an audience of 200+ at the Project Artaud Theatre. We're about to begin our second week in Mountain View. Here’s an <span style="font-weight: bold;">updated</span> mix of responses from audience members and critics. Please add your comments after you see the play. For tickets, call (415) 522-0786 or go to </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://www.atjt.com/"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">www.atjt.com</span></a><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;">From</span>: audience member Mark Schlesinger<br /><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >I wanted to let both of you know how much we enjoyed ATJT’s production of <span style="font-style: italic;">Death of a Salesman</span>. I’ve seen the play a few times over the years (including the production starring Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich on Broadway) <span style="font-style: italic;">but none of them, in my opinion, came close to this version</span>. Please extend my thanks and congratulations to Aaron, as well as to Corey Fischer, Jerri Lynn Cohen, Michael Navarra, John Sousa </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;" >and the rest of the excellent cast for providing such a wonderful, poignant, and thought-provoking experience. Needless to say, it made Christine and me very proud to be supporters of ATJT.<o:p></o:p></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-size:100%;" > </span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><br /></span> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">From <a href="http://www.goldstarevents.com/">www.goldstarevents.com</a>: </b><br /></span></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Goldstar gives TJT's production of "Death of a Salesman," its "Roar of the Crowd award." Here's a sampling of what their patrons have said: Marc Mayer raves, "Fantastically acted and directed. A real treat. Poignant, insightful, polemical, masterful, and overarchingly enjoyable." Debora Simcovich calls this production "first-rate theatre." Maxine Einhorn lauds, "Brilliant performances. I loved it." Judith Guerriero tells us, "Incredible acting, a deep and wonderful rendering of this classic Miller play." Steven Foerder calls Death of a Salesman "A very powerful and enjoyable tour de force by all cast members." Kenneth Hempel </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> simply states, "Very worthwhile." And finally,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Ira Okun says the play "still has important meaning for </span><span style="font-size:100%;">this generation."</span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">From Sam Hurwitt’s review in the East Bay Express </b><a href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-04-11/culture/pay-attention/">www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-04-11/culture/pay-attention/</a></span> </p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Most astonishing is the performance of TJT cofounder Corey Fischer as Willy Loman. It's all there in his body, all the stubborn pride and insistent insecurities, his tall frame slumped and getting only more painfully hunched in on itself as the play goes on. You can hear it in his incessant, animated ramblings, whether talking to people actually in the room or those in his head. Seemingly without taking a breath, he slides from sputtering anger to swellings of garrulous pride that crumple as easily as they come. When he stoops to pick up his boss' lighter, you can hear the air going out of not just him, but the entire room.</span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Willy's moments of good cheer increasingly become more heartrending than those of overt bitterness or desperation. There's a haunting, childlike innocence in the way he tells his neighbor, "Charley, you're the only friend I got. Isn't that a remarkable thing?" It hits harder than if Willy weren't trying so hard to put the best face on it. As he shuffles off with his shoulders hunched high and his arms gesticulating, it's hard not to get a little teary. Somehow it's so much worse when he smiles.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Also absolutely devastating is son Biff's big face-off against a father with whom he is always at odds. Michael Navarra gives Biff's resentment and outsize physicality just the right amount of underlying solicitude, guilt, and longing for approval. John Sousa is a wonderfully twitchy bundle of nerves, lusts, and aspirations as younger son Happy; the brothers are all manic energy and starry-eyed adulation as boys whenever Willy's mind drifts into the past.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">Robert Avila writing in the SF Bay Guardian<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">When Arthur Miller — through the character of Linda Loman (Jeri Lynn Cohen), model of the devoted, long-suffering wife and mother — implores the audience to notice the "terrible thing" happening to her husband, Willy, the United States was in the throes of an unprecedented postwar boom. Miller's observation of the tragic dimensions of a nation of small and hollow men and women, of dreamers, of sellers fooled by their own pitches, came as a revelation. Nearly 60 downwardly mobile years on, the Traveling Jewish Theater's not-to-be-missed staging brings fresh attention and fine skill to the Jewish inflection in Miller's American story, whose sheer ordinariness — its pitiful material distress, class shame, and wrenchingly anonymous sadness — still burns with indignation and rebuke. Indeed, for all its period charm (with Project Artaud's capacious stage, under Jim Cave's mood-laden lighting, turned into a blend of home and highway by scenic designer Giulio Cesare Perrone), the desperation feels utterly contemporary. TJT cofounder Corey Fischer leads director Aaron Davidman's excellent cast with a stirring and memorable turn as Loman — a simultaneously hunched and towering figure of a man whose daydreams and memories (augmented here by composer-cellist Jessica Ivry's wistful score) invade the action, dramatically dissolving the broken line between fiction and reality attendant on the American dream and an unraveling ego.</span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><b style="">From Evan Specter, long-time TJT audience/community member<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Death of Salesman is for me quintessential TJT: an economy- a bare quorum of props and set, allowing the lightscape and soundscape (egad, a live cellist!?) to amplify the effect of the ensemble’s deep rapport with each other and the material.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Each production element selflessly serves its purpose, just as each scene of the script takes Willy inexorably towards his complete dissolution, and us with him.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">I am a father and a son and the pangs radiated from onstage of inadequacy and expectation resonate deeply without manipulation.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">And yet the play doesn’t make it easy to pass judgment on Biff or Willy – and so it keeps me on the edge of my seat, unable to simply condemn or redeem myself along with them.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Somehow by not making an obvious parable, it touches more deeply.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">On a subtler level, in the depiction of a man’s exquisite disintegration, I see an aspect of my own scattered consciousness pretty fairly represented. For example, in the scene with present-day Bernard, “the anemic”, Willy progresses from a puffing, blustery "Biff is working on something really big” to an entreating ask about the secret to success, and then back to a bluster/fluster about what happened in Boston, I puff and fluster right along with him… and the intensity is building; the rifts in Willy’s coherence are spreading. