A DEMONIC SOUL

I went to see the current production of A SPLINTERED SOUL by Alan Lester Brooks at Stage 773 at the end of its run (closing May 29). It has already been reviewed so I won't cover that terrain. What I'd like to think about is what are the uses of the Holocaust, and when does it become just another way to provide entertainment or even be misappropriated for other agendas?

Saul Friedlander, the Holocaust historian and survivor, talks about Holocaust regarding popular culture and the thrust of his point is - when is the catastrophe of the Holocaust relegated to bumper sticker slogans? When do stories and performances that use the Holocaust just become a meme that can be used to define and explain seemingly anything? Recent misappropriate comparisons include Brazil's President Dilma Roussef who said that attempts to impeach her over corruption scandals are similar to the Nazi persecution of Jews. The Chief Justice of Alabama, Roy Moore, defied the legalization of gay marriage in the United States and compared it to the Nuremberg Laws of Germany that made Jews and their full citizenship illegal. His point (I find this reasoning convoluted) is that those (often fundamentalist Christians) who don't agree with the legalization are an oppressed minority. Ben Carson, the Republican candidate, made a remark while on the campaign trail that "if Jews had owned guns, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened." This was meant to endear him to gun rights advocates who feel themselves to be an oppressed people like the Jews, and who, in his opinion, may have to take up arms against the United States government. 

There seems to be a pattern that Jews are a symbol for all minorities to compare themselves themselves to, and that the Holocaust is transferable to any kind of perceived and or even real threat of oppression. I am under no illusions that many Jews and the Jewish community partake in feeding this idea, rightly or wrongly. The proliferation of Holocaust museums built due to Jewish philanthropic dollars as well as other foundations and donors not only are a testament to "Never Again" but also to the effort to stop other atrocities and catastrophes that utilize hate, fear, racism, and other means to create prejudice (governmental or from others) towards an oppressed group.

This can be seen in performances and appropriately so, as well. For example the newest version of Cabaret, by Fred Ebb and John Kander, augmented the ending and made a point to emphasize homophobia under the Nazis. The recent version of Fiddler on the Roof by Harnick, Bock and Stein (all Jews) on Broadway takes the beginning and end of the play to point towards the destruction that was to come to the Jews after Tevye and the inhabitants leave Anatevka. These changes and layering Holocaust foreshadowing make sense in these cases as they show the extension of anti-Semitism and exile, that with the knowledge of history, links it to the Holocaust. 

So when Alan Lester Brooks repurposes the Holocaust narrative to write a tense and psychological drama about a rabbi who is a Holocaust survivor, and uses it to try to understand the conflictual attitudes within the Jewish community towards Jewish immigrants to America from the Holocaust, many critics and audiences drew comparisons to the refugees from Syria and other lands who are in exile right now looking for safe haven. As one of the Jewish characters who is sponsoring one of the refugees says, "You are safe now." 

 

Yet the story isn't just about the Jewish immigrants after the Holocaust getting take care of in a new land, but shows the PTSD that is still to be dealt with by survivors. We see it in a story about one of the woman survivors who is placed as a domestic worker in the home of a well-off Jewish couple in San Francisco. She falls in love with the husband and she sees it as a way to overcome her fears and anxieties and take her life back.

But the main plotline develops through group sessions that the survivors regularly attend with the rabbi, who is the protagonist. They feel the need to have this meeting as an insider "tribe" and to give each other advice, peer counseling, and solace. Yet they remain outsiders to the Jewish community and the rabbi realizes that he must be a redeemer for them to get acclimated to America and to run interference for them with their Jewish sponsors. But then as a result of the group of survivors that regularly meets, the rabbi is asked to help in a situation of abuse and illegal activity which ultimately leads to the murder a of German man in their city of San Francisco. The rest of the play is about solving this murder. 

By setting the time period to immediately after the war, Brooks backshadows the controversies of today. On a certain level he seems to want Jews to get over the Holocaust since it can lead to tribalness, outsiderness, murder, and sociopathology; and on the other hand he blames Jews for not treating Jewish survivors with dignity. 

He also seems to be saying that the memories of the Holocaust are used by Jews to justify themselves in all that they do. He references Jews going to Palestine after the war and thereby makes the worst in an inappropriate political comparison. These references conjure the Holocaust in a simple minded way, as a bogus justification for why Israel was created through the feelings of sorrow for Jews after the Holocaust and demanding reparations for Jewish claims. When a con game is revealed in the play, this con in the playwright's mind is a symbol for Jews who trust in Jewish claims over others. The reality and more complex story is that Jews have always lived in the land now called Israel, since ancient times, and after resettlement from other lands that oppressed them, started the process of creating the modern country of Israel even while some Arabs accepted them and some rejected their return, all happening about fifty years before the Holocaust which wiped out a third of the world's Jewish population. 

