Ari Roth: a Legacy on 16th Street, a Launch on H

We caught up with Ari Roth, until December artistic director of Theater J, a few days before he spoke at Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast last Thursday.

Now founder and artistic director of the Mosaic Theater Company of DC, he’d gone to New York exploring collaboration possibilities, seeking out new plays, new playwrights. He’s hitting the ground running after separating from Theater J in a series of events that were very public and often rancorous. Two months ago, Roth was “terminated abruptly” by the CEO of the D.C. Jewish Community Center, Carole Zawatsky.

Roth had also been thinking about issues of autonomy, of creating something different than what the atmosphere and very special situation at the JCC might have allowed.

The signs had been there all along. The JCC had decided to drop Roth’s brainchild, the annual “Voices from a Changing Middle East” festival, which included one mainstage play, readings, symposiums, discussions and interviews. The festival had often created controversy with some of its content: plays – almost always by Israeli or Jewish authors – which addressed conditions in Israel and its neighbors.

“Part of what happened was about, well, changing conditions,” Roth said. “We had done plays that had made some people unhappy and angry.”

One of them was “Return to Haifa,” staged by an Israeli-Palestinian company, about a Palestinian family returning to its old home, which they had been forced to leave in the 1948 war, and facing the Israeli occupants. It was performed in both Hebrew and Arabic. This writer remembers the heated discussions among some older members of the audience during intermission.

Roth had been thinking about something larger, though. “In this city, and everywhere else, things are changing, and I wanted to address some of that, be inclusive in a way that we could culturally and artistically talk about and create and stage plays that were about race, poverty, conditions and conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, and in our own neighborhoods in this city,” he said.

Roth had been at Theater J for 18 years, and in those years, in addition to controversies that had occurred, there was phenomenal growth for a theater that was Jewish-specific in its content and focus, but universal in its results, with plays that brought an expanded audience along. New plays – a few by Roth himself – were staged, along with the canon from great Jewish playwrights ranging from Clifford Odets to Arthur Miller to Neil Simon. Theater J’s production of Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lost In Yonkers” was in this writer’s opinion every bit as good, if not better than, the Broadway version which had its first stop at the National Theatre.

You could expect often to be surprised by a Theater J production – like an original musical about the young Biblical hero David, or a recent production of a play about Bernie Madoff, or the works of the always original Tony Kushner.

“I think I have a legacy there,” he said. But, as he told the Georgetown breakfast attendees, “it was kind of a divorce. I will miss all those I worked with. But they appear to have moved on, they’re doing the next play, looking for my replacement. I have an office at our new home at the Atlas Performance Arts Center on H Street, we are getting donations and funding and building a theater. In November, we plan to begin a full six-play season with the Voices from a Changing Middle East as well.”