Playing through the end of the month, Adam Kraar’s is a study in family relations. The off-Broadway play makes its world premiere courtesy of Boomerang Theatre Company.
Courtesy Boomerang Theatre Company
Julia Karpovsky’s father Lawrence is brilliant and talented. Living away from his family, somewhere across the globe, with his daughter Julia and a very absent mother, he is always on a plane or smoking a pipe to seemingly hide from something, Laurence is struggling with his wife and also having difficulty establishing a relationship with Julia. His brothers, Barry and Harold, live in the US and have welcomed Julia into their complicated lives as she moves to the United States for school.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
Growing up among her eccentric and disparate relatives, Julia navigates her way through a family with a missing piece and a father who has walked back from his musicality to a life of running from country to country as a journalist. She, herself, is trying to find herself as a musician, linking her clarinet play to elusive notes connected with Jewish melodies that she heard her father play when she was a child. We see her evolve from a child to an adolescent all in the opening scene, leading to her transformation as a “wandering Jew,” unsure of how she fits in.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
The play runs for 120 minutes with a short 10-minute intermission and switches back and forth in time periods, not unlike many of our favorite television shows today such as This Is Us. The matriarch of the family, Great Momma Rose, appears both in real time and in after-death flashbacks as a symbol of what the Karpovsky family was and could be in different times. A fascinating glimpse into the search for connection with people and through music, the play traces the Karpovskys’ encounters at airport lounges over two decades as they improvise what it means to be a family, bringing kugel to share along with tales of disappointments and problems.
Playwright Adam Kraar creates stories about cross-cultural clashes and connections, including works about American families in Asia, the Civil Rights Movement, and quixotic rebels who challenge societal boundaries. Adam’s plays have been developed and/or produced at Primary Stages, The Public Theatre, Theater for the New City, Theatreworks U.S.A., The New Group, N.Y. Theatre Workshop, Cherry Lane, LaMama, Stella Adler Studio, Geva Theatre, and many others.
The talented ensemble includes:
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
Ezra Barnes as Lawrence Karpovsky has performed in many off-Broadway shows including Queen, Breakfast with Mugabe, Transparent Falsehood, To Kill a Mockingbird in White, America English Bride, The Miser and Richard II.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
Like her character Julia Karpovsky, Rivka Borek is a third culture kid, growing up in Hong Kong and London before moving to America at 15. She has been seen in Off-Broadway in Love’s Labour’s Lost and in regional productions including Hamlet; Sense and Sensibility, Oh Gastronomy! , Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
Barbara Broughton, Great Momma Rose, is familiar to New York theater audiences from Sunday in The Park with George and Music Music on Broadway and off-Broadway in Grey Gardens and A Little Night Music.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
J. Anthony Crane, Barry Karpovsky, has played in NYC on Broadway in The Country House, Sight Unseen, Butley and The Winslow Boy and is familiar from TV’s Succession.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
Michelle Liu Coughlin, Maxine, is an actress, singer, and producer. Michelle toured with Lincoln Center’s Tony-winning revival of The King and I and has worked extensively in New York and regional theatre including City Center, Playwrights Horizons, and York Theatre.
Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrica
Chris Thorn plays Harold Karpovsky and has been seen on Broadway in Bernhardt/Hamlet and Off-Broadway in Pride and Prejudice and Twelfth Night.
Tickets are available at Boomerang Theatre Company Presents: The Karpovsky Variations – Events (onthestage.tickets) with the last performance scheduled for Sunday, May 29 at The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./NY , 502 West 53rd Street, New York, New York.