In the early 1960s the film The Pawnbroker told a story about a concentration camp survivor who can't live as an emotionally healthy man. The film's narrative takes many twists and turns to understand prejudice, outsiders in society, oppressed minorities, racism, and the drug and prostitution world in Harlem in New York City. Yet the film lives on as a searing testimony of the Holocaust due to the performance of Rod Steiger, who combats his inner torment. The story and performance by Steiger transcends the facile comparisons to the inner city and goes deeply into the psychological core of this one Jewish man wrestling with his pain and loss and the meaning of being a Jew and a human being. 

Another excellent example of portraying the Holocaust is Son of Saul the recent Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language film.  It tells a story of the inner dimensions of a Jewish sonderkommando who is reduced to a non-human being. Yet his awakening is revealed to us throughout the film and all the side stories in it, though necessary to the plot, are in service to and do not intrude on what is important -- that the Holocaust is both inexplicable and must continue to explained.

BECOMING EVIL: LILLIAN HELLMAN’S "THE LITTLE FOXES"

At The Goodman Theatre in Chicago through June 7, 2015

http://www.goodmantheatre.org/littlefoxes

By David Chack

Near the beginning of The Little Foxes, the Chicago businessman William Marshall, who is being courted by the Hubbard family for his company in opening a cotton mill, says that he isn’t in business for any kind of high-minded values – apparently referring to socialism or workers rights ideologies. He just wants to make money and the Hubbards are the kind of people whom he can do that with because they are “…partners who so closely follow the teachings of Christ.”

(L to R) Shannon Cochran (Regina Hubbard Giddens), Michael Canavan (William Marshall), Mary Beth Fisher (Birdie Hubbard), Dan Waller (Leo Hubbard), Dexter Zollicoffer (Cal), Steve Pickering (Oscar Hubbard), Rae Gray (Alexandra “Zan” Giddens)   

The moment is nearly a throw away. But in an insightful direction, Henry Wishcamper the play's director, has the entire Hubbard family pause, take in the phrase, and then go on. In so doing he creates an unspoken, even a secret acknowledgement between the members of the Hubbard family that they do not follow the teachings of Christ and this reflects the back-story that is Lillian Hellman’s own Jewish family.

Jews in the South were a different breed from Jews of the North. Acutely aware of their differences in a region that was demonstrably Christian, they found acceptance in their stereotyped role as Jews who were seen as necessary in matters of money and business. And in fact Hellman’s family came from Demopolis, Alabama where the play is set, they were in business, and they were a successful banking family. Her maternal grandmother, who the matriarch in the play Regina Hubbard Giddens is modeled, evidently never missed an opportunity to mock and belittle her father for his poor business sense in front of her and her mother. (Southern Literary Trail) (Jewish Women’s Archives)

In using her family as models for the Hubbard family in The Little Foxes and because she never mentions that they are Jews, Hellman felt free to make them into the stereotyped Jewish family that their neighbors expected them to be. They are greedy and avaricious and Regina is so vengeful that she orchestrates an act so horrible that not even the rest of her family can envision it.

Shannon Cochran (Regina Hubbard Giddens)

Hellman also references her own life as a Southern Jew in the daughter of Alexandra or Zan, who breaks away from her family at the plays end to join left-wing progressives. Many of those she joined with were Jews in New York City, also putting Zan (aka Hellman) in the tradition of Jewish leftists.

(L to R) Rae Gray (Alexandra “Zan” Giddens), John Judd (Horace Giddens), Cherene Snow (Addie)

When Hellman wrote The Little Foxes anti-Semitism was at its height in the world. In her personal writings she has said that when she went to pre-war Nazi Germany in the 1930s she really felt what it was like to be a Jew. Hellman felt the darkness that was to descend on Europe and consequently on the world. In my interview with the play's director Henry Wishcamper, he told me that the anchor speech for him was, "The people that eat the earth, are like the locusts of the Bible. And then there are those who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes just standing by is as evil as doing the evil itself. They aren't doing anything to make the world better."

