NJT Hits Milestone with
Bat Mitzvah (13th) Season

In Jewish tradition, 13 is a significant number.  With the Bar (male) or Bat (female) Mitzvah ceremony which typically occurs at age 13, a young person assumes the mantle of adulthood in the eyes of the community. This being the 13th Season for the New Jewish Theatre, one can assume that this Theatre Company has also achieved a degree of maturity in the eyes of the community.  So join NJT, St. Louis’ Premier Small Professional Theatre, as we celebrate our Bat Mitzvah Season of 2009-10.

Once again this season we find ourselves out of our home at the Jewish Community Center in Creve Coeur, awaiting with excitement, completion of our new state-of-the-art Studio Theatre.  We will again be presenting most of our productions at Clayton High School at 2 Mark Twain Circle off of Maryland Avenue in Clayton.  There is generous, well lit, free parking available at the school or the Center of Clayton which adjoins it.

In keeping with this traditional event of a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, our 13th season is essentially a traditional one with stories, of families, fathers and sons, religious and cultural identity, birth of the State of Israel and of course, Jewish humor.

The season opens September 30 – October 18 with Herb Gardner’s 1994 quasi-autobiographical classic about three generations of a Jewish family living on the lower East Side, “Conversations with My Father.”  Gardner’s play, a beautiful paean to the Jewish immigrant experience and father-son relationships.  The play continues through October 18.

“Brooklyn Boy” by Donald Margulies opens December 2 and runs through December 20.  Margulies’ play follows the career of Eric Weiss, a writer whose novel hits the bestseller list the same time his life begins to unravel.  His wife is out the door, his father is in the hospital and his childhood friend thinks he has sold himself to the devil. For Weiss, this pilgrimage is a return to a neighborhood, mind-set, and religion: Brooklyn and Judaism, both of which he had escaped from and had no wish to embrace.

In February, the offering is Charlie Varon’s drama, “The People’s Violin,” a sensitive exploration of family relationships, culture, identity, truth and deception as it “grapples with the distinctly American notion that we can reinvent ourselves."  Sol Shank is an experimental filmmaker, making a documentary about his psychotherapist-Holocaust authority-author father, ultimately is forced to question what it means to be Jewish — and the audience must question the meaning of identity, tribe and self.  It will run February 24 – March 14.

Slated for the Missouri History Museum as part of their Performing Arts Series, the April production, is a world premiere adaptation, a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Adaptor and director, Robin Weatherall sets the story in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1947 during the war for Israeli Independence.  Rather than feuding families in Verona, we find warring Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem with the British as mediator.  The production will run April 14 – May 2. 

The season finale is Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.”  Inspired by Simon's experience as a writer for Cid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, this raucous comedy, set in 1953 during television’s golden age, is a hilarious behind-the-scenes peek into the comedy writers' room for a fictional show hosted by the brilliant but neurotic Max Prince.    It’s screamingly funny with its fast paced insults, non-sequiturs and one-liners.  It will run for June 2 – 20.

Join us for our 2009-10 “Bat Mitzvah” Season of award winning theatre.  Brochures are available now. Subscriptions and single tickets are available now and can be purchased by phone, mail or online at www.newjewishtheatre.org.  Or call the box office at 314-442-3283.