JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
As villains go, you can’t do much better than the one at the center of Netflix’s latest, a man called “Doctor Death.” In “Jaguar,” a crew of Spanish Holocaust survivors in 1960s Madrid hunt down Aribert Heim, a real-life Nazi physician who escaped justice for nearly half a century. “He was a doctor at Mauthausen,”…
I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees By David Greenspan Directed by Leigh Silverman Abrons Arts Center Over the course of decades, the writer, director and actor David Greenspan has built a body of work that downtown theater people consider with something close to awe while the general public has often been baffled. He’s won six Obie…
What do you do if your toddler is a god? (To start, hold the Jewish mother jokes.) In Sarah Ruhl’s beautiful and searching new play, “The Oldest Boy,” now playing at Lincoln Center Theater’s off-Broadway Mitzi Newhouse Theater, a Catholic-raised, all-American mother is visited by a pair of Buddhist monks, who inform her that her…
Clearly, playing biographical figures is challenging on many fronts, not least maintaining the delicate balance between authenticity and sensitivity. But for Isobel Pravda, who plays her grandmother, Holocaust survivor and actress Hana Pravda, she is in an advantageous position, not simply because she had a profoundly close relationship with Hana but because her lines are…
‘Why did you ruin a perfectly good Jewish wedding?” The question is addressed to Damián Szifrón, the 38-year-old director of “Relatos Salvajes” (“Wild Tales”), the Argentinian film that competed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He seems caught off guard. Indeed, it’s unlikely that many of the audience members recognized the amped-up version of “Havenu…
The first task would be to describe the play. In the case of the production of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Killer” currently running at Theatre for a New Audience, this is not so easy to do. We open on Berenger (Michael Shannon), the shambling existentialist everyman who frequently leads us through Ionesco’s plays, touring a neighborhood…
Posted outside the Golden Theater on 45th Street — where, until recently, David Mamet’s newest play, “The Anarchist,” was running right down the block from his masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross” — is the full text of an opinion piece Mamet wrote for The New York Times in November entitled “Considering the Excesses of Protest.” In…
Ronny Wasserstrom, left, as Mr. M, accomanied by his pigeon, center, played by Theresa Linnihan, and his shadow, right, played with finger puppets by Michelle Beshaw. Photo by Lee Wexler. In its evocation of “Terezin humor” — the grim recognition that if we didn’t laugh, we’d hang ourselves — “Mr. M,” by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette…
