In 1939, Cuba’s Batista government, in collaboration with the government of the United States, delayed a ship called the SS St. Louis, which carried 937 Jewish-German refugees, in the Havana harbor. Despite assurances that they would be granted asylum, the refugees were told that they could not enter Cuba without a visa. Twenty-two were eventually…
MacDougal Street today can hardly be described as paradise. Crammed with NYU students jostling for falafel, or the bridge-and-tunnel crowd fighting for a seat at Panchito’s, it’s difficult to picture the street as a hub of subversion and artistry. But once upon a time, it was. In the 1920s, a Polish Jewish lesbian immigrant named…
Photo by Jonathan Slaff At least “Open Rehearsal” gives warning. The audience is told point blank in the program that the “acts and scenes occur out of sequence.” It is clear from the moment the lights go down that this will not be a linear theatrical experience. Playwright and director Lazarre Seymour Simckes is no…
A wedding or a funeral, which is more important? That’s the main question in the upcoming American premiere of “Winter Wedding” by the renowned Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin, co- translated by David Willinger and Laurel Hessing. The play, opening at Theater for the New City on May 5 and running through May 22, is a…
It’s a pretty familiar theme — the Jew as a perpetual wanderer, forever a foreigner, friendless and reviled by all. Is there anyone else so existentially homeless, utterly without place on the planet as the Jew? Who, besides the Jew, is so intolerable to his host that he becomes the target of violent threats, which…
On February 22, this year’s annual benefit for Theater For The New City’s Emerging Playwrights Program at the National Arts Club honors acting couple Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, which seems only natural. In 2005, Wallach released his delightful autobiography “The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage,” but at 94, Brooklyn-born Wallach is…
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