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">The mercurial flip-flops to me feel so familiar and real somehow- and on some level isn’t that how we all are- saying one thing one moment and contradicting it the next in deed or word... so for me it's not just a story of a person's dissolution but it describes a part of us that clings to a way of looking at things, that makes pronouncements about reality but secretly doubts them, that overwrites personal history so many times we don't know what really happened anymore. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">I am reminded of my aging grandmother in Palm Beach, alone and bitter with a memory that is giving way to fantasy, and a growing paranoia and litany of regrets.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">She is so looking forward to my visit, and yet when I arrive she will ask when will I be coming again?</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Will I be kind as Linda or cruel as Hap?</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">And I observe in my own mind certain voices and characters summoned up by the play:</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a business venture untaken, imaginings about successful acquaintances, a hidden hosebib of resignation.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Great theater does this to me:</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">casts a penetrating light on present relationships and leaves haunting cello tones echoing in my mind.<o:p></o:p></span></p><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >"Jewish take on Arthur Miller classic succeeds brilliantly"<br />by dan pine, in <span style="font-style: italic;"> J. the Jewish Weekly <br /></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/32174/format/html/displaystory.html">(click here for full review)</a></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" ><br /></span> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Fischer, as Willy, contorts himself into a shuffling arthritic, bone weary and failing fast. Yet Willy is capable of a febrile imperiousness that drives his wife and kids nuts. Though his character never heard of “bipolar disease,” Fischer brilliantly navigates Willy’s violent mood swings. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Michael Navarra and John Sousa as Biff and Happy are marvelous together, conveying genuine brotherly love corrupted by Willy’s patriarchal smothering. The Loman brothers’ doomed-to-fail “big deal” gives Willy the cruelest of false hopes, and both actors milk their characters’ ambivalence about it. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Jeri Lynn Cohen balances Linda’s inborn grace with perpetual fear of knocking over her husband’s widening gyre. Miller gives Linda some of the play’s most iconic lines, but Cohen wisely plays them straight. Her performance is a model of tissue-level commitment to a role. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">The supporting cast is uniformly superb, especially Louis Parnell, who mines maximum humor out of Willy’s neighbor, Charley, and Meghan Doyle as Willy’s sometime mistress, the ditz who unwittingly triggers the Loman family’s implosion.<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Much praise also goes to Jessica Ivry, whose live musical accompaniment, scored for solo cello, provides heartbreakingly apt counterpoint to the drama. Though Miller’s original stage directions called for flute, it’s hard to imagine anything more evocative than Ivry’s ominous pizzicato as Willy’s world crumbles. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Davidman’s staging augments Miller’s dialogue, especially with such touches as the upright, bird’s-eye-view bed (doubling as the Loman marriage bed and Willy’s out-of-town den of sin). Parading the entire cast, ghostlike, during some of Willy’s hallucinations, Davidman turns “Salesman” into ballet. And having his actors talk over each other in some scenes, he mimics the kind of repartee heard in a Howard Hawks film noir thriller. It, too, works beautifully. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">At age 33, Arthur Miller wrote “Salesman” in a short burst of Promethean inspiration. Any production, no matter how modest, will reflect some of that greatness. With Traveling Jewish Theatre’s take, Miller’s fiery spirit has never burned brighter. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="corey"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" >Rob Hurwitt writing in the SF Chronicle</span><span style="font-size:100%;">:<br /><a href="http://http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/10/DDG2DP4LN61.DTL&type=performance">click for full review</a><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Jeri Lynn Cohen is a vital Linda, forcefully, affectingly maintaining the importance and dignity of her husband against the ridicule and hostility of their sons and others. A potent, angry Michael Navarra and amoral John Sousa add riveting depth to the sons' struggles with their father's fatal commitment to a false American dream. </span></p><p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sharp performances by Zac Jaffee, Meghan Doyle, Julian López-Morillas, Louis Parnell, Danny Webber and Juliet Strong help ground the drama.</span></p><h4><a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://www.sfweekly.com/feedback/index.php?author_email=chloe@chloeveltman.com&headline=Rebirth%20of%20a%20Classic&issuedate=2007-04-18">Chloe Veltman</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> in the SF Weekly:</span><br /></h4><p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </p><p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="corey">One of the most powerful aspects of Davidman's staging is his creation of a psychic space on stage. Crisp lighting changes, from white, denoting "reality," to the warm orange of Willy's fantasy life, draw an efficient line between the play's two states. Jessica Ivry's live cello music, heard every time the action slips into Willy's over-ripe imagination, fluidly accentuates the divide. The barren stage, scattered with a few random pieces of furniture like wallflowers at a cocktail party and scarred with the white markings of the open road, suggests isolation and loneliness. In short, we feel like we are looking at the insides of Willy's head. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="corey"><span style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">And what a head it is. As portrayed by Fischer, Willy is a man clutching desperately to his last vestiges of reason. Rattling around the stage with his beat-up valises, alternately bursting with aggressive ebullience and crippled despair, this Willy is a spluttering light bulb about to spend its fuse. Taking his cues from Ivry's cello, Fischer gives an extremely physical performance. When Ivry plays a sprightly pizzicato, Fischer lightens up. His long frame extends and his whole body seems to fill with air. But when the cello changes its tune to the plodding shuffle of a worn old man, so Fischer's body appears to collapse on itself. The muscles on his face tighten. He walks with an uneven, exhausted gait. The scenes between Willy and his eldest son, Biff (Michael Navarra), bring the actor's physical command of his character to the fore. The greater Biff's frustration grows, the more contorted Willy's body becomes. The full horror and pathos of Miller's tragedy can be seen in the interactions between these two characters.