Jewish Ensemble Theatre
Off-Broadway Theatre in West Bloomfield
(248) 788-2900
6600 W. Maple
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
2010 - 2011 Season
...be SURPRISED.
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Jewish Ensemble Theatre
6600 W. Maple
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
or call us at:
(248) 788-2900
Isaac Adams, playwright and actor, is performing in his own play about his search for what it means to be a Jew. He has married a beautiful non-Jewish model, giving up his “soul mate” to a young, observant man, and now he wants to understand his Jewish self, if there is one.
This hilarious, yet affecting and poignant evening, touches everyone who experiences it. G-d of Isaac focuses on what our religious and cultural affiliations mean to us, causing us to define what many often shrug off as undefinable.
Sherman's script toes the fine line between sweet humor and a serious discussion of religious and cultural identity, never letting the comedy impinge on the magnitude and importance this search has for Isaac. His style has an often self-deprecating humor, which makes the experience amazingly enjoyable — much more than a spoonful of sugar, if you will.
By the way, there is a rumor that Isaac’s mother might come to one of the performances. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to see her there.
The G-d of Isaac
by James Sherman
Directed by Christopher Bremer
October 6 - 31, 2010
...be CONNECTED.
Emmy-winning actress/comedienne Judy Gold and award-winning playwright Kate Moira Ryan embarked on a five-year journey across the United States, interviewing over 50 Jewish women of different ages, ethnicities, and occupations. The end result is a moving, humorous and astonishing portrait of what makes a Jewish mother a Jewish mother.
Judy Gold received a 2006 Drama Desk nomination for outstanding solo performance for 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.
This first visiting attraction includes Gold’s personal journey during which she becomes a parent, while simultaneously learning to be a daughter to a Jewish mother of her own. Whew!
There are a limited number of single tickets for these performances and only subscribers will be guaranteed seats for these special performances. Don’t miss out: subscribers will have guaranteed advance ticketing. Non-subscriber tickets will be available on a limited, first come, first serve basis. Subscribe or call now!
...be DELIGHTED.
25 Questions
for a Jewish Mother
by Kate Moira Ryan and Judy Gold
Co-Sponsored by JCC Annual Book Fair
Saturday, Nov. 13, 8:00 p.m. & Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010, 5:00 p.m.
Marion and David Handleman Hall.
Two performances only. No exchanges for this show.
Sonia Flew
by Melinda Lopez
Directed by David Wolber
A Co-Production with the
Performance Network of Ann Arbor, MI
December 8, 2010 - January 2, 2011
This play arrives in metro Detroit with an impressive track record. Since Sonia Flew was developed at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, it has been staged by many important regional theaters, including Steppenwolf in Chicago, which mounted a production the same season it debuted the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. It is also a Michigan premiere and we are pleased to be partnering for the first time with the award-winning Performance Network.
This remarkable work is a twice-told tale. Sonia, a Cuban immigrant whose parents smuggled their daughter out of Havana against her will when she was fifteen, now lives in Minneapolis with her Jewish husband and their two children. Her nineteen-year-old son Zak, "a Fulbright just waiting to happen," announces on Erev Chanukah that he has dropped out of college and joined the Marines to fight in Afghanistan. Oy Vey.
The first act is set three months after 9/11 while Act II moves back in time to newly revolutionized Cuba just before the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion where we meet Sonia’s “other” family. The play reminds us of the way in which momentous world events directly affect otherwise ordinary individuals. It also reinforces the notion that a person's deepest secrets often reside precariously close to the surface of memory. It’s life-changeingly great.
...be REMINDED.
...be DISCOVERED.
Modern Orthodox
by Daniel Goldfarb
January 19 - February 13, 2011
Originally starring Molly Ringwald and Jason Biggs, this is a knockout comedy about a modern young Jewish couple comfortably ensconced on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and how they are provoked to question their commitment to each other as well as the depth of their religious feeling. It all starts when Herschel Klein, ill-mannered interloper and diamond dealer from Brooklyn arrives on their doorstep with hi-top tennis shoes and a yarmulke with a Yankees logo demanding to be given harbor on Shabbat.
