“A People”

** What a crazy week of theater and film. We saw “Nunsense” ( quite Catholic), then the other night, we went to the movies for a Chicago premiere of “Cast Aside The Clouds” ( dealing with Bahai’) and tonight, “A People”( A new Jewish play with a message) at Theater Wit. This play is being presented by Arts Judaica and YI Love Jewish. The play written by L.M. Feldman is 90 minutes and is designed to take its audience on a journey covering 5000 plus years of Jewish history.

Directed by Avi Hoffman, who spent about 14 mnutes explaining the partnership between Arts Judaica and YI Love Jewish. While the cast was, for the most part, highly talented, and some of the vignettes cute, I truly felt that this is still a play in development and that after they rework scenes and monologues, they will come up with a sparkling production that will acheive the goal the the writer and director made special mention of, “Challenging antisemitism through the art”. I am not so sure, the way it is at present that this can happen.

There is a lot of information to cover and of course, they get into many traditions, the Yiddish language, the High Holidays ( they begin with Yom Kippur/The Jewsih New Year), the blowing of the Shofar, the prayers, the language and back to the traditions. They also add to the mix some gayness and try very hard to get the audience involved. They do have a blessing for the bread/Chale and pass a chunk to each audience member in the first row for sure, and I will say the Chale was good.

The cast members were solid. There was one cast member, Freya Churchwell, that carried around a mini-torah ( the Torah is the bible and history of the Jews) and it appeared that she had not memorized her lines. At one point, she placed it on the floor with her other props and costumes changes. This is a NO-No! Even if it was not a scroll, it appeared as one, so why chance having anyone see this?

Hats off to Jin Ai, Daniel Boughton, Xavier Mattison,Charity Schultz, Haley Schenk, Zach Kunde, and Douglas Levin for making this effort to be both an entertainment and an education for an intimate audience. Tonight, I would think that perhaps 25% of the audience may have been Jewish, so a great deal might have been far too much for the gentiles.

The tech side of the production was top-notch. The set/props by Dugan Kenaz-Mara were numerous and terrific. The performers were constantly changing identitis, and picking up props to bring something special to each segment.The lighting (Karen Wallace) and sound (Zach Stinnett) and costumes (Abby Gillette) were all handled well, and as I said earlier, the cast was quite impressive, but the material needs to be worked a bit to keep the flow natural and to bring a higher level of feelings towards the people that Feldman is trying to promote on a positive basis in order to perhaps rid our country of the antisemitism that exists.

“A People” will continue at Theater Wit located at 1229 West Belmont Avenue through July 5th with performances as follows:

Thursdays    7:30 p.m.

Fridays         7:30 p.m.

Saturdays    7:30 p.m.

Sundays       2:00 p.m.

Tickets can be purchased by calling the box office at 773-975-8150 or visit  https://www.theaterwit.org/tickets/productions/572/performances#top

Tickets dtart at $18.00 ( the Jewish number that means LIFE)

Traditions!!!!

To see what others are saying, visit www.theatreinchicago.com, go to Review Round-Up and click at “A People”