Home
 
 
See Our Season

Times & Prices

  JETYES Outreach
 
JET Festival

JET Awards
 
 
Press Reviews

 
About JET
 
Donor List
& Sponsorship
Opportunities

 
JET Ushers
 
JET Yesterdays
 
Contact & Map
 
Do a Mitzvah
 
GET JET NEWSLETTER

Press Notices for JET Productions of 2007-2008

Saying Kaddish With My Sister

The Jewish Ensemble Theatre invites you to enjoy the compelling and often hilarious family encounters in the world premier of Allison Luterman’s Saying Kaddish With My Sister.  Underwritten by a generous grant from The MASCO Corporation Foundation, the play will have four preview shows beginning Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 and an opening night performance at 8:30 pm on Saturday, January 26th.  The outrageous comedy will run through Sunday, February 17th.


Kaddish photo
Leah Smith and Teri Clark Linden as the sisters

Saying Kaddish With My Sister is a funny in-depth analysis of familial truths that affect so many of our lives.  In this tale of sibling rivalry, compassion, and family values, Oprah/God (Rhonda English, Southfield, MI) introduces Lorraine, the empathetic, deceased mother (Milica Govich, Birmingham, MI), her conflicted daughters Lydia (Leah Smith, Detroit, MI) and Rachel (Teri Clark Linden, Dexter, Mi), and Max (Loren Bass, Ann Arbor, MI), her dying husband.

In spite of the play’s title, be prepared for laughs as humor propels the surprisingly honest exchanges among the members of the Horowitz family. You’ll eavesdrop when they recall the triumphs and disappointments of their past and you’ll be transported to a time outside-of-time to heaven’s waiting room, where Oprah Winfrey reigns.

The sisters, Lydia and Rachel, are as opposite as can be: one is an Orthodox Jew having just been forced out of her home in Gaza, the other, a quirkily dressed performance artist.

Saying Kaddish With My Sister is a wonderfully imagined play that was performed last year as a staged reading in JET’s Seymour J. and Ethel S. Frank Festival of New Plays where it received rave reviews. 

Allison Luterman is an award winning poet, playwright, and essayist.  She mentors troubled youth and conducts writing workshops.  Her work has been published in Radiance, The Sun, the East Bay Express, SF Chronicle and Response. 

Artistic Director:  Evelyn Orbach

Director:  Nicholas Callani

Stage Manager:  Harold Jurkiewicz

Scenic Designer:  Eric Maher

Lighting Designer:  Elaine Hendricks-Smith

Costume Designer:  Mary Copenhagen

Prop Designer:  Diane Ulseth

Cast:

God/Oprah:  Rhonda English, Southfield, MI

Lorraine:  Milica Govich, Birmingham, MI

Lydia:  Leah Smith, Detroit, MI

Rachel: Teri Clark Linden, Dexter, MI

Max:  Loren Bass, Ann Arbor, MI


The Jewish Ensemble Theatre, a professional theatre, is a Michigan non-profit corporation.  JET receives grants and support from the  Chrysler Foundation, the DeRoy Cultural Arts Fund, the Henry S. and Mala Dorfman Family Foundation, the Max M. Fisher Jewish Community Foundation, the Stephen, Nancy and Sam Grand  Philanthropic Fund, the Jewish Women’s Foundation,

the Kresge Foundation, the MASCO Corporation Foundation, the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shubert Foundation,

the Ben N. Teitel Charitable Trust, and the Detroit Jewish News.














Tony Award Nominee

MAX WRIGHT

The Detroit News Review  - Thursday, October 18, 2007

GRADE:  A

'Songs'
is music
to the soul

By Lawrence B. Johnson

Those sad lyrics are best buried, those old songs of love lost and pain past endurance. Those old wicked songs.

That poignantly spun phrase was coined by the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, though devotees of art song more likely associate it with Robert Schumann's setting of Heine's verses in a cycle called "Dichterliebe," or "Poet's Love."

Observing Heine's words through the exquisite prism of Schumann's music, playwright Jon Marans beheld the whole of human suffering and asked: What does it mean to live with scars on the heart, the soul, the body -- not merely to survive, but truly to live once more?

Marans came up with a layered but essentially optimistic answer in his 1996 play "Old Wicked Songs," which has remained vividly with me since I saw it in London's West End shortly after the premiere. Now the Jewish Ensemble Theatre has re-created this two-man show with all the wit, edge and ambiguity that made such an impression when the play was new.

The premise is straightforward enough. In 1986, a brilliant young American pianist goes to study accompaniment with an elderly, rather eccentric teacher in Vienna called Josef Mashkan. Actually, the pianist, Stephen Hoffman, is there against his wishes. The master he really wants to work with has insisted he spend some time first with Mashkan. But the larger reason the kid is there at all is that he's burned out, his artistic drive, his ability to practice, the joy of music itself, all gone.

Schumann's "Dichterliebe" is open on the piano, so Mashkan suggests they start with that. However, to his surprise and annoyance, the pianist isn't invited to play, but to sing. And so begins a contentious venture in which the uptight young American learns about breathing and the breath of life -- and in turn forces his teacher to face his own secret torment.

As the addled but earnest teacher, Max Wright offers a performance that's richly textured, funny and wise. And Daniel Kahn answers with a well-gauged progression from presumptuous smart-aleck to understanding -- about breath and life and the profound possibilities that both imply.

Evelyn Orbach, JET's founding artistic director, directs this show. Only when you stop to consider its seamless, effortless fluidity does her invisible hand reveal itself.

Lawrence B. Johnson is a Detroit-based cultural writer and critic.
 

Free Press 10/18/07 

Old Wicked Songs

ì ì ì ì”  Out of four stars

 Pair grips past in city of lies

By Martin F. Kohn   Free Press Theater Critic

           Vienna is all a lie, says Stephen Hoffman.  Begin with the famously blue Danube It isn’t blue. It’s brown, and doesn’t even run through the city.

            Stephen, an American, is in Vienna seeking help for what ails him. A concert pianist, he has lost his will to play. Although this is the city where Sigmund Freud once practiced, Stephen hasn’t come to see a doctor but a music teacher, one Josef Mashkan.

Shtefan and Mashkan (that’s what they call each other) are the entire population of Jon Marans’ play “Old Wicked Songs.” As played, respectively, by Daniel Kahn and Max Wright in Evelyn Orbach’s Jewish Ensemble Theatre production, they overfill the stage and aim right for the audience’s minds and hearts.

Not right away, though, and not obviously. Whatever the opposite of “glib” might be, this play is it.

There is more going on than music lessons. Marans’ play is about understanding, about identity, about connecting with suppressed emotions and coming to grips with the past. The play is set in 1986, with memories of the holocaust still very much alive.



       For Reviews of Past Shows
Click Here
     

Home | See Our Season | JETYES Outreach | JET Festival | JET Awards | Press Reviews
 
About JET | JET Ushers | JET Yesterdays | Contact & Map | Do a Mitzvah
ORDER TICKETS
                       Get JET email News & Specials