Victor/Victoria: or shakespeare/amelia?Was Merchant of Venice written by a female British Jew? John Hudson thinks so. The 54-year-old social theorist is convinced that much of the work attributed to Shakespeare was actually written by Amelia Bassano Lanyer, known for being one of the first women to publish her own poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611. Lanyer was part of a family of Semitic Italian court musicians who lived as clandestine Jews.

After spending most of his adult life helping big companies market effectively, John Hudson enrolled in a postgraduate program at the Shakespeare Institute and spent four years studying the Bard's plays. The result was an authorship theory that attributes much of Shakespeare’s work to Amelia Bassano Lanyer. Lanyer was mistress to Lord Henry Hudson, the man in charge of the English theater and patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—the company that performed Shakespeare’s works.

Paying close attention to all of the musical references and knowledge of plants, law, military life, and falconry in the plays, John Hudson found that they matched the kind of education Lanyer would have had. Not only that: Hudson also found “literary signatures” where he thinks Lanyer left intentional clues about her name in a number of plays. His hypothesis was recently recognized by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as one of their top eight authorship theories.

Eventually, Hudson started a theater group, which he named the Dark Lady Players, to stage a production based on his findings. Their performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream was described as showing that:

Oberon is the figure of Yahweh (God of the Jews), who is embroiled in the Jewish-Roman war against Titus Caesar (embodied by Titania) over the abduction of the true Jewish Messiah (the Iudean or ‘Indian’ boy); the “flower, love in idleness” (a pun on idolatry), represents the Gospels; and the end of the play is a Jewish apocalypse characterized by the distribution of dew — as in the Zohar.

The staging was never heavy-handed and there were some uproariously funny moments, punctuated by scenes of violent carnage and deep, spiritual pathos. The overall tone was of a promising marriage between strict comedy and strict tragedy.

Can’t wait to see what they do with Merchant of Venice…

Israeli Security Fence: Ensuring security or ensuring separation?The plastic surgeon who specializes in breast implants had issues with my play. He intimidated the director of the theatre hosting the reading into canceling! In an email he wrote, “The last thing we want to do is offend the local Jewish community by showing some progressive lefty self-hating Jewish propaganda.” Only after 24 hours of intense lobbying by the artistic director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, who has nurtured the play and was producing the reading, and a letter from me to the artistic director and board of the theatre did reason prevail. The reading was back on.

Art: 1, Thought Police: 0.

In e-mails the surgeon disparaged me, the author and professor who would lead the post-show discussion, and the artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Program. We were either “self-hating Jews,” “anti-Semites,” or just plain ‘ole “ignorant.” The plastic surgeon hadn’t even read or seen the play.

But he did come to the reading.

What were his issues once he saw the play? That while I presented both literary and visual images of the controversial separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel, I did not present gruesome images of children killed or injured by suicide bombers that the barrier is there to prevent. During the Q&A, he told me and the rest of the audience in the crowded theatre that, as a plastic surgeon, he’s worked on such victims in Israel and he offered to provide me with x-ray images of ball-bearings, screws and nails embedded inside the skulls of children, to add to the projected images in the play.

I thanked him for his offer. And we heard from a number of other audience members who were not missing such imagery.

Sad to say, while he came to the reading—and I do give him credit for that—the surgeon didn’t hear my play. He didn’t hear the very personal story of an American Jew who loves Israel deeply and fears for her survival. He didn’t hear the story of internal conflict that so many of us share as we try to untangle the competing interests of our allegiance to our tribe and our commitment to social justice. I do respect and honor his efforts to help Israeli victims of terror attacks. But there is no gruesome imagery in the play. None. To present such imagery would be to use violence as pornography. A few years ago I spent a day with a sweet and broken-hearted father of a ten year-old boy who was murdered in a bus bombing in Haifa. He would be as outraged that an x-ray of his son’s remains would be used for someone’s political agenda as he was outraged that Israeli politicians have used funerals of suicide bombing victims to make speeches to bolster support.

That’s the theatre of politics, not political theatre.

For more information on my play, “A Jerusalem Between Us” go to: http://aarondavidman.wordpress.com

Sunset over Jerusalem: What does it mean to an American Jew?I am a playwright, director and actor, and the artistic director of Traveling Jewish Theatre, a 29 year-old experimental company based in San Francisco. I’ll be posting a weekly blog about the process of writing my new play “A Jerusalem Between Us.”

I start with the question, why? Why write this play?

The Sundance Institute Theatre Program is producing a reading in Los Angeles this coming Friday night. They sent out a flyer that reads:

"A Jerusalem Between Us" takes stock of some of the recent controversies that have divided Americans and American Jews. Davidman untangles the Rachel Corrie controversy, considers the word “apartheid”, reflects on the spirit of Jewish values and wonders what’s left of the Left. This solo play follows one man’s journey from America to the Middle East on a quest to answer some of the most provocative questions of our time.

The other day a gentleman sent an email to the artistic director of the LA theatre that has generously offered to host the reading. He offered to moderate. When the artistic director replied that Sundance had already chosen a moderator, the gentleman replied with the following:

If I'm not going to speak, I probably won't come. But I'd like to see a review of it...I don't want this guy sitting there spewing some anti-Semitic, self-hating Jewish crap. Can you find out something about it? I can't find any reviews online. It's important that we don't use the theater as a forum for any anti-Israel propaganda, right? The way the blurb is written about that horrible Rachel Corrie character gives good reason for concern that there might be a problem brewing....Please find out more. It's never too late to cancel an anti-Semite!

Why write this play? To bring forward a nuanced, complex and dynamic story about an American Jew and his relationship to Israel in the midst of a culture of fear, one-dimensional analysis and hysterical allegiance. This blog will cover the developments of the play. For more information you can also stay tuned to aarondavidman.wordpress.com.

Meanwhile, back in my former hometown of Boston, Joshua Glenn posted on the Globe's website today about a bizarre protest at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard this past weekend.

Continue reading...