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Rachel S. Kovacs

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Hidden

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Hidden

The turmoil of refugee family life following World War II—the traumas of escaping genocide, identifying the dead, and hunting for the missing—lingers until today. Holocaust survivors have often been separated by cities, continents, political and ideological barriers, and sometimes by religion. The postwar obstacles to reassembling family units are daunting. Mark Weiner’s compelling drama Hidden confronts the pain of that separation and the feelings of abandonment, loss, anger, and confusion that persist, even when those separated are reunited.

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Daughter of the Wicked

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Daughter of the Wicked

The impending 75th anniversary of the declaration of Israel as an independent state has prompted many controversial discussions. Among them are retrospective conversations about the country’s early days and questions as to whether those who struggled to create a cohesive post-Holocaust multicultural society also permitted systematic mistreatment of some citizens. How, for example, is it possible to justify the abduction of Yemenite children and the resultant grief and trauma for their families? Daughter of the Wicked, Shanit Keter Schwartz’s solo autobiographical play, deals in large part with her Yemenite identity, her immigrant parents, and her search for her missing sister.

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Eleanor and Alice

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Eleanor and Alice

It’s amazing how Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, and her first cousin Eleanor, renowned wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), sustained a relationship for more than six decades, given their polar-opposite dispositions. Blood is not necessarily thicker than water, and yet these two disparate personalities—the former, a socialite and senator’s wife, and the other, a political force and humanitarian in her own right, do not sever ties. Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts, Ellen Abrams’s new play about that relationship, deals with these celebrated women’s close camaraderie from childhood through FDR’s death. 

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I Love My Family But . . .

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I Love My Family But . . .

Parents who love their children often give them mixed messages, and children who get mixed messages often give their parents problems. Such is the case with Timmy, whose often rocky and self-centered relationship with his parents in the new musical comedy I Love My Family But… is followed from infancy through marriage, divorce—and the latter’s repercussions. This relationship most certainly qualifies as a I Love My Family But… situation.

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Mama I Want to Sing

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Mama I Want to Sing

There are music lovers who embrace jazz, some who adore R&B, and others with a penchant for soul. Yet even among these aficionados, how many know that each genre is heavily indebted to gospel music, and to black churches, where ministers and choirs rouse their congregants in praise and in prayer? Mama, I Want to Sing collectively celebrates legendary black singers whose musical roots were embedded in gospel music and who broke through color barriers as performers. It does so indirectly by tracing the life journey of Doris Winter—stage name Doris Troy—an aspiring singer in a gospel-rich choir. The guide through this journey is the DJ/Narrator, played by Vy Higginsen, the real-life younger sister of Doris Winter. She and her husband, Ken Wydro, co-created the script.

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She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind

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She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind

In the Roaring ’20s and Depression ’30s, women playwrights contributed substantively to the theater, but Black women playwrights’ work went largely unnoticed in the broader literary world. To counter this, Black magazine owners advertised contests to encourage new scripts. She’s Got Harlem on her Mind features three of Eulalie Spence’s four prizewinning scripts: The Starter (1923), Hot Stuff (1927), and The Hunch (1927). These one-act Harlem Renaissance vignettes reflect the everyday lives and cultures of its Black community. They provide a window into the hopes and shattered dreams of Harlem’s inhabitants.

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Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road

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Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road

For four decades in the mid-twentieth century, Hoagy Carmichael’s melodies enchanted audiences around the world. Despite massive social upheavals, including the Great Depression and World War II, his songs endured. Many, like Stardust, Georgia on My Mind, and Heart and Soul, became classics. The co-creators of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road lead the audience through those turbulent times as a group of gifted singers and dancers reprise a repertoire of hits that ultimately led to his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971.

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Fiddler on the Roof

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Fiddler on the Roof

Sholom Aleichem, the famous Yiddish writer, satirized and chronicled Jewish life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story of Tevye the dairyman, perhaps the best remembered of Aleichem’s works, and on which the musical Fiddler on the Roof is largely based, is being reprised by the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene in Yiddish—a production that premiered to acclaim before the pandemic and has now returned.

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Vatican Falls

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Vatican Falls

Individuals bearing scars of sexual victimization may prefer alternate histories to feel empowered and capable of some control over their lives. Those victims repeatedly denied justice may react more harshly than those receiving swift redress from perpetrators. In Vatican Falls, playwright Frank Avella vividly depicts the struggles, residual scar tissue, and raw anger of survivors of sexual assault by Catholic clergy whom they trusted.

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Everything’s Fine

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Everything’s Fine

If big-city Easterners could imagine what life in Midland, Texas, is like, they might conjure up images of a remote, semirural, small city with mundane lifestyles, cowboy hats, and thick drawls. Well, most of the stereotypical descriptors don’t apply here. Other than for the Texas sand, wind, and heat that Douglas McGrath describes in his solo play Everything’s Fine, there is much in McGrath’s story about growing up there that is universal.

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Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

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Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

David Strathairn, whose stellar career as a character actor has spanned decades, gives a brilliant, riveting solo performance in Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski. Playing a Pole who experienced the Holocaust, he draws on historical evidence and the testimony that playwrights Clark Young and Derek Goldman employ in their portrait of a righteous and desperate man determined to prevent the annihilation of his country’s Jews. This is the real-life Karski, humble, modest, and painfully aware of what he could do, and more so of what he could not do, to save them.

