THEATER REVIEW: NEW JERUSALEM

Baruch Spinoza (Marco Naggar) and  Clara van den Enden (Kate Huffman) in New Jerusalem. Photo by Hope Burleigh.

A rationalist strategy

By Ed Rampell

The censorial impulse has always been with us, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem Witch Trials to Peter Zenger’s trial to the post-World War I Palmer Raids to the Scopes Monkey Trial to the Stalinist Moscow Show Trials to the House Un-American Activities/McCarthy Era purges, and so on. Throughout history the “heretic,” the “apostate,” the free thinker, the non-conformist, has often faced persecution by orthodox defenders of the established order who fear the status quo is being threatened by new, different ideas. David Ives’ New Jerusalem takes a searing look at an archetypal seer facing excommunication by no less than two powers that be.

Philosopher Baruch Spinoza (Marco Naggar) was born in 1632 in the Dutch Republic of Amsterdam, where his family had fled from Portugal, with its inquisition and forced conversions of Jews. What is now Holland has long enjoyed a reputation for the kind of tolerance which Spinoza preached, and Amsterdam, of course, is where Anne Frank’s family sought refuge from fascism’s gathering deluge 400 years later. While the Netherlands granted these Sephardic wandering Jews more liberty than the auto-de-fes of Portugal and Spain, Amsterdam’s Jewish population experienced what’s been called a sort of second class citizenship, not unlike what blacks encountered in the segregated South.

Spinoza sprang out of this social milieu, and by the time he was 23 evolved a “heretical” philosophy that challenged the precepts of the Old and New Testaments. In a nutshell, Spinoza argued in favor of logic and rational thought against superstition and was a major Enlightenment theorist. Not surprisingly, the dominant majority Christian culture seemed to feel jeopardized by Spinoza’s radical precepts. Spinoza posed a double-edged dilemma for Amsterdam’s Jewry (or at least its establishment) which felt not only ideologically endangered, but, as a minority, perceived its tenuous position in a foreign land was being imperiled by what the majority viewed as apostasy coming from the strangers in their midst. Dutch Jews, or at least their leaders, felt like they were between the proverbial rock and hard place.

This is the stuff that makes for heady drama: The clash of ideas plus a trial, which is inherently confrontational, generating the conflict tragedies thrive on. Some, however, may find the play to be talky, especially act one, with its exposition; act two moves at a brisker pace. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s similarly themed 1955 play about a teacher of evolution being put on trial, Inherit the Wind, was filmed four times, most memorably in 1960 by Stanley Kramer. But alas, poor 23-year-old Spinoza had no Spencer Tracy/Clarence Darrow type character defending him.

Perceived as a sort of witch doctor, Spinoza needs a spin doctor to defend him as he debates Amsterdam’s chief rabbi, Saul Levi Mortera (Richard Fancy), and Gaspar Rodrigues Ben Israel (Shelly Kurtz), a parnas (president or trustee) of the congregation of Talmud Torah.  Spinoza’s expulsion hearing of took place there, in Amsterdam’s foremost synagogue, in July 1656. Amsterdam regent Abraham van Valkenburgh (Tony Pasqualini) observes -- if not presides over -- the proceedings to determine whether or not Spinoza should be forever banished by the Jews with a kherem (somewhat similar to an Islamic fatwa).

Unlike the Scopes Monkey Trial, which was actually broadcast on live radio during the 1920s, little remains of the record of the actual inquiry (although the chilling verdict remains). Having no trial transcripts, the playwright conjures up dialogue and the action of various characters, who spy on and testify against Spinoza, including his Dutch friend, the painter Simon de Vries (Todd Cattell), his half-sister, Rebekah (Brenda Davidson) and a female friend who Spinoza seems sweet on but can’t properly woo because she’s Christian. Conflicted Clara van den Enden (Kate Huffman) valiantly tries to defend the thinker.

The ensemble acting is adroitly, tautly directed by Elina de Santos. The sparring between the philosopher and his interrogators, especially the rabbi, is electric. Sparks fly as an anguished Mortera faces off against his former pupil, while Kurtz’s parnas likewise delivers a bravura performance. The rabbi’s philosophical conclusions in the face of his ex-student’s reasoning is surprising -- and quite troubling: Spinoza must be expelled not because he lies, and is wrong, but because he tells the truth and is right. So the victims of expulsion go on to practice expulsion themselves.