</span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="corey"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </p> <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" ></span>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-82736783735609327362007-03-17T18:40:00.000-07:002007-03-17T18:50:36.464-07:00death of a salesman<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbp1nSyhxUSZduiqUeQUNS1w-E4OWLQVDuuwmN7CeB9YCpCMlc18bLr3oSjr-d9kZNnWLLq2ftT7GD17T2Bx5e5AjKlkP_U_Ev_7IYkIz3WduJ5YyAcL1dl1hpgHvTsbsJVm-t/s1600-h/07_DOS_B-W-L-3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbp1nSyhxUSZduiqUeQUNS1w-E4OWLQVDuuwmN7CeB9YCpCMlc18bLr3oSjr-d9kZNnWLLq2ftT7GD17T2Bx5e5AjKlkP_U_Ev_7IYkIz3WduJ5YyAcL1dl1hpgHvTsbsJVm-t/s320/07_DOS_B-W-L-3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5043074246995911202" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Death of a Salesman </span>starts previews on April 5 and opens on April 8, 2007. The buzz has started. Watch for a cover story in the J Weekly and get your tickets before they sell out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">For schedule and tickets, <a href="http://www.atjt.com/current-season/07_dos.html">click here</a>.<br /><br />Here's what Corey Fischer wrote about the reasons TJT is taking on this formidable challenge:</span><br /><p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">In February, 2007, TJT begins work on a breakthrough production of Arthur Miller’s <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i> that will reclaim the Jewish context that Miller, writing in 1949, felt constrained to “censor out,” attempting to create an ethnically unmarked family whose struggles would have “universal” appeal.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Our production is directed by our Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman. <span style=""> </span>Corey Fischer and TJT Associate Artist Jeri Lynn Cohen play Willy and Linda. Scenic design is by Giulio Cesare Perrone (designer of our productions <i>Opening to You</i> and <i>Isaac)</i>.<span style=""> </span></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">Jess Ivry, whom TJT audiences will remember from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Bright River</span>, will perform her original, solo cello score live throughout the run.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-size: 100%;">Why a Jewish <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i>?</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">TJT has always held, as a working principle, that universality can only come from specificity.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">We’re certainly not alone in this view; more and more late 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> century writers, artists and thinkers have moved beyond the notion that specific ethnic or cultural markers needed to be jettisoned in order to create works of a truly <i style="">universal </i>value.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">This mid-century notion may have been a reaction of second generation immigrants to the limitations of the “old world.”</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">What I find fascinating is that, almost in spite of himself, Miller created a character (Willy Loman) who is caught is that very struggle to assimilate, to re-invent himself as an American free of the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the shtetl or the ghetto.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">But Miller, in 1949, was perhaps – as a writer, anyway – caught in that struggle himself and felt bound to make Willy a generic American. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Willy Loman was recognized as a crypto-Jew as far back as 1951, when one of the most accomplished actors of the Yiddish theatre, Joseph Buloff,</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">translated the play into Yiddish and played the role of Willy.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">The production was a huge success in New York and on tour.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">George Ross wrote, in a review of the Yiddish <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i>: </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">“The great success of Joseph Buloff's production is that it brings the play "home." The effect is remarkable. Buloff has caught Miller, as it were, in the act of changing his name…”</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">And just last year, the contemporary Jewish playwright Karen Hartman wrote,</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><i>“Death of a Salesman</i> suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling "kind of temporary" about oneself. The play's Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.<br /><br />I'd suggest that the psychically fluid structure of <i>Salesman</i> tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it's impossible to envision the shifting structure of <i>Angels in America</i> without <i>Death of a Salesman</i>, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail.”</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">(<a href="http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131">http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">So the intention behind our production is to restore those missing “clues.” </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style=""> </span>Unlike the infamous production of <i style="">The Crucible</i> by New York’s Wooster Group (it was subject to a cease and desist order initiated by Arthur Miller) TJT will take no liberties with the text, but will, rather, explore it from its own particular perspective and esthetic – that of a contemporary Jewish ensemble theatre.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">As Karen Hartman points out, Miller was not entirely successful in purging all yiddishkeit from his<span style=""> </span>play.<span style=""> </span>It reveals itself in the monitory cadence of a line like<span style=""> </span>“Attention must be paid..” <span style=""> </span>Ross, referring to this line, writes: “Here, and in many places, one felt in the English version as if Miller were thinking in Yiddish and unconsciously translating…and sometimes when his English filters through the density of his background, it succeeds in picking up flavor on the way.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">For a company who has based its 28 year-old reputation on the creation of original work and the development of new plays across a variety of forms, engaging with an iconic American play can be seen as a radical new direction. Likewise, realizing that the largest part of its work has looked toward the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora, the <i style="">Shoah</i>, the Middle-East for inspiration, we want to explore the <i style="">American</i> Jewish experience of the last few decades; the period in which American Jewish identity went through such surprising transformations.</span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-80153341222757871192007-01-15T23:09:00.000-08:002007-01-15T23:17:29.935-08:00Responses to Rose<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">From Colleagues:<o:p></o:p></span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: arial;"><o:p></o:p><br /><br />Naomi:<br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Your performance tonight was stunning. Congratulations. Mazel Tov. The play is fantastic and your work in it truly brilliant. You are an inspiration. Thanks for the great work, your </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">perseverance</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">, your style and strength and depth and humor.