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Two Jews, Talking

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Two Jews, Talking

Old Testament history has been amply recreated on the stage and in film—enslavement in Egypt, the Hebrews’ 40-year desert trek to Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, transmission of Jewish laws, and a passionate yearning for the Promised Land. In Two Jews, Talking, playwright Ed. Weinberger loosely and innovatively paints both this saga, a “revisionist” desert adventure, and its cemetery-centered finale, with a very broad brush. He does so with the aid of veteran actors Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell, whose characters face off against each other theologically and temperamentally yet find comfort in each other’s company.

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Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom

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Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a brilliant but dense and sometimes inaccessible work. Aedin Moloney’s solo performance in Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom is adapted from Molly's “Yes!” soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s novel. Co-created by Moloney and acclaimed Irish author Colum McCann, the show is a remarkably ambitious collaboration, a welcome contribution to understanding the complexities of Molly Bloom (wife of Ulysses’ protagonist Leopold “Poldy” Bloom), and a consummate one-woman show.

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Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily in That Order)

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Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily in That Order)

Can an atheist serve as a guide to the history, customs, and longevity of the Jewish religion and its adherents? Moreover, how can an atheist recognize that a man who has just died is with God? At first glance, this seems quite absurd. Yet neither for Michael Takiff nor for his audience does it appear to be a problem. Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily in That Order), Takiff’s one-man show, is a roller-coaster ride through Jewish belief, identity, and practice.

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¡Americano!

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¡Americano!

If Antonio (Tony) Valdivinos, the hero of the new musical ¡Americano!, had been born before the millennium, and especially before World War II, the chances his true story would reaching a wide audience would have been slim to none—and even less likely echoed in an Off-Broadway musical with the momentum of a Broadway hit. But ¡Americano! is a vehicle that delivers the messages behind Tony’s story and those of other “dreamers” and serves as a catalyst for activism. Under the direction of Michael Barnard, the production reflects the uncertainty and frustrations facing dreamers, particularly those desiring to serve their new homeland as true Americans.

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H*tler’s Tasters

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H*tler’s Tasters

Much about Adolf Hitler was incongruous. Infatuated with his own greatness and that of the “Fatherland,” he pontificated about Aryan superiority, order, and sacrifice, yet his life was chaotic, fueled by anger and drug-induced delusions; he was obsessive and paranoid. In H*tler’s Tasters, playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has brilliantly adapted the true story of 15 women who were employed to taste the paranoid leader’s food. It’s a timely drama with dark humor and music.

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How the Hell Did I Get Here?

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How the Hell Did I Get Here?

For Downtown Abbey aficionados, it is an unlikely stretch to imagine Lesley Nicol as anyone other than the series’ jovial, wise cook, Mrs. Patmore. The leap of imagination that transforms Patmore into a painfully shy, insecure, aspiring and often overlooked actress is a dilemma with which the audience for How the Hell Did I Get Here? must grapple. Ironically, Mrs. Patmore and Ms. Nicol may share a Northern British accent, but that’s where any comparison ends. The former’s “extreme makeover” as fashionable Lesley Nicol is not a makeover at all, but an internal and external transformation from her early childhood. Isn’t that what good acting is all about?

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A Touch of the Poet

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A Touch of the Poet

Written in 1942, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet was intended to be the first of multiple plays about the Irish experience in America. O’Neill’s cycle was never completed, and the play was produced posthumously, in 1958. The Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival, masterfully directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, is a gut-wrenching drama that focuses on the Irish American Melody clan in the Boston of 1828. Led by Con (for Cornelius) Melody (Robert Cuccioli), a ne’er-do-well immigrant and inn owner who recites Lord Byron’s poetry, most of the characters live in a world full of delusions.

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Space Dogs

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Space Dogs

It seems a near-impossible task to take on an historical, highly politicized, and contentious international topic, and successfully morph it into a high-tech, semi-satirical pop-rock musical. Nevertheless, with Space Dogs, playwrights-composers-lyricists Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire have done exactly that. They have etched out the broader landscape of what was perhaps the most frightening, longest-running, and potentially deadliest conflict of the late 20th century—the Cold War.

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Just for Us

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Just for Us

Despite Alex Edelman’s opening caveat that “my comedy barely works if you’re not a Jew from the Upper East Side,” he is one of the rare, masterful stand-up comics who can “cast out” and then successfully “reel back in” a diverse audience. He can take his monologue way off-topic, on a tangent that itself could be a stand-alone show. Although the thrust of Just for Us is his attendance at a white-supremacist gathering, along the way he signs and mimics the distress of a gorilla at Robin Williams’s death (the gorilla really grieved), then quips that Brexit should be called “The Great British Break-Off,” and lovingly, yet mercilessly, spears his family, their Hebrew names, his brother’s Winter Olympics prowess as part of the Israeli skeleton team, and his Orthodox Jewish parents’ finessing of Christmas (including a decorated tree in the garage) to comfort a bereaved Christian friend.

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