Quick, name a pioneering comic actress from the early days of television. Chances are you mentioned Lucille Ball, but before we loved Lucy there was Gertrude Berg, who not only starred in The Goldbergs — the first exposure to Jewish family life for many Americans — but she wrote, directed and produced the entire series, as she had previously done on radio for two decades. … [Read more...]
World premiere play revives ‘Goldbergs’ pioneer and the blacklist
Gertrude Berg, the pioneering writer-director-producer-star of radio and television’s The Goldbergs, a domestic comedy of a Jewish family in the Bronx, is all but forgotten today. In part that is why area stage actress Elizabeth Dimon wanted to commission a play about Berg and her show’s untimely demise in the dark days of the anti-Communist blacklist. In addition, the … [Read more...]
At GableStage, a somber, powerful ‘The Children’
Lucy Kirkwood has life-and-death issues on her mind in her clever, thought-provoking drama The Children, but she is wily enough to wrap her themes inside a very human character study. And at GableStage, which is giving the work its area premiere, director Michael Leeds brings this somber little play to life with Laura Turnbull, Angie Radosh and David Kwiat – three of the … [Read more...]
Powerful ‘If I Forget’ stuns at GableStage
These days, we cling to our memories, worried that without them we will drift into dementia. But in his latest controversial book, fictional professor of Jewish studies Michael Fischer argues that American Jews need to forget – forget the Holocaust and stop obsessing over it for the sake of their mental health and general well-being. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he … [Read more...]