For us to know the crypto-Jewish story, as well as the events in Hellman’s time, we then see a complex and psychological portrayal in The Little Foxes that shows a Jewish family that has been poisoned by their “outsiderness” in the South, no matter how successful they become. Consequently the play shows that they have become the demons their neighbors see them as. 

Wishcamper is relentless in his depiction of this family that implodes through their need for power and also driven toward their destination of darkness. The performances are searing from the portrayals of the Hubbards to the African-American domestic help Cal and Addie. This group of outsiders, though on different levels of power, are all hurtling towards an end that will drive them to the only solution, which is exile – exile from family and exile from the South.

Interestingly and even mythically Hellman brackets the evil through the play’s title The Little Foxes, referencing The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. The Song of Songs or Song of Solomon is one of the great love poems in literature. The phrase “the little foxes” (2:15) is about how the little foxes will ruin the king and princess' vineyard of love. Many have written that this is Hellman’s metaphor for the beauty of the South and that the Hubbards are the virulent little foxes who will ruin it and lay it to waste.

But bearing in mind that the Hubbards are the crypto-Jews of the South, the “little foxes” is the oppressive evil of prejudice and racism that infiltrates the vineyard. And the vineyard is the Hubbard family itself. In other words, this place that Jewish families had hoped to have as their home and that they would make into a beautiful and intoxicating vineyard, is instead infected by prejudice born from hateful stereotypes, racism, greed, and power. The great irony is that the Hubbard family, unlike old Mother Hubbard of the nursery rhyme, is made into the "shylock" that their neighbors wish them to be. 

The Goodman Theatre, Chicago

Through June 7, 2015

Director Henry Wishcamper

http://www.goodmantheatre.org/littlefoxes

THE CLASH OF HOW WE BEGIN TO REMEMBER

As the events in Paris and Bogo, Nigeria unfold there are images of horror that are screaming. We can only imagine what it must have been like for the satirical cartoon artists that were massacred by Islamic jihadists in Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish shoppers in the kosher market shopping for the Sabbath who were greeted by a man who wanted to kill them because they were Jews. 

I am also appalled about what I am learning about the massacre of possibly 2,000 people slaughtered by the Boko Haram in Nigeria, basically obliterating an entire town. 

We are shocked at the evil and we are also amazed. There was heroism reported. A French-Muslim man, Lassana Bathily led the Jewish

Lassana Bathily

shoppers down to the walk-in freezer in order to hide. Then he escaped and at first though briefly held by the police as possibly connected to the jihadist, he then was released and continued to help the police so they could save the people in the market.

These attacks are attacks on the freedom of ideas, the power of the arts, the transmission of culture, and the ability to be transformed. Yes, Charlie Hebdo was a playful, satirical magazine, provocative and sometimes brutally irreverent. In this way it was performative, getting us to sit up and take notice, but also getting us to really think and see the world through our darker sides and then to examine them to decide how we feel about immigrants, races, gender issues and sexuality, politicians, religions, and more.

These attacks are also against the Jewish people. They can be seen as an accumulation of attacks, not necessarily linked, that have occurred relatively recently - from the Hyper Cacher Jewish market

to an attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 where children and their teacher were killed. They echo the attack on the Jewish museum in Belgium in May 2014 where a shooter burst in and killed four and the attack on the Chabad Jewish Center in Mumbai in 2008 that killed six including the rabbi and his wife. Their two year old son was saved by his Indian nanny; and the very recent November 2014 attack in an Israeli synagogue where five men were killed who were praying. Even in the Charlie Hebdo office the only woman killed was a Jewish woman, Elsa Cayat,

Elsa Cayat

who worked there and was specifically sought and killed by the jihadists, as other women were left alone. Her cousin reported that she had been receiving anti-Semitic threats. 

These attacks are also specifically against ideas and the transmission of knowledge. The Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their school seeking to eradicate any form of education that is against their values and desire for power. They have specifically targetted schools. They are also against freedom for women, since they believe in a caliphate of Islamic beliefs that are repressive. The recent massacre is showing an upsurge in their quest for a fundamentalist caliphate.

In other words these attacks are an assault on a new world. It is a world that is closer than ever before due to the digital world we live in. This world lives in close proximity to different religions, different belief systems, different cultures and most of all different identities - both individual and collective. This also means that we are in an age of transculturalism - a vital way of seeing the world as "collected identities." We no longer live in the age of the melting pot seeking to merge all heritages and cultures into one big identity, which basically means the identity of the majority culture. 

