5/31/2023 0 Comments Woman in russia with xray visionAlthough the play tackles serious issues, Vaynberg called it “lush, romantic and sexy - not didactic.” The first member of her family to be born in this country, Vaynberg grew up in Los Angeles her bat mitzvah, which was presided over by a Chabad rabbi, took place in the community room of a local theater. In an interview, Vaynberg told The Jewish Week that the two-hour play is based on her own upbringing her father was a railroad engineer in Russia and her mother is a physician. Russian fairy tales, including the tale of the witch named Baba Yaga (a staple of Yiddish folklore), as well as one about a frog princess, are interwoven into the play in ways that mirror the main action of the drama. Lena and Katya, despite the differences in their backgrounds, bond over listening secretly to Radio Liberty, as well as to bootleg recordings (made on X-ray films) of the Beatles and Vysotsky.īut as anti-Semitism spikes throughout the Soviet Union, and as Lena attempts to get a visa to emigrate to America, Lena and Katya’s relationship turns out to be more fraught than either of them had realized. Katya, who is divorced, falls for a Jewish man named Levin (Terrell Wheeler), a railroad supervisor who tells anti-Semitic jokes to his colleagues to convince them that he is not Jewish. Like the title character in Tolstoy’s novel, Lena is a married woman who has an affair, in this case with a man named Adler (Jordan Bellow). Lena (Vaynberg) is Jewish Katya (Perkins) is not. Inspired by Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” it comes on the heels of the debut of a new musical adaptation of the same novel in London, and just a year after the closing of Dave Malloy’s hit Broadway musical “Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812,” inspired by Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” The new work was sponsored by grants from COJECO (Council of Jewish Émigré Community Organizations) and the Genesis Philanthropy Group.ĭirected by Inés Braun, “The Russian and the Jew” centers on the close friendship between two young female doctors in the small town of Brest in Belarus. These X-ray recordings are a central metaphor in a new Off-Broadway play, “The Russian and the Jew,” written by Liba Vaynberg and Emily Louise Perkins. T hey called it “jazz on bones.” In Soviet-era Russia, Western music was explicitly forbidden, and in order to listen, say, to the Beatles or to the work of the Jewish singer/songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky, music was recorded on X-ray films by cutting them in circles and burning a cigarette hole in the center.
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