Theater Ariel makes a long-awaited return to the stage with ‘Amsterdam’

After a long hiatus from full-scale production, Theatre Ariel, Philadelphia’s Premiere Jewish Theatre Company is back with its first main stage production in 15 years: Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur’s Amsterdam, translated into English by Eran Edry.

Jesse Bernstein, the play’s director and Theatre Ariel’s artistic director, describes this production as an aesthetic coming out for the organization as “fresh, powerful, and inherently theatrical,” in the playbill. Yasur’s Amsterdam certainly fits that bill.

The plot focuses on an unnamed expat Israeli violinist who seeks assimilation into the music scene in Amsterdam. Her life and story fractures when she receives a mysterious unpaid gas bill from 1944.

This summary may prove unhelpful, and that is entirely by design. Yasur’s play has no named characters, no stage directions. In effect, actors Keith J. Conallen, Taylor Congdon, Kishia Nixon, and Adam Pelta-Pauls are tasked as storytellers — a modern Greek chorus of sorts — who walk us through the twisting and winding plot.

This style of writing takes some getting used to: the, at times, haphazard oscillation between first, second, and third person, the sporadic calls for “pause” make it feel like the actors are rewriting the story as it goes. The production seems aware of this and seeks to ease audiences by using the first few scenes to give us time to settle into the text. Conallen and Pelta-Pauls in particular offer moments of levity in their physical performance, leaving the audience chuckling in a play centered around the lasting impact of the Holocaust.

This levity, however, does not last. In the play, set in 2018, the unseen protagonist is asked by her agent to compose a requiem for children killed in Gaza. It’s a scene that takes the air out of the room. The fiction strips away and as Yasur speaks to us directly: “Why do they keep smearing me with this blood?,” Theatre Ariel makes it clear why it chose to meet this political moment with Amsterdam.

Notably, Yasur wrote How to Be a Humanist After a Massacre in 17 Steps in the days following the Oct. 7 attacks, which looks at the idea of humanity from the perspective of mothers on both sides of the conflict.

Amsterdam is performed at the Christ Church Neighborhood House’s fourth floor flex space. Scenic designer Andrew Thompson has done much with little in his modest, slightly-experimental set. A simple apartment — a bed, a dining table with chairs, and a bicycle — offers the actors the opportunity to play around in their search for answers, a simple juxtaposition against the complex realities of the plot.

Thompson plays with the depth of the space by dropping a scrim, blocking the upstage area from view. When lit, this area reveals itself to be a gestural apartment wall full of nooks created by wooden planks assembled almost sculpturally.

Audiences have to work hard to keep the story straight while navigating the winding way the story is told. Yasur stirs up anxiety with her prose, but many were left feeling more confused than nervous.

Ultimately, people leave knowing the answer to the central mystery, but they’re left tasked with questioning the solution’s validity. That probably is entirely intentional. The central questions in Yasur’s play linger on:

How do the stories we tell ourselves endure? And what responsibility do we have to understand our history, to uncover truths?

Through Nov. 24 at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N American Street, Phila.; theatreariel.org/mainstage. Running time: 2 hours.

Theater reviews are produced independently by The Inquirer without editorial input by their sponsor, Visit Philadelphia.