Naggar’s prophet outcast alternately comes across as priggish, smug, self-absorbed, self-righteous, brilliant and brashly hubristic in that youthful, exuberant way. Naggar hails from Geneva, the Swiss city with a long human rights history that’s currently celebrating the birth there of another of the Age of Reason’s top philosophes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As the Jewish leaders, a bearded Fancy and Kurtz (a Yeshiva University grad!) are also standouts, delivering Ives’ zingers with gusto and angst, as their characters whine on about Spinoza’s temerity in thinking for himself.

Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s set is spot on, creating a sense of being in a Jewish temple with Sephardic roots, where most if not all of the action takes place. However, Schwartz’s modern dress costuming presented a conundrum for this reviewer. On the one hand, this breaks the illusion of the fourth wall. Theatre, film, TV, etc., can take spectators to another time and place, long ago and far away, but when Mr. Pasqualini’s Valkenburgh appears in a snazzy three piece suit and tie, the aud’s “willing suspension of disbelief” (as poet Samuel Coleridge put it) is shattered.

On the other hand, this contemporary aspect could be an attempt to create a Bertolt Brecht-like “alienation effect,” intended to snap viewers out of the reverie that they are seeing real life unfold before their eyes, when in fact, they are merely watching a staged rendition of reality. Therefore, spectators should assess the play as a work of art using their logic (a true Spinozan perspective!), instead of via emotions caused by empathizing with characters, the plot’s plight points, etc.

Having said that, I feel that the modern dress costuming is a blunder, and note that according to photos in a N.Y. Times review, the cast wore period costumes in a 2008 off-Broadway production of Ives’ drama. Furthermore, the current version’s own graphic likewise depicts a figure in 17^th century garb. As for authenticity, only a few experts and sticklers for absolute accuracy would demand costly costuming completely faithful to that era’s fashions. In fact, mere black robes would have served as appropriate garb for some characters.

But this is a mere quibble, and the West Coast Jewish Theatre’s production is a thought provoking evocation of the thought police -- then and now. Last year WCJT also presented the anti-Nazi plays The God of Isaac and Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass. In addition to being an ethicist, Spinoza was a lens grinder, a symbolic calling for a man who set out to make humanity see the truth, and for one finally ground down before his time. To find out why Albert Einstein said he “believe[d] in the god of Spinoza,” don’t miss New Jerusalem -- a shining city on a theatrical hill.


New Jerusalem runs through April 1 at the Pico Playhouse, 10508 W. Pico Blvd., L.A., CA 90064. For more information: Call 323/821-2449;http://www.wcjt.org/. 

FILM REVIEW: BRIDE FLIGHT

Frank (Waldemar Torenstra) and Esther (Anna Drjver) in Bride Flight.

Thresh beholdened

By Ed Rampell

Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight is a highly recommended adult movie. By this, I don’t mean that it’s porn – although it does have some eroticism and a glorious nude scene. Rather, I simply mean that this foreign film has mature subject matter and is for grownups who think. Bride Flight also has a fairly complex form that requires a sustained attention span, so it’s definitely not for mall rats intent on mindless action and escapism on multiplex screens. 

As its name implies, Bride Flight is indeed about wives-to-be who fly on the so-called “Last Great Air Race” from Europe to New Zealand back in 1953, when these globe straddling jaunts were very big adventures. The passengers aboard the KLM carrier that participated in and won this real life aerial contest included 40 Dutch immigrants, mostly women seeking to escape post-WWII Holland’s hardships by starting new lives at Christchurch, where their Dutch fiancés awaited them. A pretty offbeat premise, as far as plots are concerned.

The film focuses on three women and a man on this flight that, back in the 1950s, took days to make. Frank touches the lives of the trio, and although the émigrés’ existences become intertwined in their adapted country, they go on to lead very separate lives, yet remain intimately bound. In terms of Bride Flight’s complexity, it effortlessly shifts cinematically from past to present, so the romantic saga goes back and forth from the young to the aged immigrants. The technique requires viewers to focus on the unfolding saga, the way that Alain Resnais’ circa 1960 classics Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour likewise bent time and continuity. 

Bride Flight therefore has two actors playing each major character -- 20-somethings for the new arrivals, seniors for the present day Dutch transplants. American audiences will be most familiar with the rugged Dutch action hero Rutger Hauer (1982’s Blade Runner, 2005’s Batman Begins, this year’s Hobo With a Shotgun) who portrays Frank. Waldemar Torenstra plays young Frank. Ada has married a religious zealot and is portrayed by nubile Karina Smulders, whose smoldering sex scene with Frank lights up the screen. Pleuni Touw depicts the older Ada.

