Tovah & Ruth
In a beautiful Jewish cosmic alignment, brilliant actress Tovah Feldshuh is portraying the acclaimed Dr. Ruth Westheimer in “Becoming Dr. Ruth” (June 9-July 4) at our very own North Coast Repertory Theater.
I had the distinct pleasure of having some time to talk to Tovah and Dr. Ruth. I feel very honored and very lucky to have been in that position. I’m going to let them do the talking in this article, but first I wanted to acknowledge that both of these women were incredibly generous with their attention and they both made a point to address me by name and connected with me as a person and not just another interviewer. I thought I would start out like this because I wanted to preserve the human touches of these conversations that, to me, further highlights the pathos of the play and the friendship between Tovah and Dr. Ruth that enriches it. Read
Old Globe Season 2023 Preview
Coming off of a very successful post-pandemic 2022 season, the Old Globe is continuing their momentum. (“We’ve had really full houses; it’s been really gratifying,” Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director, Barry Edelstein, remarked.) The 2023 season offers many of the things we look forward to: Shakespeare, world premiere commissions and vibrant variety.
Barry Edelstein, talked us through some selections of the new season. Read
World Premiere Play Explores Contemporary Jewish Conversations and Friendships
Nathan Englander worked for a whole year on developing his short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” into a play of the same name exchanging draft after draft with Barry Edelstein. When they finally had a draft they were happy to take into rehearsal, Covid shutdowns hit two days later.
“It was just of the personal disappointments — it was so sad. I had been working for years and we were just about to all fly out and go into rehearsal. It has been so close to my heart this whole time. I didn’t let myself look at it for two years in between. I was like ‘Don’t read it. Don’t touch it,’” Nathan Englander said.
He was in France teaching for NYU this past summer and was able to take a whole month to reopen the draft that he kept away from and revise it. The world changed in those two years and what his characters (contemporary Jewish friends) would actually talk about, their worries, their opinions on the global landscape had to reflect a specific point in time. Read
Costume designer Ásta Hostetter and Shana put special emphasis on the clothes as an important world-building tool and something pivotal to the tone of the play.
“Because this play is about artifice and the ways in which the presentation and clothes actually determine so much about what we say to the world about who we are in terms of gender, wealth, status all those things, the clothes are quite pivotal to the point of view of the production,” she said.
Shana explained that with putting on Shakespeare’s plays there is a level of dramaturgy in the design process where you are asked to create a whole world whereas contemporary playwrights spell out the design in the text. Read