-Courtesy of Perpetual Motion PR
photo by Aaron Oster
Theatre Ariel, which since 1990 has been Philadelphia’s only professional theatre company dedicated to telling stories of the Jewish experience, returns to producing fully-staged performances this fall with a Philadelphia Premiere. Since 2011, Theatre Ariel’s Salon series – readings in intimate spaces of classic and modern Jewish plays – have delighted local audiences. This November, the company branches out to present their first Mainstage production since 2009, bringing to life a play that saw powerful audience reactions when presented as a reading. Now, Theatre Ariel welcomes a wider audience into the world of Amsterdam, by Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur, translated by Eran Erdy. Amsterdam will run November 14-24 at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street. Tickets will be available starting mid-May on www.theatreariel.org.
In a timely play that explores how the costs of past injustices always come due, audiences meet an Israeli violinist living along a picturesque canal in Amsterdam who receives an unpaid bill from 1944. An unpaid gas bill. The implications of it send her racing through issues of identity and alienness, legacy and peoplehood. Amsterdam is a thrilling and imaginatively-told mystery that reconstructs the possible, devastating origins of the bill.
“The premise gives you goosebumps,” says Theatre Ariel Artistic Director Jesse Bernstein. “And while details are very specifically related to the Holocaust and the Jewish psyche, the themes are universal: How marginalized people sometimes struggle to both advocate for their uniqueness while also trying to assimilate; the not-always-unjustified paranoia of what people in the dominant culture are thinking of you; the refusal of nations to take responsibility for the trauma they’ve inflicted on groups of people. The Jewish people are not alone in these experiences.”
To illuminate these themes, Yasur chose a unique style. Rather than portraying specific characters, a group of actors simply tell the story – navigating spots where they can’t agree on the facts and sometimes getting side-tracked – as they try to solve the mystery of the bill. In creating this stream-of-consciousness style, the playwright was inspired by the flight of starlings, with their constantly changing directions. The actors move through the story much like the shifting flight of the birds, further enhancing the scattered interior thoughts of the characters and the performers.
That style is part of what inspired Bernstein, who will be directing the production, to make Amsterdam the play that marks Theatre Ariel’s return to the stage. “When I became Artistic Director of Theatre Ariel in 2022 and we began discussing mounting a full production, I knew it needed to be a play that demanded to be more than a reading, that demanded to be ‘on its feet’. Amsterdam is pure theatre: physical and poetic and funny, and it asks both the audience and the actors to take a very unique journey together.”
That journey is partly inspired by actual events. Yasur, who herself spent time living in Amsterdam, read about a student researching the Amsterdam City Hall archives. The student discovered paperwork revealing that many Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust returned home from the camps only to be forced to pay utility bills for the time they were gone – a time during which, in many instances, Nazis were living in the confiscated homes of the deported Jews. Theatre Ariel got a first hand account of this injustice when it first performed Amsterdam in the Salon series in 2023. At the Salon, a man told the room about his father, who sat beside him. When his father was a boy, his family fled Amsterdam for South America when the war broke about. Upon returning to Amsterdam, the bank demanded they pay back-mortgage for the time they were gone. The family, essentially refugees, were unable to pay and ultimately lost their house.
“It’s real history that echoes strongly today,” Bernstein says. “Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are on the rise, and this play deals with both in a completely unique way. It’s the only play I’ve ever read that captures what it’s like being inside my head as I deal with these issues. That will make our Jewish audiences feel seen, and offer some insight to non-Jewish audiences. Maya also grapples with Israel and Israeli identity in a complex, nuanced way that I think will surprise many American audiences. She lets no one off the hook, including, I think, herself.”
The cast and production team will be announced at a later date.
Theatre Ariel is a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 1990. Since spring of 2011, Theatre Ariel’s main mode of performance has been our Salons – concert readings of new and established plays performed in intimate spaces. Inspired by the 19th-century gatherings of intellectuals and artists, these readings originally took place in living rooms around the Philadelphia area. When COVID-19 forced people to stay at home, Theatre Ariel quickly pivoted to produce an all-online season. This was followed by a season half on-line and half in public venues where distancing was possible. In 2022, Theatre Ariel returned to completely in-person performances and for the 2023 – 2024 season we reintroduced a few in-home performances.
Amsterdam represents the first fully-mounted production for the company since 2009, when Theatre Ariel performed a run of 10 IMAGININGS OF SARAH AND HAGAR at Theatre Three in Manhattan (NYC) for Theatre of Ideas’ International Jewish Theatre Festival. We remounted the show for the Bucks County Jewish Theatre Festival produced in partnership with the Bristol Riverside Theatre.
Theatre Ariel presents professional performances of new and established plays inspired by the past, present, and future of the Jewish experience – its heritage and humor, struggles and triumphs, ethics and intersections. Through our focus on the specific, we illuminate the universal. Our performances entertain, educate, and enrich audiences in intimate communal settings unique to our region’s cultural life. Theatre Ariel welcomes everyone to engage with our shows as a catalyst for exciting, thought-provoking discourse.
In 1990, Founding Artistic Director Deborah Baer Mozes created Theatre Ariel in response to a gap in the cultural mosaic of Philadelphia – the lack of a Jewish theatre. This was not always the case. Richard Cumberland’s The Jew had its American debut in Philadelphia in 1830. In the early 1900s Philadelphia was a vibrant center of Yiddish theatre, with the names of Molly Picon (a native Philadelphian), Jacob Adler and all the greats of that era glittering on the marquees of Philadelphia’s theatres. With the diminishing light of Yiddish theatre, Jewish theatre lay dormant in the city — until the birth of Theatre Ariel.
In its thirty-three years, Theatre Ariel has made an impact locally, nationally and internationally as a theatre committed to the development of new Jewish plays and emerging Jewish playwrights as well as celebrating published and established work. More information can be found here: www.theatreariel.org/history
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