Melinda Lopez\’s \”Sonia Flew,\” which opens at the Laguna Playhouse on Sept. 16, depicts the parallel struggles of a Cuban girl in 1961 and a half-Jewish, half-Cuban American boy just after Sept. 11.
If Barry Gordon seems to be one of the lone liberal voices on the radio (he jokes that listeners are as likely to hear Gordon Liddy as him on KCAA), he follows in a tradition that goes back to FDR.
Based upon Edward Hopper\’s famous painting of a late-night coffee shop on a desolate city street corner, Douglas Steinberg\’s new play, \”Nighthawks,\” which is having its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theater, features a painter who says only one word in the entire first act.
The Czech nation, in its many incarnations, has figured prominently in Jewish lore and literature. It has spawned the Golem and Franz Kafka, to say nothing of the recent Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner collaboration, \”Brundibar,\” a play that was staged by the Berkeley and Yale repertory theaters and that took its story of children who vanquish a monstrous adult, a stand-in for Hitler or fascism in general, from an opera written in the Terezin ghetto at the time of the Holocaust.
With all of the negative images about Jewish-Muslim clashes in the world, it is nice to see a documentary, directed and produced by a Jew and a Muslim, about a Muslim son taking over his father\’s slaughterhouse business in Queens, N.Y.
The film \”City of God\” shed light on a long-neglected subject, the Third World conditions and inescapable warfare existing in Rio de Janeiro\’s slums. Now comes \”Favela Rising,\” a documentary that not only limns the tragedy of the favelas, the Brazilian ghettoes, but also tells the inspirational tale of Anderson Sá, a black Messiah figure who founds a reggae music club that offers a nonviolent alternative to their rampant drug and gang activity.
Especially during the McCourts\’ first year of ownership, the Times sports section for the most part depicted Jamie and Frank McCourt, the latter known by Simers as the parking lot attendant, as carpetbaggers who have little interest in or knowledge of Los Angeles, social climbers who lack the financial resources to run the team and public relations novices.
While each show follows its own trajectory, Chaiken points out that many Jewish-themed plays explore the issue of legacy. These performers describe conflicted feelings about their parents and the aspirations held out for them. As clichéd as such scenarios may seem, they speak to the pain and humor of family, a commonality that usually resonates with audiences.
Bryan Singer\’s first real understanding of evil came when, as a boy of 9 or 10, he dressed up as a Nazi one day while playing a World War II game with his German neighbors in Princeton Junction, N.J. He came home wearing a swastika.
Singer\’s mother admonished him, but it wasn\’t until a few years later, when his junior high school teacher, Miss Fiscarelli, taught an entire unit in social studies on the Holocaust, that he gained a greater understanding as to why his mother had been so troubled. That class changed Singer\’s \”whole perception of what people are capable of anywhere,\” he said.
Alfred Uhry\’s \”Without Walls,\” starring Laurence Fishburne, deals not only with race but also sexuality.
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