One of my prophets is Paul Simon and his album "Graceland" is for me one of the great works of art

Miriam Makeba and Paul Simon

On it he has many pieces that depict this transcultural journey and the song that says it best for me is Under African Skies. If there is anything redeeming in all of this, perhaps we can hear it in his voice.: 

Joseph’s face was black as night

The pale yellow moon shown in his eyes
His path was marked
By the stars in the Southern Hemisphere
And he walked his days
Under African Skies

This is the story of how we begin to remember
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein
After the dream of falling and calling your name out
These are the roots of rhythm
And the roots of rhythm remain

AT LAST: A Tribute to Etta James

Review of AT LAST: A Tribute to Etta James
Written and directed by Jackie Taylor 
Co-director Daryl D. Brooks, Musical Director Robert Reddrick
Through December 28, 2014
At the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago www.blackensemble.org

"Etta James. Etta James, Etta James, I gotta have my Etta James." This refrain is repeated over and over again in an almost ritualized fashion evoking the great singer of blues, jazz, country blues, soul, rock and roll, and just about anything else that was thrown at her in Jackie Taylor's dramatized revue AT LAST: A TRIBUTE TO ETTA JAMES at the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago.

The show posits the many Etta James' and has five wonderful singers portraying each of her multi-dimensions played by Candace Edwards, Arzula Gardner Melanie McCullogh, Alanna Taylor, and Yahdina Udeen. Each has a different aspect of her personality and each has her own incredible singing voice. One who is more soulful, to one who is more gutsy, to one who is more childlike, to one who is more bluesy, and to one who is a more straight-ahead composite of all them. And the women explore the many personalities behind the songs at the prodding and demanding of one Ms. Real. She insists that they are all brought together to understand and pay tribute to the great person that they all represent.

Taylor's dramatic revue is about how Ms. Real, played by Rueben Echoles, who is conducting the "tribute" to Etta, insists that they must explore the different facets of Etta's psychology: her bouts with depression and drugs, her self hating, her problems with men and her inability to love herself. And the show has the many Etta James' argue with themselves and sing their hearts out from one hit song to another (with much support from the audience who do shout outs as though at church).  

In Etta James' memoir "Rage to Survive" she has to go through such therapeutic experiences, when she is given the choice by a judge to go to rehab or go to jail for her drug habits as well as other crimes she has committed. She chose rehab and just as in Taylor's show, Etta resisted learning about her psychological disorders with all her might. 

Throughout, each singer taunts the other in opposition, counterpoint and in exploration of the true Etta James. This is enacted in the second act by a singing competition and each Etta James tries to outdo the other in singing prowess reaching and raising the rafters on each song and finally coming to the realization that each is an important aspect of who Etta is. Imagine James Brown, Phoebe Snow, Diana Ross, Roberta Flack and Mahalia Jackson all combined into one and maybe you'll understand the power and emotion of Etta James. Clearly Jackie Taylor milks the most out of these singing voices (and Etta's voice did change over the course of her career).

The weaknesses in the piece are in the scriptwriting, especially in the first act as it sets up the confrontations in the second act, and in how it doesn't really tell us much about Etta James' life story. According to her memoir it is fascinating, dramatic, heartbreaking, and poignant. 

But the singing and the performances of each of the Etta James' is truly amazing. They go from one iconic song to the next and finally end on what we have all been waiting for "At Last." And even though we know that this is where they are heading from the very beginning -- as we hear from each actor singing from the depths of Etta's soul, we must join in and say "Etta James, Etta James, Etta James, I gotta have my Etta James."

THE HEART THAT YEARNS: REVIEW OF MY NAME IS ASHER LEV AT STAGE 773

REVIEW: MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

By Aaron Posner

Adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok

Directed by Kimberly Senior

Produced by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago

At Stage 773 through October 18, 2014

Alex Weisman as Asher Lev, Lawrence Grimm as the Father, Danica Monroe as the Mother

When I was 12 years old I read a book that changed my life. It was The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I marveled at how Potok was able to capture the beauty of Judaism and at the same time depict a secular world with exciting baseball games, the joys of literature and the ideas of Western thought. Then The Promise and My Name Is Asher Lev came out and I was hooked.

