View the JWT calendar to see all Salon Theatre dates and special events. Click on each event for show time, location and ticket price, and to buy your tickets. We look forward to seeing you at an event soon!
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Susanna Brisk from Jewish News CA reviews the second salon of the 2013 Season, “God Plans, and Woman Laughs” as “an intimate, informal, yet powerful entertainment experience.”
Read the entire glowing review and see pictures of the show by Cyndi Bemel by clicking HERE.
“God Plans, and Woman Laughs” was our best-attended salon yet, with sold-out shows all week. Enjoy this photo album of the show! (Click HERE or on photo for complete album).
Kate Zentall, Annie Korzen and Arva Rose
American Jewish University invited JWT to present three shows this year in the David Alan Shapiro Memorial Synagogue Center on the AJU Campus. JWT brought their popular salon shows Stories From The Fringe, Eden According to Eve and The Moment You Knew to this beautiful venue.
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JWT wants you to submit plays, poems, songs or monologues with the theme of “Sex, Lies and Virtual Relationships” to JWT’s College Writing Contest. You can win cash prizes and the chance to have your work presented in a 2014 At-Homes Salon. Click here for more information.
In November, JWT was invited to perform its popular show “Saffron & Rosewater” at the Fowler Museum at UCLA as part of the acclaimed art show, “Light and Shadows,” highlighting the art of Iranian Jews.
The cast of six performed brilliantly before three hundred patrons who were held spellbound by the storytelling, acting and singing. The post-show highlight was the gathering of all five of the distinguished writers on stage for a lively Q & A.
Gina Nahai talked about her childhood memories, why they are still so vivid today, and why they find their way into her books. Farideh Goldin told about her mother and grandmother being married off before puberty in Iran and how she left her homeland so she wouldn’t have the same fate. Esther Amini, in from New York, shared a bit about the impact of being raised by a mother who was never formally schooled.
In early November, JWT performed “Stories From the Fringe,” for almost 150 Marin County patrons at Kol Shofar, a synagogue in Tiburon. The very next day, JWT crossed the Golden Gate and performed “The Moment You Knew,” for over 100 San Francisco patrons in a private home in South Beach.
The shows were exceedingly well received!
Cast of Stories From the Fringe with Rabbis of Kol Shofar (Post Performance)
The Cast of “The Art of Forgiveness” with show Director Ellyn Gersh Lerner and JWT Artistic Director Ronda Spinak
Over six nights, nearly 500 JWT fans saw “The Art of Forgiveness” at private homes and at The National Council For Jewish Women. Check out the new photos by JWT Photographer Christiane Ingrenthon by clicking HERE.
by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
The Season’s Final Show!
What’s a dramaturge?
When submissions for The Moment You Knew began arriving in my email, I have to admit I had only a sketchy idea of what a dramaturge was. JWT’s literary manager and our artistic director had already reviewed about fifty entries and they sent me some of their picks for this production. That’s when I got the picture. The dramaturge’s job is to adapt, develop or edit theatrical writing. I began to read.
Pretty soon, it became clear that The Moment You Knew would be a show of many voices. They emerged from the plays, memoirs, blogs and other writings that kept coming my way. There were pieces by seasoned television writers and authors, as well as first time submissions. JWT had also commissioned pieces from its Artists in Residence – writers who have been exploring their Jewish experience on an on-going basis.
I’m no stranger to editing. I’ve belonged to a writers group for years. From this I’ve learned that while most of us are too close to our own writing to see it clearly, working on other people’s manuscripts develops your eye for what works, and what doesn’t. That said, this show posed some surprising challenges for me. I began to appreciate how different editing and writing theatrical material is from editing or writing a book.
In my novels I can plant readers in my characters’ heads. But theatre, by definition, distances characters from their audience. Even the people in the first row aren’t privy to what is happening in an actor’s head unless the character talks about it, or does something to dramatize it.
When I first heard the evocative title of this show, The Moment You Knew, I knew exactly which moment I wanted to write about. But as I began to work on it, I couldn’t find a way to dramatize the almost completely internal “moment” I’d had. In fact, it was so difficult I wasn’t sure I could write it at all.
I wasn’t alone. During these past weeks, a lot of manuscripts have been ping-ponging back and forth as we’ve isolated the essence of what each “moment” was about and found the best way to dramatize them. It’s nothing short of exhilarating when you realize that a word, a line, even a paragraph can be cut or moved and the whole piece falls into place!
