By David K. Shipler
One year
ago, the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C.—an otherwise estimable
institution—summarily fired Ari Roth, its internationally respected artistic
director, who over 18 years had built the center’s Theater J into an inventive
forum of dramatic ideas. Roth was compelled by his family history and his
creative sensibilities to reach across difficult lines of difference. He did
not shrink from putting hard issues before Washington audiences, but always
with a strain of hopefulness. He did not like leaving people in despair.
He did not
like leaving himself in despair, either, and in less than a year began a new theater
company, appropriately named Mosaic, which is now assembling the polished
pieces of diverse experiences into a thematic first season of ambitious plays.
In a country and a world that is dangerously polarized, he is searching for
paths to healing by looking clear-eyed at momentous conflicts and personal
sorrows. Fine art does that. Art filtered by politics does not, and that’s
where Roth’s expansiveness collided with the JCC’s timidity.
Essentially, Roth infuriated
shallow-minded conservatives by staging plays that portrayed Israel as an
actual country with real blemishes and impurities, not the cardboard artifice
that right-wing, pro-Israel Americans have constructed in their imaginations.
He produced playwrights who put history on display and allowed Arab voices to
be heard. He did not censor one narrative in favor of another. He did not
simplify reality but invited theatergoers to consider its contradictions and
ambiguities, in the Middle East and elsewhere. And now, exiled from the Jewish
theater, he is making a promising start doing the same thing on a broader
landscape.