Potok’s book My Name Is Asher Lev struck home for me personally, since Asher was an artist and I was in theatre and a singer. For me the creative impulses of being an artist and a Jew came from the same spiritual place. I found a Judaism which lived and breathed through storytelling, humor, song, dance, performance and textualities coming from Judaism’s ‘thousands of years’ dialectic with Torah and Talmud. Also the Judaism I followed had experiences in chavurot or small fervent communities with ecstatic prayer, meditative practices, and creative experiences. It is no wonder that Chaim Potok was one of the leading lights for the Chavurah Movement of young Jews, starting in the 60s and 70s.

The play of Asher Lev is set against the landscape of a world where it is dangerous to be a Jew, where the wonder of life cries out to be explored through creative expression, and about the intense passion from a Chasidic way of life that. Showing the pressures on Asher and his Chasidic family in a 1950s household in Brooklyn after the Holocaust and during the reign of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the play takes place when Jewish communities were rebuilding their lives. The parents, who are emissaries – shluchim – for the Rebbe the spiritual leader of their community, have to deal with an inquisitive and creative son who is passionate about “idolatrous” art, which is anathema to their world. While doing the Rebbe’s work, Asher’s mother suffers the loss of her brother and she goes into a deep depression.

Asher, in the play as our narrator, looks back in time and describes his predicament living with a depressed mother and his yearning to create art. As we the audience hear his tale, we long for him to leave his home and find himself. Eventually he goes on to study art (through a recommendation by the Rebbe) and he grows up to become the thing that his parents do not want, a famous artist.

But as Asher narrates, he speaks as though disembodied, without much connection to his parents, to Judaism or himself. It is telling that in the talkback discussion after the show, Alex Weisman the actor who played Asher, responded to a question by saying that he believed the play is more about the parents than it is about Asher Lev. This basic misconception of Potok’s intent was apparent from the performance and this production. 

Purposely, Potok uses Chasidism because it is a branch of Judaism known for emphasizing the awe in the universe that can be found in every human action, from the trivial to the portentous. It is a Judaism that leads the person in prayer to the celestial heights. It is filled with music, dance, storytelling and intellectual discourse, and even, at times, through drink and wild merriment. 

Alex Weisman as Asher Lev

Sadly, director Kimberly Senior  gives no emphasis to how Asher’s artistic passion is related to his Chasidic roots. A fine director (great work in Northlight’s The Whipping Man), I am sorry to say that this play gets away from her. Its deep themes of spiritual and Jewish content are not evident in her work with the actors or in the staging.

An example, Asher is supposed to have payos (side hair curls) that Chasidic boys and men grow out. They are continually referred to as a major part of his identity. Yet he doesn’t have them and looks quite “reformed Jewish” (Weisman words describing his own Jewish upbringing, in the talkback).

A missed historical detail is in the costume choice for the Rebbe. Astonishingly he comes out in a modern synagogue-style tallit (prayer shawl), rather than, either, a traditional Polish-style coat and shtreiml (fur hat) or a large fedora typically worn by the Lubavitcher Rebbe -- the sect Potok used as the inspiration for this fictionalized sect, as the Ladover.

A more important scene is when Asher, who is now taking classes in an artist’s studio, is going to paint a live nude model for the first time. This scene entirely loses its world shattering impact for Asher, because the female model partially disrobes for only a second and Asher barely registers it. Yet this moment should have been a telling one for him. Afterwards he tries to explain it to his parents, about why drawing nudes is so important for an artist. Clearly, in the script he is affected and brought to some sense of the mystery of the female body, as a transcendent and revelatory moment. But on stage it seemed rushed and embarrassed.

A bizarre production choice is the fact that Asher, who is constantly drawing, shows his pictures to his parents, yet nothing is on the page. He then posts them on a large wall and before us are a lot of blank pieces of paper looking like a lot of ‘post-its’. It is emblematic of this production, that where we look for the art from the page, we can’t find it conceptually on the stage.

Most importantly, a major theme of the play is the question of Jewish identity and the need for healing the world and the Jewish people after the trauma and losses of the Holocaust. Yet in this production the Jewish specificity is a mundane story of generational conflict, creating a blandness throughout.

Asher’s parents go to his gallery opening and see his painting “Brooklyn Crucifixion,” a painting of his mother on a cross at his gallery show. Potok’s point, and what makes his work so interesting, is that Asher appropriates and transforms this symbol into a Jewish one for a post-Holocaust era, bringing Chagall’s “White Crucifixion” to mind. Going back to his Chasidic roots to bring the Moshiach “now,” the Messiah who will redeem the Jewish people and the world, Asher paints what is deep in his soul and even within the soul of his people. Ironically, it is this painting that shakes his parents to their very core as Jews, yearning for their son to embody the values they believe in. Though we see shock in his parent’s faces when they see the piece, the lack of a performative Jewish concept in the production and the way the scene is played, leaves the moment colorless.