</span><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Much love, </span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Nina (Nina Wise, improviser, writer, teacher and performance artist)</span><o:p></o:p></span></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Naomi:<br />Hope you are able to catch your breath and get some rest after all the excitement last night. What a lovely evening and what a glorious performance! The whole theatre was spellbound...everyone was with you and I heard at least three people say that they felt like they were the only one in the room with you...it felt that intimate. You have created such a wonderful character...thank goodness you found her or she found you...whichever. I hope the rest of the run is as exhilarating. I know it is a lot of work and ton of energy...really, I don't know how you do it. But I can't wait to come and see it again. As it can only grower richer and deeper. All my love to you and a blessing on your long run,<br />Jeri Lynn (TJT Associate Artist)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span><i style=""><span style="">From the Community:<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Hi Devra:<br />My friends and I loved Rose on Saturday night. I don't know how Naomi Newman does it, but she was riveting and inhabits her character. This should have a great run...<br />Rose Katz<br />Program Coordinator<br />BJE Jewish Community Library<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Dear Devra:<br />Naomi was amazing. I will spread the word about "Rose" and please pass along my warmest compliments on Ms. Newman's amazing work!<br />David Rachleff, MSW</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Hi Devra<br />My husband and I saw Rose last weekend up in San Francisco and we loved it!<span style=""> </span><br />I am teaching an upper-division class -- writing about the Holocaust -- and I am hoping I can organize a trip to see the show. We would need 12-15 tickets. Is that possible?<span style=""> </span>Let me know.<br />Thanks so much!!<br />Jill<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span><i style=""><span style="">From the Critics<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">J the Jewish news weekly:</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">It may be old hat to Newman to hold a rapt audience in the palm of her hand, but it never gets old for theatergoers, including the appreciative ones that packed the house on opening night Sunday, Jan. 7…</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sherman saves several juicy surprises for the final minutes, tying together various threads and lending to the play –– and Rose –– a fitting coda to a life well lived.<span style=""> </span>credit Sherman with giving Rose a great sense of humor. Recalling her idyllic shtetl girlhood, at one point she wonders aloud if she’s really remembering it, or just thinking of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Rose is a cut-up, but a mortally wounded one. She sits shiva for good reasons… Joan Mankin’s direction is appropriately understated, with subtle touches of light and sound evoking far away memories. She wisely leaves the heavy lifting to Newman, who pulls it off with aplomb… Newman may have remained seated for two hours, but it was the audience that stood, cheering, at the end. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p></o:p>SF Chronicle:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Newman invests [<i style="">Rose</i>] with grace notes of sly humor, wry self-consciousness and touching warmth.</span></span></p><p class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Please post your response using the "comment" option below.</span><br /><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-61677326949312664182007-01-08T19:51:00.000-08:002007-01-08T20:08:02.480-08:00TJT's ROSE blossoms<a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7UMzoxMZOztp6Jn4vHL5tLAqYqZ-G0wzBQYojXbGlYXaYWQ9c8VdibduPEzQOcTEdazuPMHywOzFtxM5OAPVpfXlEyYJyTEYpPUzGoMQ1okZopyomxxIy_54xadQO2sGxdna/s1600-h/roselogo.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7UMzoxMZOztp6Jn4vHL5tLAqYqZ-G0wzBQYojXbGlYXaYWQ9c8VdibduPEzQOcTEdazuPMHywOzFtxM5OAPVpfXlEyYJyTEYpPUzGoMQ1okZopyomxxIy_54xadQO2sGxdna/s320/roselogo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5017874395096927970" border="0" /></a><br /><p class="corey" style="font-family:arial;">Rose opened last night to one of the longest standing ovations I’ve ever seen in our theatre.<span style=""> </span>I’ve been working with Naomi since 1968.<span style=""> </span>Forty years this summer.<span style=""> </span>I’m happy to say this is the best work I’ve ever seen her do.<span style=""> </span>I wasn’t personally involved with this production and didn’t see any rehearsals until the last one before previews began. I loved what I saw but on Sunday night, I witnessed the play, the character and the performance fusing into an incandescent whole.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="corey" style="font-family:arial;">As Aaron Davidman said afterwards, it was a triumph of storytelling. Theatre as storytelling.<span style=""> </span>Storytelling as theatre.<span style=""> </span>Naomi, alone on stage for over two hours (which go by with a fluidity we rarely get to experience in the jangle of our days), illuminates Rose’s personal history as it intersects the wounded landscape of modern Jewish, European, Middle-Eastern and American history.<span style=""> </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">Together with our associate artist, Joan Mankin, who directed the production, Naomi has shaped a performance in which artifice disappears, effort vanishes and craft is subsumed into an act of witnessing as generous as it is courageous.</p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">I was reminded of Antonin Artaud’s call for a theatre in which the stakes were so high, it would be as if the actor were “signaling through the flames.”</p> <p class="corey" style="font-family:arial;">Sherman, the playwright, subverts almost all our expectations of what an 80 year-old Jewish woman might have to say about the <span style=""> </span>life in a Ukrainian shtetl, the Warsaw Ghetto, Israel and Palestine, love and sex and grief, tumbleweeds and motion pictures.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="corey" style="font-family:arial;">Neuroscientists have been saying a lot about “mirror neurons” lately. When you see someone drink a glass of water and find yourself salivating, that’s your neurons firing in a pattern that mirrors the activity of the drinker’s neurons.<span style=""> </span>Same thing when we see someone smile or frown or weep or laugh. <span style=""> </span>Experiencing Rose, my neurons got quite a work out, as they mirrored Rose’s/Naomi’s sudden, unexpected shifts between <span style=""> </span>exhilaration and irony, joy and fear, shock and regret, heartbreak and helpless laughter.</p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">-Corey Fischer, founding member<br /></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="corey">For tickets, go to our <a href="http://www.atjt.com/">website</a>.</p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-1166495026240250332006-12-18T18:08:00.000-08:002006-12-18T19:25:13.390-08:00<a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2253/4096/1600/526096/liz.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2253/4096/320/494923/liz.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(153, 0, 0); font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" >Report from Our Trip East<br /><br /></span><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" spt="75" preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:formulas> <v:path extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" connecttype="rect"> <o:lock ext="edit" aspectratio="t"> </v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_s1026" type="#_x0000_t75" style="'position:absolute;" wrapcoords="-115 0 -115 21532 21600 21532 21600 0 -115 0"> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\corey\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\01\clip_image001.png" title=""> <w:wrap type="tight"> </v:shape><![if gte mso 9]><o:oleobject type="Embed" progid="MSPhotoEd.3" shapeid="_x0000_s1026" drawaspect="Content" objectid="_1227970505"> </o:OLEObject> <![endif]><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family:arial;">This is Corey writing again.