Laurence Klavan
By Laurence Klavan
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Culture True Drama
Large theaters in 2010 seemed to mostly recycle earlier images of Jews, familiarly corrosive or sentimental (“Angels in America,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Collected Stories,” even “The Merchant of Venice”). It was left to smaller theaters to take fresh approaches to modern Jewish life and recent history. David Greenspan portrayed hilarious and hair-raising marital discord in…
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Culture Reproducing Madoff
When the Bernard Madoff scandal broke in 2008, some Jews feared a rise in anti-Semitism, predicting that age-old stereotypes of the greedy Hebrew would be awakened and again perpetuated. Now, nearly two years later, despite a minor increase in typically anonymous, bigoted comments on websites and blogs, it remains mostly a Jewish obsession: How could…
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Culture The Replacements
The Book of Genesis is filled with replacement and impersonation: Jacob disguises himself as his twin, Esau, to get his father’s inheritance; Rachel replaces her sister, Leah, in Jacob’s bed. So maybe it’s fitting that the new Bible-based show, “Jacob’s House,” at New York’s Flux Theatre Ensemble, is itself a replacement. The show originally scheduled…
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Culture It’s a Sin
Dramatic adaptations are both a sort of marriage and a kind of alchemy: a mystical merging of two artists to produce a new creation in a different form. This is fitting for Isaac Bashevis Singer, since matrimony and magic both provide subjects for much of his work, including his short story “The Unseen,” which has…
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Culture Heads of Clay
The February 2 announcement of the Academy Award nominations will include five nominees for Best Animated Film, instead of the usual three, a testament to the large number of worthy contenders this year (or maybe just the pressure applied by major studios to push their most lucrative product). It means there may be room for…
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Culture Canonizing Saint Simon?
Neil Simon is, it turns out, in line to be one of the greats. The Broadway revival of his Jewish family play, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” was supposed to be offered in repertory with the second of its two sequels, “Broadway Bound.” David Cromer — whose recent productions of “Our Town” and the avant-garde musical, “The…
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Culture Revenge, a Dish Best Served Convincing
Over the summer, much was made in the media of the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish revenge picture, “Inglorious Basterds.” A mix of structural virtuosity and moral and emotional nincompoopery, the film expressed Tarantino’s lip-smacking love of torture, and titillated audiences were delighted by its sadism. Daniel Goldfarb’s similarly themed play, “The Retributionists,” has had…
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Culture Unstunned
Brooklyn’s community of Syrian Jews — defensive, insular, affluent and bound by a 75-year-old edict that forces excommunication upon anyone intermarrying — is a big and mysterious subject, one ripe for dramatizing. Zev Chafets’s excellent article about it, “The Sy Empire,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in 2007, had odd and arresting…
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