At the end the character looks into a mirror as he faces the audience. Looking at himself (and at us) he says, “My name is Asher Lev,” the translation of his Hebrew name meaning “heart of happiness.” But this production does not go to that heart. Potok is exploring the search for identity, out of deep Jewish historical roots of creativity, revelation, exile, trauma, and transformation. It is for a world today that is yearning for a spiritual and aesthetically truthful journey. Given TimeLine Theatre Company’s great past work and its mission of presenting works from history as they connect with us today, this production is disappointing.

THE ICEMAN COMETH -- A STORY OF EXILE

As someone who mostly writes about Jewish related theatre I saw many parallels to plays of Jewish content in Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh which opened last night at the The Goodman in Chicago. Perhaps due to that, I saw a play that depicted the story of people in exile. 

Though it has stars - Brian Dennehy and Nathan Lane who were excellent -- it was O'Neill, his epic play (4 hrs and 45 minutes incl. three intermissions) and the ensemble cast who were the stars. This group of ne'er do wells in Harry Hope's flophouse are rootless, stateless and living under the bottle -- longing for their next drink and waiting for Hickey, their saviour.


But when Hickey arrives, the salvation he offers is to come clean, to leave the world of pipe dreams, to come back to reality and see the world as it truly is -- not under the haze and anesthesia of drink. This seems reasonable and not unlike abolitionists of the day. Since Hickey is a charismatic figure that they look up to they do try to tear away the charades they play. They work to clean up and in amusing ways like a group of schlemiels, they try to drop their pretend lives that are dreams, but are so much a part of their identity. They try to live in a reality that has oppressed them in the past and to do the things that they say they really want to accomplish.

But this freedom that he offers has a price. And when they do join the world, they see why they lived in fantasy. Separated from their dreams they become like their oppressors -- petty, angry, greedy, misogynist, physical abusers, and racist. They become the things that they have been trying to escape from. Life fills them with terror. Before, they saw the world as in a dream and they were the storytellers of that dream, living for a tomorrow that may never come, but yearning for it just as an exile longs for the homeland.


Bolshevism and revolution are the backdrop. Radical leaders are being turned in and arrested by an intransigent (and corrupt) legal system, that upholds inequality and believes that cultural and racial differences are insidious and un-American. Similarly, Jewish-American were leaders in the unions and radical movements at that time, enduring jail to promote their ideals. Anti-Semitism was rampant in 1939 when the play was written and Germany was seen, even in America (witness leaders like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh), as a bastion of progress with a false superman -- Hitler, to rid them of their radicals and their Jews.


The characters (and they are interesting and playful characters performed by a wonderful cast) in Harry Hope's Saloon come to reality and it stinks. They yearn to go back to their dreams and their lies. But Hickey has worked a miracle and changed the booze so it no longer creates an alcoholic stupor. Like a magician he has made the elixir of dreams into liquid impotence and all that is left to them is emptiness. 

The characters in Harry Hope's Saloon are from the heartland of America, they are Irish-Americans, Black, Jewish, immigrants (legals and not), people who are emotionally unstable, intellectuals, women selling their bodies -- all searching for a home and a society that accepts them and their difference. They yearn for a day of equality and change. They yearn for a future that brings hope. And unlike other times when Hickey visits, even if they didn't have that, they had their dreams.


But Hickey has changed. He takes their dreams away as he takes away their drink and gives them the harsh reality of an America that only cares about power and is self-serving. Similarly to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Hickey is a salesman who sells dreams. But both embody rootlessness and self-loathing that is both imposed from within and from outside. They live in a dream that becomes a nightmare of deep, deep existential loss.

Where does this loss come from? I believe it is from exile, the exile of people from their communities, their cultural roots, and their identities. The pipe dreams of Harry Hope's Saloon that they express through stories, jokes and song are their lifeblood, helping them to live with a taste of a better tomorrow, that they all long for, but can only realize through booze. 


And Hickey, their leader, is also the ultimate wanderer who can never settle down. Like Willy Loman he is always on the go. And as much as they chase the next sale, they are in both in exile. Both of them live in an world that values commercialism, capitalism and power. They are just cogs in the system -- the everyman, the "low-man," the "hick-man" -- and attention will definitely not be paid.