</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><span style="font-family:arial;">In the previous post, we told you, among other things, about the origin of the Prayer Project, our collaboration with Liz Lerman (that’s her on the left) and her company, the Dance Exchange (D.E.).</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><span style="font-family:arial;">On November 12, Aaron, Naomi and I traveled to </span><st1:place style="font-family: arial;"><st1:city>Washington</st1:city> <st1:state>D.C.</st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family:arial;"> to spend a week with Liz and members of her company learning more about the ways each group worked and planning the future development of the piece.</span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Our visit coincided with an “Institute” that the D. E. was conducting. We would participate in parts of it, joining the dozen or so other participants and three D.E. members Cassie Meador, Elizabeth Johnson and Matt Mahaney who were co-leading with Liz. The rest of the time we’d work in another studio with one or more of the leaders developing some material we had brought with us.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >The Institute was close to what we might call a workshop. It combined instruction, research, improvisation and group process. For the D.E., institutes are an opportunity to begin exploring a new area – like prayer – and to teach the very special compositional tools they have developed as well as to bring in some needed income. The participants came from D.C. and elsewhere and included a couple of experienced young dancers, a retired school teacher who used a wheelchair, one of D.C.’s most respected actresses, an African-American museum curator, several students, an academic, a writer and a woman who created and taught Kabalistic chants. All of them had worked with Liz or her company members before and had a deep appreciation for Liz’s values and processes and for the D.E.’s performance work.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Someday I would love to sit at Liz’s feet and hear the story of how she came to know what she knows. In the meantime, I refer you to the <a href="http://www.danceexchange.org/toolbox/essay.asp?Line=5">Dance Exchange website</a> where you’ll find one of several thought-provoking essays. (You'll need to register once you get there.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >In our first work session we showed a movement score that we had developed during the past two weeks of work back home. It was derived from the shapes of the Hebrew letters that make up the Sh’ma, one of Judaism’s central prayers, which says: “Listen, people of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Israel</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" > (lit. those who struggle with God), God, your God is One.” The Sh’ma can be translated to emphasize either the monotheistic aspect of Judaism – “Listen, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Israel</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >, the Lord alone is our God” or the non-dual nature of divinity: “God is one.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >After running through our score, in unison, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Elizabeth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >, Cassie and Matt began work with us to find ways of partnering each other and a greater dynamic range of movement. We were immediately stuck by the ease in which these three young artists were able to share the role of director, effortlessly passing the leadership between themselves, building on each other’s ideas with no sense of ownership of those ideas, no ego and no attachment. In the D.E.’s process, the work “belongs” to no one or to everyone. The creative space is a commons. After working for three hours or so we had evolved a much more complex and fugue-like score that included lifts and carries, surprising shifts in tempo and movements that were different from any we had ever done. Cassie, Elizabeth and Matt were able to work with each of us in ways that both supported our strengths and challenged us to stretch our individual, often self-imposed, limits.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >The next day we worked with Liz on personal stories each of us had begun to develop in SF as short, solo hybrids of language, narrative and movement. Liz was incredibly quick to grasp the heart of each story and to build on what we had done. One of her principles became very clear: let the movement and the language each do something different; verbal and movement languages can each give different information and thus create a kind of tension that can open up a third space in the consciousness of the audience. For example, working with my story of the open-heart surgery I had two and on half years ago, she had me unhook my voice from any attempt to carry the emotion. Working with opposites: using a casual, unemotional voice while the movement became increasingly charged. (All this, of course, is much harder to “get” from a verbal description than it is from seeing it. For that, you’ll have to wait until spring, 2008, or until we have time to upload some video.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Aaron and Naomi and I also had various experiences outside the studio that informed our work. At an exhibit at the Smithsonian, Aaron was deeply moved by a photograph of the Cambridge scholar of Judaica, Solomon Shechter, in the process of sorting through hundreds of thousands of scraps of damaged, flawed or superannuated Hebrew scriptures that had been acquired from the Cairo Genizah, the repository for sacred texts waiting to be buried in a special ritual for that purpose. He took that image of the bearded old man intensely absorbed by fragments of the sacred into the studio where Liz guided him into ways of connecting with the image in movement.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >I had begun trying out a prayer practice suggested by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav in the late eighteenth century. Simply talk directly to “God” (my strongly secular upbringing still has me putting that word in quotes) pour your heart out to him/her/it. This did not come easily to me, but when I really allowed myself to do it, I was invariably brought to tears. More from relief and release than from sadness. So I began to wonder if that phenomenon had something to do with a “God”-given faculty, perhaps a faculty of imagination, that allows us to create an inner space from which its possible to pray. When I related this to Liz, she asked me to imagine a beam of light emerging from the crown of my head and then moving that light to different spots of the walls and ceiling. Immediately, I felt my neck lengthen and soften. I experienced, in my body, that same sense of space I had been talking about.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Naomi had been concerned that as the oldest in the company, she might not be up to the physical demands of the work. She was perhaps a little reassured that, she could easily outlast me, stamina-wise even though I may be fourteen years younger. But she was still troubled by the issues of moving down to and up from the floor, of giving and taking a partner’s weight. After working with Matt, though, who is a master at helping people work with lifting, carrying and sharing each other’s weight, and the others, she gained a new confidence and ease in all those areas which we all celebrated. That’s how it was. Every time anyone made a discovery or moved someplace new the joy of it came to all of us. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >During the times we participated in the larger Institute, we made duets and solos, told stories, improvised and explored exercises all somehow connected to the idea of prayer and, particularly in this Institute, prayer as radical action. Another of Liz’s core ideas emerged: “Turn discomfort in inquiry.” We began to learn to ask the questions that would help the work move where it needed to, Again, we were – it’s not too strong a word – awestruck by the profound attitude of service, the whole-hearted generosity that Liz, the D.E. members, and the work itself came from. I felt that I was part of an expedition to a remote territory where the weather was completely unpredictable. Its success depended on the ability to fully experience the other: to listen and sense, to respond and support.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >So you see how intensely. we had all bonded by the end of our time in D.C. The planning session – which we had not exactly been looking forward to – went smoothly and gracefully. Peter Di Muro, the Producing Artistic Director of D.E. who quietly took care of us all week, and Jane Hirschberg, their Managing Director, joined the rest of us in mapping out the next year and a half of work. Liz, Cassie, Elizabeth and Matt will be making several trips to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" > starting in September 2007 and culminating with the work’s premiere in April, 2008. In one sense, we’ve hardly begun: we have no idea what form the finished work will take, what it will look like, we have only a few elements that might actually wind up in it, From another angle though, we’ve found new ways of working, of relating to language and movement and, most importantly I think, to each other. We have questions. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" face="arial" class="corey">We took the train to <st1:state><st1:place>New York</st1:place></st1:state>, feeling very satisfied and very sore.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2253/4096/1600/82258/isaiah_color.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2253/4096/320/947904/isaiah_color.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="font-family: courier new;" face="arial" class="corey"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="_x0000_s1027" type="#_x0000_t75" style="'position:absolute;margin-left:328.05pt;margin-top:4.15pt;width:75pt;"> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\corey\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\01\clip_image003.png" title=""> <w:wrap type="square"> </v:shape><![if gte mso 9]><o:oleobject type="Embed" progid="MSPhotoEd.3" shapeid="_x0000_s1027" drawaspect="Content" objectid="_1227970507"> </o:OLEObject> <![endif]><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >In New York, the highlights were our meetings with Isaiah Sheffer, (R) artistic director of <a href="http://www.symphonyspace.org/">Symphony S</a><a href="http://www.symphonyspace.org/">pace</a> (and producer of NPR’s Selected Shorts) and with Elise Bernhardt, the first new executive director in many years of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: courier new;" face="arial" class="corey"></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Isaiah regaled us with a number of stories from his unusual and colorful life. I was particularly knocked out by the one about his having been an understudy for the role of Happy in the legendary Yiddish translation of Death of a Salesman that I refer to extensively in the previous post (Why a Jewish Death of a Salesman?). He went on for several performances. Isaiah and his team have transformed the Symphony Space on Broadway and 96th from a derelict barn of a building into a beautiful and inviting performance space with two theatres and a café that is both a national and a community resource. We’re hoping that Isaiah will be able to present TJT’s Family Alchemy there in sometime in 2007. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Our meeting with <a href="http://www2.jewishculture.org/about/staff/bios/elise-bernhardt">Elise Bernhardt</a> made us feel very hopeful about the future of the NFJC. She wants the foundation to focus less on producing conferences and other events and more on creating a meaningful source of financial support for Jewish artists. She also has a great sense of humor and a strong background in the performing arts.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >Please post your “comments” using the link below.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >For my personal account of the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" >New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:11;" > portion of the trip, visit my blog at <a href="http://www.fromcorey.blogspot.com/">www.fromcorey.blogspot.com</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36621634.post-1161933962503419182006-10-26T23:00:00.000-07:002007-03-17T18:05:52.265-07:00<span style="font-size:100%;"><a style="font-family: arial;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2253/4096/1600/bw-strip.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2253/4096/320/bw-strip.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >Welcome to TJT’s blog. We hope that this new experiment will allow our community a closer look at our life as a theatre. In it, we’ll tell you about the current goings-on and about new ideas as they emerge.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >We’ll invite your responses to questions that arise and try to answer questions that you might pose. We’ll point you toward the materials that inspire us and ask you to do the same.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;font-family:arial;font-size:100%;" >When we’re in rehearsal, we might try posting logs of the process; when we’re in production, the blog can be a place to continue and deepen the post-show discussions we often hold in the theatre.</span> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">Different members of TJT will post at different times. I (<a href="http://www.coreyhome.net/">Corey Fischer</a>) am starting things off with, first, an overview of the three major projects we’ll be developing over the next three years and, next, some thoughts about our production of <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i> which will open at the beginning of April, 2007.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We’ve also just updated our website (<a href="http://www.atjt.com/">www.atjt.com</a>) and restored some pages that had gotten lost in a redesign a while back (history of TJT, ensemble biographies, etc.).</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">Your participation will contribute to the direction the blog takes and will, when all is said and done, determine the success of the experiment. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">To start, let me locate you in TJT’s day-to-day.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Last night, we finished the second of two workshop/readings of co-founder Naomi Newman’s new play <i style="">Torn Ribbons</i>.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TJT Associate Artist, Jeri Lynn Cohen and I joined six guest actors under Jayne Wenger’s direction and spent three half-days sketching out a simple, script-in-hand presentation of Naomi’s intense and surprising new work.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">This was the first time in our 28 years that Naomi worked only as a playwright, neither acting nor directing.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Those of you who were able to see the readings in San Francisco or Berkeley know how moving the play is.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">After another reading (at the Actors Studio in New York, directed by Ellen Burstyn), Naomi will continue developing it.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Since there is nothing overtly “Jewish” about the play, we’re asking ourselves (Naomi most vocally) whether it’s something TJT should ultimately produce.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We’ll keep you posted.