As young Marjorie, Elise Schaap’s character makes the best marriage of the trio, although life tosses her a curveball, causing her to become obsessive and possessive. Petra Laseur plays petulant Marjorie as an older and perhaps wiser lady. Probably the most interesting character is Esther (Anna Drjver), a Jew who, unlike her family members, survived the Holocaust, although its lingering, PTSD-like effects continue, understandably, to haunt Esther. 

Esther retains a strong individualistic streak and along with the jealous Marjorie, shares a “deep dark secret.” Esther is a fashion designer. (Interestingly, Drjver is actually a runway model, so talk about tailor-made casting.) While movies and TV shows heavily favor certain professions -- crime fighters, doctors, journalists, attorneys and the like -- Frank’s career path is fairly unusual for motion picture protagonists, and another sign as to what an outstandingly unusual film Bride Flight is. 

Bride Flight's location shooting in New Zealand enhances the overall production, which is handsome to behold and drink in. Like most movies set and/or shot in the South Seas, the indigenous Islanders and their Islands serve mainly as backdrop for the really important doings of the Caucasoid stars. However, in Bride Flight it’s not even New Zealand’s dominant majority culture of white people or “Pakehas” of English origin who are featured; it’s a Dutch minority.

Nevertheless, this 130-minute, partially subtitled film is an excellent, well-crafted feature for auds who prefer their movies mature. Bride Flight is a realistic slice of life, albeit in an unusual milieu. Director Sombogaart’s Twin Sisters was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2004, and gazing into my crystal ball, I predict the same for Bride Flight, which has also earned some richly deserved prizes on the film festival circuit. Bride Flight, like fine wines, shows that films taste better when aged.

 

  

 

FILM FEATURE: PAGE OSTROW

Producer Page Ostrow

Producing pictures of importance

By Ed Rampell

The fact that Beverly Hills-based Page Ostrow is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors has contributed to rather than hampered her success in the highly competitive, male-dominated movie world. The profound life lessons Ostrow absorbed from her parents -- who met in Germany after their liberation from different concentration camps -- have served this producer’s representative well.

“Around 1960 my father came to Toronto without two nickels to rub together, and he went on to have the second largest manufacturing company of leather coats in Canada,” proudly states Ostrow, President of Ostrow and Company.

Ostrow developed the sharp, shrewd negotiating skills necessary for obtaining distribution for hundreds of films and navigating Hollywood’s shark infested waters by paying close attention to and implementing strategies she learned from her Dad, a self made businessman.

“I worked with my father for four years, learning how to do business the old school way, which includes having the long view of building close relationships with clients and associates,” said Ostrow.

But more important than the business acumen Ostrow accumulated from her family is the ethos bestowed by parents who endured Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen and other slave labor camps. Indeed, as one of a handful of the film industry’s producer’s representatives, Ostrow is on a movie mission, using her savvy deal making skills to secure outlets and film financing for socially aware indie features and documentaries that might otherwise fall by the wayside amidst Hollywood’s focus on big budget glitz, glamour and escapism. Ostrow hooks up independent, hard hitting filmmakers with distributors who release their work worldwide on all platforms, including theatrical, television, home entertainment/ VOD (video on demand), Internet and all ancillary rights.

“We’re fortunate to represent quality films,” said Ostrow. “Films of conscience with cinematic vision meet with our commitment and strategy toward championing a new global reality”

The specialty cinema Ostrow and Company represents includes Juvies, a documentary about juvenile offenders tried as adults by what the firm’s website calls “a kind of vending machine justice.” The 2004 doc aired on HBO.

Heavens Fall is a 2006 dramatization of the infamous Scottsboro Boys court case, wherein nine Blacks were falsely accused of raping two Southern white women during the 1930s, starring David Strathairn, Timothy Hutton and Leelee Sobieski. Mohammed Gohar’s 2008 The Anti-Bin Laden is an award winning nonfiction look at the Egyptian televangelist and businessman, Amar Khaled, who preaches a moderate vision. Stolen Childhoods is a doc narrated by Meryl Streep about forced child labor. The firm’s 200-plus titles also include feel good movies like Dating Games People Play and Summer Dreams.