These plays speak so much to our times, where power and greed are what are given voice in America and the world today. Not only has the revolution not taken place but corporations are now  "people" under the law as the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case. No longer are individual human rights respected, as the Arizona law against immigrants makes clear -- they need not apply, even though they add value economically and as cultural capitol. And as the NRA lobby continues to guide legislation, states like Florida allow people to legally use guns and kill when they feel threatened by people they deem to be "the other."


I could go on and on about the relevance of The Iceman Cometh and Death of a Salesman. Suffice it to say that the loss of everything we should hold dear is in this play. Come see it to dream, to laugh, to cry, to mourn and to feel the loss that comes from an exilic world. From this telling of the tale, maybe there is hope.

THEATRE OF THE REAL

The acts of violence against innocents and the shear hatred that it encompasses is not in the past, as we remember the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah this past Wednesday and Thursday. It is with us today. The trial of  Anders Behring Breivik for the massacre of 77 people in 2011, mostly teens at a summer camp, that he executed in Utoya, Norway, shows us how pure unadulterated hate leads to a violence that is unimaginable by civilized people. 


The recent killings done by a madman in Toulouse, France when Mohammed Merah went on a rampage in March 2012, killing three paratroopers and seriously injuring a third. Then four days later Merah went to a Jewish school and slaughtered a 30-year old rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his children aged four and five, and another child, the daughter of the school's principal. The 7-year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, died in her father's arms as medics tried to resuscitate her. Merah was described as chasing her and then holding her by the hair as he shot her at point blank range.


As I teach my classes this quarter on representations of the Holocaust in theatre and film we think about why things like this happen. We try to get "inside" the events that are being depicted on stage or on the screen and we examine how they represent what the Holocaust was about. We discuss the ongoing history of anti-Semitism and acts of violence that come from racism and prejudice that humanity perpetrates against the other. And as theatre people, we try to imagine. 


Yet our imaginations fall short. We have no thoughts that can truly picture it. So, even as we realize the paucity of our understanding, acts of violence against children and other innocent people still happen. The theatre of the real takes over and erases the theatre of the stage. This is not the same as so-called "Reality TV", with its superficial nonsense that wears us down when we watch and anesthetizes us. The theatre of the real is the performances of every moment that make us feel and think and shock us to what is important in life.


Today Elie Wiesel and Barak Obama met at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. They went to the memorial and spoke about the continued need to ferret out atrocity and intervene before it is too late. Wiesel spoke about how the Holocaust could have been prevented if nations had moved to stop it. Obama spoke about the new commission on atrocity and the sanctions against Syria and Iran. 


Are these acts enough? When will the violence of hatred end? As Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote today in the NYTimes in reference to the trial of Breivik, "Our task is to witness it, to allow the weight of reality to break through the picture and correct it. And never, never the reverse." This is the theatre of the real.

FOOTNOTE-Joseph Cedar's wonderful new film

I am still pondering this one. Though the reviewers I've read have seen this as a film that shows the Jewish art of learning for learning's sake - Torah Lishma - I think it is more about the problems of learning that begin and end with a footnote. Having been in footnotes myself in books and articles and also being proud of them, I definitely, empathize with the father Eliezer. But I also relate to Uriel the son, who is able to go beyond the infinitesimally small and expand learning so that people today can relate.


This tension very much exists today. We want to know and learn quickly. We don't want to take the time for research. We want everything to relate to our times and we get frustrated or bored when the problems of the past aren't my problems. I also get frustrated with the phrase "make it relevant." I am a big believer in context and I think that learning must be as much as possible from a contextualized perspective. I think we settle for easy answers and basically we like knowledge when it affirms views that we already have.


But learning in order for it to truly be new knowledge must be unsettling and disturbing. It must jar our usual mental processes and bring us to new conclusions. And this is where the movie FOOTNOTE creates the tension. The learning of the father gets stuck in the infinitesimal and the learning of the son, which becomes wisdom is that just knowing the truth is not always what is right.


It says in the Talmud that two scholars studying together "sharpen each other's minds in the study of the law for the sake of truth." But that sharpening can be a dangerous weapon wielded against others. FOOTNOTE beautifully shows this tension and also shows the dire consequences of learning that are hurtful and create barriers which enslave rather than frees us.

Batsheva Dance Company Tells Story Through Revelation

The internationally famous Batsheva Dance Company from Israel is coming to Chicago to the Auditorium Theatre later this month (ticket information below) . I watch the performers as they exhibit flawless execution and I ask, "What story are they telling?"

