The New Jewish Theatre

2010-2011 Productions

My Name is Asher Lev by Aaron Posner, adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok

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Asher LevThis inspiring drama, based on the novel by Chaim Potok and newly adapted by Aaron Posner, is a passionate and poignant coming-of-age story about a young man’s personal struggle between his religious upbringing and his drive to become an artist. Asher Lev, a young Hassidic boy born with a natural and prodigious artistic gift, is torn between his observant Jewish community and his need for creative freedoms. His artistic genius, threatening his relationship with his parents and community, weighs heavily on his conscience as he struggles to reconcile his two worlds.  Both heartbreaking and triumphant, Asher’s story is a struggle without ethnic, intellectual or artistic boundaries.

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The Last of the Red Hot Mamas by Tony Parise and Karin Baker

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ADDITIONAL WEEK OF PERFORMANCES

SophieBefore Madonna, before Marlene Dietrich - there was Sophie!  The legendary Sophie Tucker, Queen of vaudeville, burlesque theatre and the jazz age, whose career spanned a sensational 60 years in showbiz. Born Sonia Kalish to a Jewish family in Tsarist Russia that immigrated to the United States, Tucker’s bawdy sense of humor and outspoken views on men and relationships influenced comediennes and singers for generations. This original musical, featuring many of the songs Tucker made famous, including “My Yiddishe Momme,” her signature song, “Some of These Days,” and “I’m The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” celebrates the gutsy vaudevillian’s six-decade career and popularity.

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Sirens by Deborah Zoe Laufer

FEBRUARY-MARCH
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SirenDirect from the Humana New Plays Festival, Laufer’s hit play is an empty-nest story about a husband and wife and the hit love song he wrote for her. When musician Sam first met Rose, he wrote a song for her which became an instant hit. Rose fell in love with Sam, they married and lived off the song's proceeds for the next 25 years.  But Sam’s creative stagnation and memories of passionate youth drive him to Facebook to seek a new muse to reawaken the passions of 25 years ago.  Laufer asks “when the past is longer than the future and when ardor turns to comfort, how can you find a way to be happy with what you have? Eternity sounds really great in principle, but it might be just interminable.” In Sirens, Laufer dares us to remember our past while finding a way to embrace the future—and to live in the present.

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Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets

APRIL-MAY
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tenementWar looms across the ocean, anti-Semitism is on the rise, capitalism is corrupt, the American economy is shaken to its roots, immigrants are uneasy and the family unit is in upheaval – with issues as relevant today as when it first premiered in 1935, this masterpiece by Odets is gritty, passionate, funny and heartbreaking. Set in a Bronx tenement during the Great Depression, the Bergers, a working-class Jewish family helmed by Matriarch Bessie, desperately cope with their financial hardships while clinging to dreams of a brighter future.  The tale grabs you by the collar and reminds you of the price of materialism, of an inhuman society. A masterpiece of American drama, The Wall Street Journal heralds it as “One of the greatest of all American plays.”

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The Immigrant by Mark Harelik

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judaica smallInspired by the playwright’s family history – and his grandmother’s photo album – this is the (mostly true) story of two Eastern European Jews who immigrated to a small Texas town in 1909. This is just one story among thousands of Jewish immigrants who ended up in the American Southwest through the Galveston Project.  When Haskell ends up in Hamilton, Texas, he discovers that he is a stranger in a strange land as the town’s only Jew.  He must struggle to hold onto or recapture his sense of culture, family and a place in the world. Harelik’s loving portrayal of his grandparents’ tale is a touching search for both personal and cultural roots.  It is both funny and heartfelt.

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