By Donald H. Harrison

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- It's the eighteenth year of the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, and for producing director Janet Arnold, the chai year means she has been weighing for a life time such questions as "Is this play Jewish?"; "Will the audience like it?", and "Who should be cast in it?"

There were times in that lifetime when Arnold wondered whether the company could make it--and she still does in poor cash flow seasons, when she has to defer her own salary. On a $400,000 budget, the theatre puts on four plays for adults, two for children, and also operates a teen improvisational troupe, an 8-week summer camp program for aspiring young actors as well as after-school acting programs for inner city youth.  

AJTC started as a "community theatre," meaning the actors were volunteers, but after several years Arnold decided that she needed to professionalize the product.  In came Actor's Equity, up went the quality, but so too did the costs. 

About 800 people are season ticket subscribers, a fairly high percentage of them gray-haired members of the Jewish community, but by no means only Jews. Each of the four adult plays per season typically attracts between 2,000 and 2,500 audience members in a small, office-building theatre that seats 190 people and that has almost no back stage for the cast to change, much less for the storage of props.  

Looking back over that  lifetime since she left a job as the early education director of the fprmer Phoenix Jewish Community Center, Arnold marveled that there probably hasn't been a play in which a piece of her own household hadn't appeared on stage as a prop.  "Clothes too?"  "Yes," she responded, "there was that gold go-go dress."

Madam Travel Agent and I met the producing director for dinner on Tuesday, Feb. 28,  at "My Florist" Cafe,  a trendy salad and sandwich place that kept the name of the former business at that location rather than tear down its well-known overhead sign. We later accompanied her to a crew meeting and  first read-through by the cast of Natives, a comedy by Janet Neipris about a Jewish mother whose three grown daughters come home, each having made a distinctive choice of mate.


Janet Arnold, producing director of the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, stands to get a better view of a model
of the set for Natives, which is now in rehearsals for a March 25-April 9 run.  (Donald H. Harrison photo}

The two-act comedy is one of those that tests the question, "Is it Jewish?"  New York Playwright Neipris is Jewish, and the characters refer occasionally to such experiences as "the time you lived in the back yard, pretending you were a Jew in the desert" or when a visit to a store produced a "panic attack" because there were "eight varieties of lox" to choose from.  At another point, the mother tells her daughters, "You have all come here visiting more plagues on me than Moses visited on Pharaoh" but, notwithstanding such references, there is nothing intrinsically Jewish about the play. The family could as easily have been Italian by substituting appropriate cultural references.  Various Yiddishisms were the garnish on a universal play.

About the play, Arnold commented: "It clearly has a Jewish feel to it, the way they relate to each other, but it is a constant question. We just had the Association for Jewish Theatre conference here, and we always have that question, 'what is Jewish, how Jewish should it be' and so on.  In Detroit, the  Jewish Ensemble Theatre feels that their mission is doing things of social conscience, so they will stretch to that point. Maybe it is written by a Jewish playwright but there is nothing Jewish in the play, but it makes you think about a social problem."

Arnold said she normally demands explicit Jewish content, but she conceded that she stretched that boundary recently when she put on a production of Oscar and Felix, which is Neil Simon's redo of The Odd Couple.

"I have my theory about Neil Simon--I have my theories about everything," she said.  "If you look at them (the characters)  in Come Blow Your Horn, he doesn’t say they are Jewish or anything, but they are so obviously Jewish.   You know when he was writing those things in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was post World War II, and you didn’t make a big deal about being Jewish.  I think Neil Simon came out of the closet about being a Jew with his Brighton Beach Trilogy, each of which AJTC has produced during its 18-year run.

Comedies, light fare, are the safest choice for a theatre company, audiences often preferring to be entertained than educated.  However, in each season, Arnold says, she feels it is her responsibility to do at least one drama, often dealing with edgy subjects, but not too edgy lest she alienate her audience.

This season the drama was Two by Ron Elisha in which a rabbi living in a cellar apartment in postwar Germany reflects on the Holocaust and his own relationship with God.

"We always do our best work in those small dramas; we just can’t get people in the door," Arnold commented. "The ones who come love it.  I mean the response that we got in the community to Two is overwhelming; I had a call today from a woman, 'I have been coming for a few years, I thought Two was absolutely spectacular, and you know  I think is that it is time we made a donation.'  We got several e-mails on this show, one guy e-mailing saying 'this is why I come to Jewish theatre, to see something different, significant and important rather than the marginal Jewish stuff.'  I wrote him back, 'thank you so much, but your opinion is in the minority.'"

Last season, the drama  The Price by Arthur Miller was as well or better attended than any of the comedies but that probably was a function of the timing.  Miller died the day before the play opened. "I blessed him every day," said Arnold. "He was older and it was his time, but, oh, his timing was so wonderful for us, that we got all sorts of people into that show who never would have gone, and so our drama was one of our big sellers. But that is unusual."