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">If you have any thoughts on the subject, post a response.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">Tomorrow, we begin preparing another new play, <i style="">Who by Fire</i> (formerly, <i style="">Moving</i>), by TJT Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman and Israeli playwright, Ro’I Rashkes, for a workshop/reading next weekend in Mountain View and SF (the details on our website).</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">These workshops have been supported by the Magic Theatre and the Z Space’s initiative for new play development.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);">Three mainstage projects over the next three years</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><i style="">What follows are brief descriptions of the three main projects that will be occupying us through 2009.<span style=""> </span>What’s not mentioned here is this year’s production of Rose by Martin Sherman, featuring Naomi Newman and directed by Joan Mankin.<span style=""> </span>You can find out more about it on out <a href="http://www.atjt.com/">website</a></i><i style=""><span style=""><a href="http://www.atjt.com/"><br /></a> <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><i style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"><span style="">Death of a Salesman<span style=""> </span></span></i></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);">(Opens April, 2007)</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">In February, 2007, TJT begins work on a breakthrough production of Arthur Miller’s <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i> that will reclaim the Jewish context that Miller, writing in 1949, felt constrained to “censor out,” attempting to create an ethnically unmarked family whose struggles would have “universal” appeal.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" >Our production will be directed by our Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman. <span style=""> </span>Corey Fischer and TJT Associate Artist Jeri Lynn Cohen will play Willy and Linda. Scenic design will be done by Giulio Cesare Perrone (designer of our productions <i>Opening to You</i> and <i>Isaac)</i>.<span style=""> </span></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" >Jess Ivry, whom TJT audiences will remember from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Bright River</span>, will perform her original, solo cello score live throughout the run.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" >Why a Jewish <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i>?</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">TJT has always held, as a working principle, that universality can only come from specificity.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We’re certainly not alone in this view; more and more late 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> century writers, artists and thinkers have moved beyond the notion that specific ethnic or cultural markers needed to be jettisoned in order to create works of a truly <i style="">universal </i>value.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">This mid-century notion may have been a reaction of second generation immigrants to the limitations of the “old world.”</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">What I find fascinating is that, almost in spite of himself, Miller created a character (Willy Loman) who is caught is that very struggle to assimilate, to re-invent himself as an American free of the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the shtetl or the ghetto.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">But Miller, in 1949, was perhaps – as a writer, anyway – caught in that struggle himself and felt bound to make Willy a generic American. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Willy Loman was recognized as a crypto-Jew as far back as 1951, when one of the most accomplished actors of the Yiddish theatre, Joseph Buloff,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">translated the play into Yiddish and played the role of Willy.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The production was a huge success in New York and on tour.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">George Ross wrote, in a review of the Yiddish <i style="">Death of a Salesman</i>: </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“The great success of Joseph Buloff's production is that it brings the play "home." The effect is remarkable. Buloff has caught Miller, as it were, in the act of changing his name…”</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">And just last year, the contemporary Jewish playwright Karen Hartman wrote,</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>“Death of a Salesman</i> suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling "kind of temporary" about oneself. The play's Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.<br /><br />I'd suggest that the psychically fluid structure of <i>Salesman</i> tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it's impossible to envision the shifting structure of <i>Angels in America</i> without <i>Death of a Salesman</i>, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail.”</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" >(<a href="http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131">http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" >So the intention behind our production is to restore those missing “clues.” </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><span style=""> </span>Unlike the infamous production of <i style="">The Crucible</i> by New York’s Wooster Group (it was subject to a cease and desist order initiated by Arthur Miller) TJT will take no liberties with the text, but will, rather, explore it from its own particular perspective and esthetic – that of a contemporary Jewish ensemble theatre.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" >As Karen Hartman points out, Miller was not entirely successful in purging all yiddishkeit from his<span style=""> </span>play.<span style=""> </span>It reveals itself in the monitory cadence of a line like<span style=""> </span>“Attention must be paid..” <span style=""> </span>Ross, referring to this line, writes: “Here, and in many places, one felt in the English version as if Miller were thinking in Yiddish and unconsciously translating…and sometimes when his English filters through the density of his background, it succeeds in picking up flavor on the way.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" >For a company who has based its 28 year-old reputation on the creation of original work and the development of new plays across a variety of forms, engaging with an iconic American play can be seen as a radical new direction. Likewise, realizing that the largest part of its work has looked toward the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora, the <i style="">Shoah</i>, the Middle-East for inspiration, we want to explore the <i style="">American</i> Jewish experience of the last few decades; the period in which American Jewish identity went through such surprising transformations.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" >An interesting side note to the 1951 Yiddish production by Joseph Buloff can be found at: <a href="http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=331">http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=331</a>.<span style=""> </span>Chloe Veltman interviewed Luba Kadison, Buloff’s widow and an important yiddish theatre performer in her own right. Veltman says:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“Arthur Miller was delighted with her portrayal of Linda in a Yiddish version of <i>Death of a Salesman</i> at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn in 1951, as was the scholar Harold Bloom, who wrote to Kadison just a few weeks before her death, saying her <i>Salesman</i> was the most moving he'd ever seen.”