“I gave you my name, Sarah.

         And it is a dead end road.”

                                    —Yukel’s Journal

“I scream.  I scream Yukel. 

         We are the innocence of the scream.”

                                                       —Sarah’s Journal

From ‘The Book of Questions’ by Edmond Jabès, Egyptian Jewish writer and poet. Jabès was expelled from Egypt along with most of the Jewish population in 1957 during the Suez crisis and fled to Paris. (d. 1991)

I spent almost a quarter century excavating the shards of a destroyed civilization through the  creation of original performance works that drew on the streams of Jewish thought and culture that run sometimes underground.

Here are a few snapshots from that time:

In the early 1980s—yes, that long ago—our theatre had a performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall. When we arrived for our pre-show setup, we were confronted by two guys in blue jump suits. One of them was sweeping the auditorium with a metal detector while the other was being led around by a bomb-sniffing dog.  (There had been a bomb threat).

There was no bomb. But it was an act of terror. We were a Jewish theatre. More specifically—A Traveling Jewish Theatre.

We thought we were as politically correct as was humanly possible. We hung our own lights, built our own sets…we figured that if Allen Ginsberg could use an Indian harmonium, we could.

We were also a founding company of The........

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