I spoke with Matan David, one of the troupe’s dancers and who is currently in New York City with the company. I asked him about the meaning and stories of their dance compositions. “It is hard to say as theatre and story. We work with emotions and feelings but not to show a story. The information is purely physical. The way we work - stories are created on their own and it is abstract.”

This past week they performed "Hora" in New York City. “It is a dance about the alternative meanings,” David told me. “The word “hora” can mean many things. For many it is an Israeli dance, it can also mean “hour” in Latin" (the dance is one hour). And the work doesn’t have the Hora circle dance in it. Clearly for Batsheva and its Director Ohad Naharin, meanings are subjectively multiple and come from the viewer’s perspective, even as they emerge for the performer.

Naharin, the Director of Batsheva Dance since 1990, has said. “Texture is one of the most meaningful things to me, in dancing…And for me the meaning comes out of recognizing those elements…the composition, the tension between the elements, the dynamics… that’s the meaning of the work; it comes out of there. That’s why you cannot tell a dance. And if you can tell a dance, it’s maybe not a very good danc.” (Susan Yung 2007 interview). Anna Kisselgoff of the NYTimes wrote, “He seems deliberately to leave interpretation to the audience. A more dubious appraisal might suggest the choreography is needlessly obscure in some cases.”

I continued my discussion with Matan David about “Max“ which will be performed in Chicago.  I continued to probe about story, but in a new way. I asked David about the story of Naharin and how he composed the music for “Max” under the pseudonym Maxim Warrat. He laughed and said, “That is very funny. Max is the alter ego of Naharin. He came into the studio one day and became Maxim Warrat the composer. It seemed like a joke. And the music came in with him each day we worked on it.” I asked if Naharin became someone else or more himself as Maxim and how his dual identities reminded me of Purim this past week, with the masks we wear to hide in order to play and let out another side of ourselves. “Yes, that is true," he said, "so “Max” is very theatrical and it came from the music. I always have people see “Max” first if they have never seen Batsheva. For me it is dark…the movement creates a distance. I love it. It is very influenced by Japanese movement and dance.”

In “Max” I saw the performers manipulate their bodies flawlessly through movements that were exacting, totally in sync and physically impeccable. I heard Hebrew and other languages or pseudo-language; and the musical tones evoked Jewish kinot, or mourning laments, which are chanted to remember exile and the ancient Temple’s destruction. I also saw in the dance other destructions and atrocities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and through the purity of Batsheva’s movement I was brought to the universalism of the suffering of all humanity. The New York Times wrote about “Max,” “(It) produces a formal structure full of breath, as if the air around the dancers and not just the movement, is responsible for shifting the dynamic from mischievous to ominous. At times it’s balmy; in other moments it’s ice cold. Succinctly and mysteriously, “Max” zeros in, just as its press notes say, on the pleasure and pain of being alive.”

Dance critic Debra Cash writes about how their technique coming from a process called "Gaga" is integral to their composition, “The Company sums it up by calling it simply “a tool for creative thinking." As it says on their website, "We are aware of the distance between our body parts, we are aware of the friction between flesh and bones, we sense the weight of our body parts…we learn to appreciate understatement and exaggeration…We discover both the animal we are and the power of our imagination.” 

In this way the body is more body-in-pure-movement rather than a body with a dramatic story arc and context. As a contrast, in the recent Wim Wenders film about Pina Bausch, Pina, (which beautifully encompasses her aesthetic of dance and the Wuppertal Tanztheater) one sees dancers working in a totally different way, with all kinds of relationships emerging -- men to women, sensual to powerful, repetitive and Sisyphusean, environment to body, music to feeling, and youth to aging.

Unlike Pina, Naharin goes to the other end of the spectrum. Meaning and story are stripped away to show the purity of body and energy. The music lends a feeling of ritual. Unseen and powerful forces are the source for the movement and the dancer is an actor who is not in control and caught up in movements without intellectual or emotional awareness.

Batsheva is understood through the viewer’s perspective, what the dancer discovers, and how the pure movement on stage is an unformed revelation of movement -- as texture and the text.

Batsheva Dance Company Auditorium Theatre March 17 and 18, 2012 one weekend only. Tickets are on sale now and range from $30 - $90, available by phone at (800) 982-2787, at http://www.ticketmaster.com/Auditorium-Theatre-tickets-Chicago/venue/57351 or in-person at ATRU’s box office. This engagement is made possible through the generous support of Seymour Persky.