As you might imagine, Herschel takes his faith seriously, peppering his conversation with Hebrew phrases (notably the all-purpose invocation "Baruch Hashem,") and repeatedly denigrates Ben for his more casual approach to Judaism. In fact, Hershel's direct question about Ben's faith provokes a mildly embarrassed response. "Reform," he says. "Er, secular, really. Whatever you'd call a High Holy Day Jew." Hershel knows: "A gentile."
Suffice it to say that Herschel moves in and becomes the Jew who came to dinner, which doesn't exactly sit well with Ben's brand-new, gorgeous fiancée, Hannah, a hard-working doctor.
And there’s much more to this lovely, hilarious evening. Don’t miss it!
...be QUESTIONED.
New Jerusalem
The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656
by David Ives
Directed by David J. Magidson
March 16 - April 10, 2011
Amsterdam, 1656. Baruch de Spinoza neglects his father’s spice-importing business and spends his time speculating on the nature of G-d. Even worse, he has shared his ideas with gentile friends, including a young painter and Clara, the devout daughter of a local freethinker. But his blend of mystical piety and logical brilliance has also made him a rising star in the Jewish community and the beloved disciple of its leader, Rabbi Mortera.
As the play begins Spinoza is developing a definition of G-d that sets off alarm signals for Jews and Christians alike, a view that threatens to actually “dissolve” the G-d of monotheistic tradition.
As expressions of faith go, this locates Spinoza at the open door on the road to the Enlightenment. You’ll thrill to a Reformation-era prequel to the Scopes trial, with a chilling extra touch of proto-Nazism.
Here’s what makes this is no dusty philosophical play, but an astonishing, suspenseful adventure filled with surprises: either the Jews expel Spinoza as a heretic or Amsterdam will expel the Jews!
...be OBSERVANT.
Circumcise Me
A New Comedy Written by and Starring Yisrael Campbell
Directed by Sam Gold
Co-Sponsored by the JCC of Metropolitan Detroit
Originally produced by Evelyn McGee Colbert and Eva Price
for Maximum Entertainment Productions
Saturday, May 7, 9:00 p.m. and
Sunday May 8, 2011 5:00 p.m., 2011
Marion and David Handleman Hall
Two performances only. No exchanges for this show.
This is the hilarious, poignant, true story of Yisrael Campbell, your average Irish, Italian, Catholic kid from Philadelphia, who became a sober alcoholic, recovering drug addict, husband, father, reform, conservative, unorthodox, orthodox, Jewish comic actor. In Circumcise Me, his fresh from New York theatrical debut, Yisrael (born Christopher) takes the audience on an extraordinary spiritual, creative, and hysterically funny journey including, ouch, three circumcisions along the way.
This second visiting attraction is the rare collision of comedy and theatre and we promise it will have everyone both howling with laughter and squirming in their seats! Unbelievable. And once again only subscribers are guaranteed tickets. Oh what a night! Call now! Subscribe today!
...be RELOCATED.
The Model Apartment
by Donald Margulies
Directed by Lavinia Hart and featuring Jamie Moyer
May 11 - June 5, 2011
In this masterful dark comedy by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Donald Margulies, we find a husband and wife in flight from much more than their memories of surviving the Holocaust. Their promised land in the New World, a Florida condominium, is anything but the refuge this aging couple so desperately seeks. Max and Lola have left their care-riddled life in Brooklyn but what awaits them is anything but Eden.
When Lola says, at one point, "It's embarrassing to have to move people around in the middle of the night," there's a muffled roar of something unspoken beneath. They speak of someone they have left behind them -- for good, they hope -- who is referred to only as "she."
This may be Donald Margulies’ best writing, which is something since he has won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Obie and more. At the same time that it is sharp and regretful, hiding the most awful of truths, it is also gentle and oddly commonplace, filled with images of the couple eating cereal standing up or softly embracing each other, assuming a sad, strange poignancy.
(By the way, in a prior New Play-reading Festival series, guess where this play got its start? If you said this very JET Theatre, you would have gotten a cigar, if the law hadn’t changed.)
