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Chutzpah! Festival, Vancouver
Available online until November 18
Created, written and performed by Jeremy Goldstein with Henry Woolf
Directed by Jen Heyes
Chutzpah! Festival community participants: Emet Davis, Marsha Lederman, Sophie McNeilly, Patricia L. Morris, Lisa Webster, Nick Cassenbaum, Gina Shmukler
Running time: approximately 90 minutes.
Jeremy Goldstein is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his company London Artists Projects, whose missions include taking his “Truth to Power Café” across the world.
Rooted in Goldstein’s experience of being the estranged son of a father who aspired to be a writer but felt stifled by his friendship with the playwright Harold Pinter, the café is a totally inclusive, non-judgmental space where anyone who has wrestled with any kind of power can speak out.
Adding to the inclusivity, the show also exists as a webstream and draws in virtual participants.
First up is Goldstein with the narrative he has told from Sydney to Rotherham, England, and most recently, Vancouver, Canada. In February next year, he will take it to Melbourne.
The power for Goldstein was his father Mick, who was one of the Hackney Gang of friends of Pinter.
In theory, the gang was on the side of the disempowered, but paradoxically, Mick Goldstein was a negative force for his son until his son learnt to give voice to the power and nurture a relationship that, he tells us, has grown and blossomed even after his father’s death.
Fathers and their children and mothers and theirs are powerful themes for those who take the mike at the Vancouver café, as part of the Chutzpah! Jewish festival of performing arts.
Especially poignant now, given the territorial tensions in the Middle East, is the festival’s acknowledgement that it takes place on borrowed land – “the ancestral and unceded territories” of some of Canada’s First Nations peoples.
The first speaker after Goldstein is Lisa Webster, who claims First Nation as well as Scottish ancestry, and who is struggling with life on a remote island where she faces the power and powerlessness of a son with health, behavioural and intellectual issues.
It’s a cri de coeur for relief as she battles a system, at once powerful and not powerful enough as it fails to provide the relief they need.
Beyond the child-parent bond that shapes every one of us for good or ill, Patricia L. Morris, once “the monkey in the middle” during her childhood, speaks up for the old and invisible with no-one to care for them.
She is reeling from an experience in a downtown alley where a young woman whispered menacingly at her: “You are old. You’re going to die soon, so what do you matter?”
Patricia’s plea is to tame the intergenerational power and that the young cease to bully the old.
Declaring that everyone matters, she takes a seat among the other newly-empowered speakers, while beamed in by technology from Johannesburg, South African actor Gina Shmukler declares she is Jewish – and sad and conflicted.
“It hurts to be Jewish right now,” she confides, empowered to say so by the safe space of the “Truth to Power Café”.
The power of the cafe and of theatre in general is that it is a place where “the ands and the nuances” can be heard, Shmukler says, drawing the contrast with the intolerance of social media and polarised societies where she feels unable to speak of her horror at the war in Gaza.
Sharing her story does not deliver an immediate remedy, but the heroic act of articulating a personal truth changes the speaker and their relationship with the abusive power whether or not it is listening.
Truth to Power Café,
Chutzpah! Festival, Vancouver
Available online until November 18
Created, written and performed by Jeremy Goldstein with Henry Woolf
Directed by Jen Heyes
Chutzpah! Festival community participants: Emet Davis, Marsha Lederman, Sophie McNeilly, Patricia L. Morris, Lisa Webster, Nick Cassenbaum, Gina Shmukler
Running time: approximately 90 minutes.
Jeremy Goldstein is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his company London Artists Projects, whose missions include taking his “Truth to Power Café” across the world.
Rooted in Goldstein’s experience of being the estranged son of a father who aspired to be a writer but felt stifled by his friendship with the playwright Harold Pinter, the café is a totally inclusive, non-judgmental space where anyone who has wrestled with any kind of power can speak out.
Adding to the inclusivity, the show also exists as a webstream and draws in virtual participants.
First up is Goldstein with the narrative he has told from Sydney to Rotherham, England, and most recently, Vancouver, Canada. In February next year, he will take it to Melbourne.
The power for Goldstein was his father Mick, who was one of the Hackney Gang of friends of Pinter.
In theory, the gang was on the side of the disempowered, but paradoxically, Mick Goldstein was a negative force for his son until his son learnt to give voice to the power and nurture a relationship that, he tells us, has grown and blossomed even after his father’s death.
Fathers and their children and mothers and theirs are powerful themes for those who take the mike at the Vancouver café, as part of the Chutzpah! Jewish festival of performing arts.
Especially poignant now, given the territorial tensions in the Middle East, is the festival’s acknowledgement that it takes place on borrowed land – “the ancestral and unceded territories” of some of Canada’s First Nations peoples.
The first speaker after Goldstein is Lisa Webster, who claims First Nation as well as Scottish ancestry, and who is struggling with life on a remote island where she faces the power and powerlessness of a son with health, behavioural and intellectual issues.
It’s a cri de coeur for relief as she battles a system, at once powerful and not powerful enough as it fails to provide the relief they need.
Beyond the child-parent bond that shapes every one of us for good or ill, Patricia L. Morris, once “the monkey in the middle” during her childhood, speaks up for the old and invisible with no-one to care for them.
She is reeling from an experience in a downtown alley where a young woman whispered menacingly at her: “You are old. You’re going to die soon, so what do you matter?”
Patricia’s plea is to tame the intergenerational power and that the young cease to bully the old.
Declaring that everyone matters, she takes a seat among the other newly-empowered speakers, while beamed in by technology from Johannesburg, South African actor Gina Shmukler declares she is Jewish – and sad and conflicted.
“It hurts to be Jewish right now,” she confides, empowered to say so by the safe space of the “Truth to Power Café”.
The power of the cafe and of theatre in general is that it is a place where “the ands and the nuances” can be heard, Shmukler says, drawing the contrast with the intolerance of social media and polarised societies where she feels unable to speak of her horror at the war in Gaza.
Sharing her story does not deliver an immediate remedy, but the heroic act of articulating a personal truth changes the speaker and their relationship with the abusive power whether or not it is listening.
Barbara Lewis © 2024.
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://vimeo.com/1025962161/259a8cc9bb__;!!GFN0sa3rsbfR8OLyAw!aLI2uhFmiRcG9ymrdbPD66evdGn11fU00MBa-p4YuxBivNNVzgck26valnuQ58iJl6ATDLkvEvs780s-vULxdjdyVNAETS_tfayjj5NW$
By Barbara Lewis • performance, playwrights, theatre, year 2024 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, performance, playwrights, theatre