In 1978, when Core y Fischer, Albert Greenberg and Naomi Newman founded A Traveling Jewish Theatre in Los Angeles, Newman says they were positively “unambitious, except in an artistic sense.” They never expected the enthusiastic response they elicited—a response that would propel them through three decades of theatremaking in San Francisco, where the company would relocate in 1982.
The Jewish Theatre (as it was renamed in 2009) has since mined Jewish identity and experience in all its historical, folkloric, mystical and contemporary dimensions, reinventing the Jewish storytelling tradition. The company’s trademark has been a rigorous ensemble process, driven for years by the artistic appetites of three—and later, after Helen Stoltzfus joined the group in 1987, four—co-artistic directors. This approach, rare in the American theatre, produced a rich aesthetic mingling of the experimental with popular forms spanning everything from vaudeville to Jewish liturgy.
Last fall, however, the company announced that 2011–12 would mark its final season. True to its original name, TJT ended up traveling to 60-plus cities worldwide, though by the late 1990s it largely abandoned touring for its own 88-seat basement theatre at Project Artaud in San Francisco’s Mission District. Greenberg and Stoltzfus left the company in 2002 to pursue their own projects under the aegis of Alice Arts. Fischer and Newman stayed on, with artistic directorship passing in 2002 to Aaron Davidman, who led TJT through an ambitious period marked by such highlights as Blood Relative, a 2005 international collaboration with Jewish and Arab artists.
The economy played a leading role in the 2011 decision to call it quits. More than half of TJT’s funding had evaporated in the recession. Indeed, the last several years had seen the company producing fewer shows and leaning more on established plays—even a Neil Simon—as the financially necessary alternative to developing new work.
But questions had also been raised internally about the relevance of the distinctive, groundbreaking ensemble theatre’s original mission 34 years on. Did the same need remain for a specifically Jewish theatre in the Bay Area?
“Now, 34 years later, you’ve got Tony Kushner, Jon Robin Baitz, you name it,” says Fischer. “It’s no longer a big deal. In 1980, when we first did The Last Yiddish Poet, Yiddish was still really marginalized. Now it’s taught in universities. The first klezmer revival band, the Klezmorim [from Berkeley], started at exactly the same time we did.”
In the 1970s, Fischer had been nursing a career in television and film (including three Robert Altman movies) when exposure to the avant-garde of the time, including ethnically conscious theatres such as El Teatro Campesino, drew him to the the notion of a modern Jewish theatre. Back then, he recalls, “Most Jews who happened to be playwrights, actors, directors, whatever, would rarely become part of the work or its subject. So to make a choice to identify publicly and mine the culture for our work was kind of new.”
“Jewish life was a lens to look at larger issues,” adds Greenberg, who in the 1970s was an L.A. songwriter intrigued by the questions theatre was asking. “Along with Roadside Theater in Appalachia and Junebug Productions out of New Orleans, we created an American Festival Project and toured Europe, showing the nature of America as not a melting pot but a kaleidoscope of colors,” remembers Greenberg with obvious pride. “But I think if you do ethnic theatre, there’s a limit to how seriously people take you as an art form in America.” He adds, “Too often we talked about the cultural parts, which were certainly important, and very little about the aesthetic part—the art—which I think was really strong.”
“We created plays that came from our own passions,” explains Stoltzfus. “We brought them into the rehearsal space, physicalized them, vocalized them, transcribed them, edited them, formed them into a play as an ensemble—not with one playwright, but with all of us being the playwright. That makes for a kind of richness and complexity that is different and wonderful.”
The Jewish Theatre’s final two-play season (which will be punctuated by a one-night-only theatrical “recap” and celebration on May 14) returned to the collaborative creation of new work, with fitting nods to the legacy that made possible the soul-searching vision first articulated in now-definitive productions like A Dance of Exile and The Last Yiddish Poet.
In the Maze of Our Own Lives, written and directed by Fischer, led off in October with a warmly emphatic, politically resonant accounting of the storied Group Theatre. The Group is an informal ancestor of TJT in its commitment to ensemble work and relevant new American plays—including a trailblazing exploration of Jewish-American life in the work of Group playwright Clifford Odets.
Newman’s own contribution in March, Becoming Grace, is a warm and present-minded one-woman play (directed by Jayne Wenger) derived from the words of writer and peace activist Grace Paley, another unofficial progenitor. In fact, A Dance of Exile, says Newman, got the troupe an introduction to Paley herself while the play—directed by Newman and performed by Fischer and Greenberg—was running at New York City’s Dance Theater Workshop in the early 1980s. Apparently, a mutual acquaintance had urged Paley to see it, so an 8 a.m. performance was mounted for the busy writer.
Newman is Paley’s junior by less than a decade, and her own background in immigrant-heavy, socialist-minded New York echoes that of the now-deceased author. “Her reputation of course will last, but I wanted to share her with people who don’t know her,” Newman says. “Her stories are really filled with poetry.”
Elaborating on Paley’s revelatory powers of expression, Newman cites a line from the author herself. “She says the hardest job is to illuminate something that hasn’t been seen before, or maybe not for a long time.” That line didn’t end up in the play, but it’s an apt description of nearly everything TJT has accomplished over 34 years.
San Francisco Bay Guardian critic Robert Avila is a recipient of American Theatre’s Bay Area Commissioning Fund grant, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