A day in this producer’s representative’s hectic life reveals her to be a whirlwind of activity. At her office, located a stone’s throw from Rodeo Drive, Ostrow and her team seem to need eight arms each to get through in-house meetings, nonstop phone calls and emails from around the globe. Ostrow works the phone with an ease Alexander Graham Bell would marvel at, negotiating contracts with filmmakers and distributors, navigating the finer points of a deal with studio executives to win her producers bigger payoffs.

The firm’s busy pace became fever-pitched during Egypt’s revolutionary turmoil, when Mohammed Gohar, CEO of Video Cairo Sat, made frantic long distance calls to Ostrow and Company, declaring that VCS’ “150 employees are holed up in my office for nine days now with the lights dimmed to protect from looters and security at our door protecting us. We’re providing satellite, crew and information to all the reporters from around the world here in Egypt. We’re currently missing three of our team who went out as crew to report and have not returned.”

The child of Holocaust survivors empathizes with the desperate Egyptian, and asks, “How can I help?” “Just watch our film,” replies Gohar, who, via satellite, sends Ostrow a link to The Last Breath, arguably the first documentary chronicling the events leading up to Egypt’s revolution and the people’s power revolt there. Viewing the doc, Ostrow and her staff are, she says, “amazed by the uncanny predictions detailed in the film which are now a reality in Egypt,” and the producer’s rep signs a contract with Gohar to represent The Last Breath.

Ostrow’s team includes 30 cinema scouts who travel the film festival circuit and trade shows all over the world, including Toronto (Ostrow’s hometown), Austin (where the South By Southwest Festival is taking place this week), the Bahamas, Utah (home of Robert Redford’s Sundance), the French Riviera (Cannes), Santa Monica (the American Film Market), etc. Every day there’s another film festival somewhere; Ostrow’s team covers most of them. At these venues producers seeking distribution for character driven feature films and socially relevant documentaries are encouraged to submit their work for consideration. An in-house team of executives review each and every film submitted for filtration to see which are suitable for producer's representation.

Those selected are then offered a deal in exchange for a retainer and percentage of business done by Ostrow’s multimillion dollar Beverly Hills outfit, which has access to film distributors in various mediums and platforms. Filmmakers may know their art, but Ostrow – who has worked for distributors such as Graham King (The Aviator; The Departed) for 10 years and on her own as a producer’s rep for another decade -- has the business savvy, contacts and database to ensure producers find audiences for their work.

But this Beverly Hills wheeler-dealer isn’t only in it for the moolah. Remembering her roots, Ostrow supports Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, recording testimonials of thousands of survivors of Hitler’s genocide. In 2004 she served on the board of directors of the National Council for Jewish Women, serving as an activist as well. Ostrow was also the first Hollywood entertainment executive invited to speak at the United Nations Film Festival in New York.

“The noblest search is the search for excellence,” Ostrow stresses. “Could I have made more money doing slasher films and movies with gratuitous sex and violence? I don’t even think about it; there’s many ways to make money. Feature films and socially conscious documentaries are the kinds of films I like to represent. I’d rather leave a legacy, change lives and have an impact. There’s an audience for these types of films."

Another Harvest Moon is one of these films. Starring Doris Roberts, Piper Laurie, Anne Meara, Richard Schiff, Cybill Shepherd and Cameron Monaghan, the film is scheduled for an April release in selected theaters. The movie deals with the circle of life in three generations of a family and stars Ernest Borgnine, who just won the Screen Actors Guild’s Life Achievement Award.

While growing up in Toronto Ostrow was bitten by the movie bug after seeing the 1972 anti-Nazi musical, Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York and Joel Grey.

“When I first started going to Cannes,” she recalls, “I brought with me the Time Magazine that had on the cover a Holocaust survivor in the camps behind electric wires, in black and white uniform, and it said: ‘Love Letters From the Camps.’ Even during the times of the concentration camps people actually sent love letters back and forth. And I thought, ‘If they could do that, and have hope and be brave, then I can certainly handle what any of the notoriously difficult Hollywood players or studio executive at Cannes can throw my way as a young woman deal making on the Croisette of the French Riviera.’ Courage is never letting your actions be dictated by fears.”

Page Ostrow has survived and thrived in Tinseltown, enhancing the cinema scene by championing the indie and the underdog.

THEATER REVIEW: BROKEN GLASS

Sylvia (Susan Angelo) and Phillip (Michael Bofshever) in Broken Glass. Photo Credit: Hope Oklahoma.