After that, watching the finished pieces placed into the hands of actors and a very able director completed the production’s transformation from thought to theatre. Every piece came to life in unanticipated ways. The choice to accentuate a word or phrase, to pause here, instead of there, to adopt an accent or a tone, completely changed how they read on the page. Like children, they all began to assume their own independent identities. I was thrilled to watch my own monologue delivered in a way I had not imagined. I heard new layers of humor, wisdom and passion in the pieces I’d worked on.
The last element in bringing the collaborative process of The Moment You Knew to life is you, the audience. We’re sold out for all four performances!
It’s been a joy and an honor to dig into all this rich work. Now, I’m looking forward to our enjoying all these Moments together!
Breed Street Shul Project Update
We’re hard at work narrowing down which women to spotlight for the fall production about Jewish American women from the 1700’s to the 1970’s. A lot of big decisions also have to be made about how to dramatize them. There are so many women who have made enormous contributions to this country in so many ways – homesteaders and wild women of the West, fighters for the rights to vote, to unionize, to get a college education; creators of countless vital institutions… And two hundred years later, they can still make us laugh!
by Lisa Rosenbaum
Breed Street Shul Project
Not long ago, JWT’s Artistic Director Ronda Spinak and Founding Board Member Rabbi Lynne Kern flew to Cincinnati to research women in the rabbinate at the American Jewish Archives. While they were there, the director of the archives gave them a book of first-person stories about American Jewish women, from the 1700’s to the 1970’s. At about 1000 pages and weighing a couple of pounds, it was no lightweight in any sense, but the stories it contained were simply fascinating.
Who knew Jews were fretting about intermarriage back in 1743? Well, read the letter Abigail Franks of New York wrote to her son. Her pain and confusion at her daughter’s secret marriage to Oliver DeLancey (decidedly not of Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of New York!) is palpable. There are stories of pioneer women struggling to define their Judaism, first-hand accounts of women organizing garment workers, suffragettes, social workers, poets, politicians, musicians, writers and yes, a couple of real Vilde Chayas (Wild Women!).
None of this fit the mission of the JWT salons – telling the stories of contemporary Jewish women. But Ronda couldn’t stop thinking about the American Jewish women’s history book and what their lives said about the full sweep of the American Jewish experience. No one has dramatized their stories. We’ve never heard of most of them. She kept reading story after story, wondering what to do.
Then along came a connection to Tsilah Burman, Executive Director of the Breed Street Shul Project in Boyle Heights, and a subsequent visit to the shul in Boyle Heights. Tsilah wanted to know if JWT might be interested in using the newly renovated smaller shul at the back of the site for a theatrical production. Ronda thought immediately of the book and realized it was a perfect match; the oldest synagogue west of the Mississippi and a production about Jewish women in American history. She brought it up at a board meeting and asked if anyone was interested in producing. Arlene Sarner, Suzanna Kaplan and I raised our hands like over-eager school kids. We decided to do a “one-off” show (one that stands on its own and is not part of next year’s season) at the Breed Street Shul this fall.
Now the real work begins; figuring out how to wrestle this gigantic body of information into a meaningful, entertaining production. The four of us have been spending some serious time around Ronda’s kitchen table discussing possible approaches. Just slogging through the material is taking time, but we’re beginning to see some patterns emerging about the kinds of contributions these women made. There are voices from the eighteenth century that sound fresh and relevant today, and voices from the mid-twentieth century that sound woefully dated.
I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress. There’s a lot more to be said about the Breed Street Shul itself, but I’ll save that for another day!
In the meantime, mark your calendars. We’ve set the performance date for November 4, 2012!
Final Show of the Season
The Moment You Knew, our third and final show of the season, is just a couple of weeks away (May 28-31.) Tuesday night is already sold out so if you haven’t yet bought your tickets, click the “Buy Tickets” button on this page!
This is going to be an especially innovative theatrical evening, not only because of the provocative title, but because the show is a collage of responses from professional and non-professional writers. Also woven in are audience members’ submissions about: the moment you knew what it meant to be Jewish?
Come with your own “moments you knew” in mind and join the discussion afterwards for what will surely be a particularly illuminating Q & A!
Saffron and Rosewater Update
Last bit of news… The American Jewish Committee invited JWT to present excerpts of Saffron and Rosewater to a select group of Consuls General at a private home on May 18. This will be the culmination of a day-long program about LA’s Persian Jewish community! And a lovely acknowledgement of our work.
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