This Land Is Our Land
Aaron Davidman has been grappling with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time, and in fact he’s been working on his one-man show on the subject for a long time as well. The erstwhile artistic director of San Francisco’s late Traveling Jewish Theatre was scheduled to unveil Wrestling Jerusalem as part of TJT’s final season in 2012, but instead the show’s finally seeing the light of day two years later at Intersection for the Arts. Directed by Michael Jon Garcés, artistic director of Los Angeles’s Cornerstone Theater Company, the staging is intimate and intense, laced with skillful use of Middle Eastern and other music by sound designer Bruno Louchouarn.
A Becoming Farewell
TJT has unveiled the final show of its final season in a limited two-weekend run, founder Naomi Newman’s one-woman show about author Grace Paley. My review is up on the Marin Independent Journal web site, also for a limited time.
Rock’s Progress
If you’re really, really looking forward to seeing Rock of Ages this spring (featuring “the mind-blowing, face-melting hits of Journey” et al.), you may want to tide yourself over by checking out a much smaller-scale ’80s-style rock musical finishing up its run in San Francisco this week.
Reflection in a Portrait
Show #46: Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, The Jewish Theatre San Francisco, April 16.
A Rosensweig by Any Other Name
Although San Jose Rep and TheatreWorks had both done the play in the past, the late Wendy Wasserstein’s 1992 Broadway hit had somehow never made it to San Francisco until now, so I’d never seen The Sisters Rosensweig before Saturday night—nor, if truth be told, had I seen any of Wasserstein’s plays. I had some vague notion that it had something to do with Chekhov’s Three Sisters, because of my unexamined assumption that anything with three sisters had to be informed by that play, from Lear’s daughters to Daisy Duck’s nieces. Turns out the Rosensweigs aren’t Chekhovian in the slightest, although Wasserstein tosses in a few Three Sisters references in the same offhand, apropos-of-nothing way that distinguishes a lot of play’s bon mots.