Before Passover

By Ed Rampell

Arthur Miller is our very own American Shakespeare. Miller’s best known for Death of a Salesman, his 1949 scathing critique of capitalism; All My Sons, his acerbic look at war profiteering; his metaphorical McCarthyism dramas, 1953’s Salem witchtrial-set The Crucible and 1955’s A View From the Bridge; and he’s also rather famous for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

Broken Glass is one of the lesser-known works in the Miller canon. It only ran 73 performances when it opened on Broadway in 1994, although it was Tony-nominated. And Broken Glass is also probably this Jewish playwright’s most Jewish play.

At its core Broken Glass explores what it means to be a Jew in America, so it’s appropriate that it is being presented by the West Coast Jewish Theatre. While Dr. Harry Hyman (Stephen Burleigh) hasn’t changed his name, this equestrian physician who wears riding boots in his medical office and rides his trusty steed in the rural hinterlands of 1930s Brooklyn (hard to believe!) is a self-avowed atheist who married the shiksa, Margaret (Peggy Dunne), from Minnesota. Phillip Gellburg (Michael Bofshever) is a self-denying Jew, who is introduced to us in a scene where he spells his name, in order to dispel the notion that he’s a “Goldberg.” Phillip has broken glass ceilings by working for a gentile real estate-related firm by foreclosing properties (now there’s a timely reference), and using his WASPy boss’ (a Tory yachtie played by Stanton Chase) influence to get his son into West Point to become a career Army officer.

But then there’s Phillip’s wife, Sylvia (Susan Angelo). Although not particularly religious, as Hitler’s “final solution to the Jewish question” engulfs European Jewry, she internalizes the looming fate of her people. Despite being “safely” ensconced thousands of miles and an ocean away in America, newspaper accounts of the Nazis’ 1938 night of terror called Kristallnacht have a curious effect on the panicky Sylvia: She is literally paralyzed. (Imagine how terrorized poor Sylvia would have been had she been bombarded by our 24/7 news cycle on cable TV, the Internet, etc.!)

Miller uses paralysis and impotence to probe the condition of the Jews as the Holocaust approached. He seems to have a Reichian analysis, cannily linking political repression to sexual dysfunction. The play’s title refers to Kristallnacht, or “the night of Broken Glass,” but also, perhaps, to the sexual symbolism of the Jewish wedding ceremony custom of the groom stomping on a drinking glass wrapped in a cloth, which represents deflowering. It’s interesting to note again the doctor’s last name, which sounds like “hymen” and is another reference to devirginization. (Interestingly, Dr. Hyman, who has a reputation for being promiscuous, calls himself a “socialist” -- psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was a German Jewish Communist who believed the revolution would liberate libido.) It’s all grist for the Miller mill.

While Sylvia’s hysteria is intensified and amplified by the Nazi pogroms, her marital problems long preceded the Shoah. In illumining her soul Miller reveals that Phillip’s refusal to allow his wife to continue her career once they married has contributed to her inner paralysis. But by 1994, a quarter or century after the rise of the feminist movement, this and some of Miller’s other observations are hardly original.

Nevertheless, Broken Glass is a powerful drama adroitly directed by Elina de Santos (who previously helmed All My Sons for the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble) and the 99-seat Pico Playhouse was sold out the night I saw the play. WCJT’s production of this lesser known Miller play is well worth seeing and well acted by an ensemble cast. Peggy Dunne skillfully reveals the ruefulness beneath Margaret’s mirthfulness, which conceals a painful nervousness caused by her husband’s philandering. Broken Glass is at its best when it delves into the helplessness of the Jews as they confronted fascism’s floodwaters. Do you remember that pathetic look on Hannah’s (Paulette Goddard) face -- which Charlie Chaplin so movingly captured in his 1940 masterpiece, The Great Dictator -- as the Nazis invaded yet another country in their anti-Jewish jihad and crusade? Born Marion Pauline Levy, like her character Hannah, Goddard was a Jew.

More insightful and revelatory is the Jewish playwright’s depiction of the psychological dilemma and anguish of the Jew in America. Should he/she assimilate? Or embrace his/her heritage and legacy? In Broken Glass, Miller shows himself to be on a par with those other great Jewish-American writers who grappled with these tense, thorny issues, such as Phillip Roth, author of novels such as Portnoy’s Complaint.


Broken Glass runs through April 17 at the Pico Playhouse, 10508 W. Pico Blvd., L.A., CA 90064. For info: 323/860-6620; www.wcjt.org or www.picoplayhouse.com