</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" >The Prayer Project</span><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(Title TBD)</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" >(Opens April, 2008)</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">Since we first met nearly twenty years ago, at a theatre festival in Stockholm, TJT and <a href="http://www.danceexchange.org/">Liz Lerman </a>have been drawn to the possibility of collaborating together. In 2005, Liz proposed that by “using personal story, or by placing unusual events side by side, or by retrieving rituals</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from our past, or by listening to our young people recount their futures,”</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">we create a work “that lets our bodies be the healing landscape for some of our divisions.”</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Together, we agreed to build a work that would explore the meaning of prayer in human experience with Liz directing and co-creating the piece and TJT core ensemble artists, Aaron Davidman, Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman co-creating and performing it.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The notion of working with <i style="">prayer</i> comes from our shared sense that we urgently need an alternative to the dangerously polarized and contentious relationships that exist between different communities of belief (or unbelief) in our post 9/11 world.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">As <a href="http://www.tikkun.org/">Rabbi Michael Lerner</a> writes in his new book, <i style="">The Left Hand of God</i>:</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i style="">It is the search for meaning in a despiritualized world that leads many people to right-wing religious communities because these groups seem to be in touch with the sacred dimension of life. Many secularists imagine that people drawn to the Right are there solely because of some ethical or psychological malfunction. What they miss is that there are many very decent Americans who get attracted to the Religious Right because it is the only voice that they encounter that is willing to challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and spiritual loneliness.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Theatre can mount a powerful challenge to “the despiritualization of daily life,” not in any sectarian or doctrinaire way, but by inviting audience members to become part of an— albeit temporary—community of imagination and possibility, by offering metaphor as a balance to an overly literal understanding of life.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TJT has always sought to fulfill this potential, often exploring the “sacred dimension of life” in unconventional ways that speak to Jews and non-Jews who may have no affiliation with any particular religious institution, but whose values, nevertheless, cannot be dismissed as merely materialistic.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In the proposed collaboration, Liz Lerman and TJT seek to create a context in which non-threatening interaction between people of various religious and secular orientations can happen; in which people who identify with a particular religion <i style="">and </i>people who do not will both be able to recognize the impulse to find a connection to the sacred—the primal human impulse to <i style="">pray. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We perceive an unmet need among people who are not affiliated with any particular religious institution to still be able to speak about <i style="">prayer</i>, about <i style="">God</i>, about <i style="">soul</i> and <i style="">spirit</i>, for, as Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum writes,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">“…the American religious right has totally hijacked the language of religion and spirituality to promote the values of its reactionary political agenda.”</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">And without a language in which to express a spiritual dimension of one’s life,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the experience itself becomes less possible, less real.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Corey, Aaron and Naomi have been learning some of Liz’s tools for devising choreography from various sources that she introduced to us last May and with which we’re continuing to work in September and November.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Also in November we’ll be spending another week with Liz (in D.C. this time) to continue work.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We’ll have to put the project on ice for the rest of this season and</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">will pick it up in the summer of 07 and again in January ’08 until it opens in April ’08.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We have no idea what the piece will be like other than very physical.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We’ll be using texts from various sources – extant writing, original writing, interviews with people – In various ways and will most likely work with a sound design that uses recorded sound and music, found and original.</span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" ><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);">Odets/Group Theatre</span><span style=""> </span></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" >(Opens in 2009)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">TJT, in collaboration with the South Bay’s resident theatre, Theatreworks</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(at least for some of the early development), will create an original theatre-piece that explores the creation of the Group Theatre’s two most explosive and influential works—which premiered within weeks of each other in 1935—<i style="">Waiting for Lefty</i> and <i style="">Awake and Sing</i>. As scholar <st2:personname><st1:givenname>Nahma</st1:givenname> <st1:sn>Sandrow</st1:sn></st2:personname> has written: “[<st1:sn>Odets</st1:sn>’ plays] translate the Yiddish theatre’s leftist passion for social reform into an English with Yiddish inflections.” </span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The story of how this historical moment came to be has the potential to illuminate the ways in which the energy, ideals and rhythms of Eastern-European Jewish immigrant life suffused a nascent American culture as the country struggled with a broken economy and the new threats to democracy posed by fascism. For the first time in nearly three decades of theatre-making, TJT will use its innovative ensemble processes to explore a cluster of deeply American themes.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">By bringing theatrical</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">life to specific characters, landscapes and events: the minute particulars that form a narrative fabric, the new work will investigate American culture as a culture of immigrants; the relationship of democracy, art and social change; the ongoing relevance and resonance of this early experiment in visionary, non-commercial theatre by a largely Jewish group of artists.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Corey will be lead writer on this one.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="corey"><span style="font-size:100%;">This is more than enough for one post.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" > </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We look forward to your responses.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>corey fischerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03088923683424065055noreply@blogger.com24