After transitioning to a professional theatre, Arnold learned that in Phoenix, at least, most professional actors are not Jewish.  She found herself casting numerous Christians in Jewish parts, so much so that she often felt obliged to take her cast on field trips to help them achieve a sense of their characters.  She recalled one particular Simchat Torah when she took the actors to a Chabad House, where some heavy imbibing was being done to celebrate the annual completion of the Torah reading cycle.  She said when the troupe was ready to leave the celebration, she looked around for one actor, an Italian-American, but couldn't find him.  Not until she looked up on the bima and found him jovially swapping stories and tossing down drinks with one of the Lubavitchers.

Sometimes, Arnold said, she feels as if she is operating a small version of the Anti-Defamation League because the plays help not only the actors but her audience become increasingly familiar with the customs, beliefs and history of the Jewish people.  That is a two-edged sword.  Because AJTC considers one of its missions to be teaching Gentiles about Jews, Arnold is wary about plays that may be too critical of the Jewish community.  "Should we wash our dirty linen in public?" she asked me rhetorically.

As an example, she mentioned finding a play about the Jonathan Pollard case.  She said the play was quite critical of Israel, so she stayed away from it.  "I figure Israel has enough enemies without me adding to it," she said.  Another play deals with spousal abuse in a Jewish household. She took a pass on that one too.

On the other hand, she said, she did put on a play confronting two emotional issues, in which a pregnant Jewish woman knows that if she gives birth, her son will be gay.  She decides to have an abortion.  Talk about controversy!

Arnold said she has learned to be "mercenary" enough to calculate what her audience will accept and what, for them, will be beyond the pale.  Of course, not every member of her audience thinks alike.  In one drama about the Holocaust, to emphasize its universality, she "color-blind casted," meaning that she had people of different races playing members of the same family.  One African-American actor played "multiple roles as a Polish farmer, a Nazi, and another guy in the concentration camp," Arnold said. "I felt that was interesting-- in fact, last week, we got a donation from someone who said, 'no more casting like that one time!'" She replied: "That was six years ago, you still remember that!"

The cast and crew preparing for the March 25 through April 9 run of Natives  turned out to be an interesting ethnic mixture themselves.  The director, Mark DeMichele is of Italian parentage. His wife and children are Jewish. He also has acted in AJTC roles, including one in which he portrayed a rabbi in Cantorial, a play about a haunted temple. Reading the script, he recognized he was on too unfamiliar ground, so he studied with Rabbi Arnold Plotkin, the most senior emeritus rabbi in Phoenix. 

"I literally sat at the foot of the rabbi several evenings, he would instruct me, because I didn’t know what I was doing…. I didn’t know what a yad was (the pointer for the Torah) and he said 'you do it like this.'"  Incidentally, DeMichele returned the favor to the elderly rabbi, casting him in a production for another theatre company as an exorcist, which resulted in the production being packed by many of his former congregants at Temple Beth Israel!

Stage manager Avi Soroka was raised in an Orthodox family in New York, and is a graduate of Yeshiva University.  He saw an ad online for the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, and applied for the opportunity to combine his background and his interest in theatre.  

For Soroka, there is no precise answer to the question about what makes a Jewish play.  "The best thing you can do as a Jewish theatre company is to present all Jews in all lights mostly, I think, so non-Jews can get who we are and what we are..."

Well, is Natives, for example, a Jewish play?  "I think it is a Jewish family and I think a Jewish family is already a step closer to a Jewish play than a non-Jewish family," he responded. "This is a very modern family …it says a lot about Jews nowadays that you can just stick in a few lines, and they are a Jewish family... I think the theatre company has been great to show different Jews from all different angles. We show the Jews who have assimilated and the ones who haven’t assimilated" in various productions.

Mark Turvis had a maternal Jewish grandmother but his mother followed the Roman Catholic ways of his father.  Turvis decided to formally convert to Judaism when he was a teenager, a ceremony that required his circumcision.  He said he bolstered his courage for that surgery with heaping glasses of kosher wine.  Besides being an actor in this play (he plays a husband who is more obsessed with food than with sex), Turvis also writes for Backstage, which covers theatre throughout the country.

"I think ethnic theatre should have two roles – one is to educate the wider community and the second is to keep the faith. ...It's easy in America to forget about where we come from, so I think part of the ethnic theatre’s mission should be the education of those around you and the re-education of people" in the community.

Angela Calabrasi and Michael Tassoni are Roman Catholic Italian Americans, whose understanding of Jewish people has been deepened by their association with the theatre company. In Convertible Girl, Tassoni played a rabbi who was converting a girl to Judaism--talk about the teacher staying one step ahead of the student! Tassoni said many people assume he is Jewish upon meeting him because some Italians and Jews have similar looks.

To assess what role a Jewish theatre company should play, Calabrasi pondered what she would want from a hypothetical Italian American company: In addition to entertaining audiences, she said, she would expect that ethnic theatre would "educate people about a culture that they have not been brought up in, that they are not a part of."  She said this ought to include "whatever you define as culture – rituals, language, religion, history – and then of course familial cultural things, things that are specific to certain families"   

By such standards, the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company clearly is a complete success.  Still, making a nice healthy profit wouldn't be so terrible either.