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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

NEW MOON PLAY READING FEATURES PLAY ABOUT 1939 SHANGHAI

New Moon Play Reading

THE SHANGHAI KADDISH
By Larry Loebell
Directed by Cheryl Katz

WHEN: Monday, December 5, 7:30 PM
WHERE:
Luna Stage, 555 Valley Road, West Orange
TICKETS: $5 donation at the door
No reservations required
973.395.555
www.lunastage.org

Did you hear the one about the Chinese boy and the Jewish girl? They walked into a bar. Well, into Viennese coffee house. Near a street called Broadway. In Shanghai. In 1939. Seriously.

You knew Shanghai saved more Jews from the Nazis than any place in the world, right? OVER 30,000 between 1937 and 1940? I’m not making this up. Google it. And that the Red Army was founded there? No?

Neither did Richard Eisenberg, a half Jewish-half Chinese standup comic, until he went searching for his mysterious father in the booming and mysterious city of his, well, conception.

 

Larry Loebell’s full-length plays include The Portrait Master, House Divided, La Tempestad, Pride of the Lion, Girl Science, The Ballad of John Wesley Reed, and The Dostoyevsky Man. Short plays include Angie and Arnie Sanguine, But Who’s Counting, and Just Before the War Between the Plates, Emma Goldman Imagines the Millennium, Ellie and Edward Supine, and Monica for Chanukah.

Larry has been awarded four Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in playwriting, an EST/Sloan Science Foundation rewrite commission, and was awarded a new play commission for House Divided from the National Council for Jewish Culture. His living newspaper-style play Living News, written for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, is in its seventh season of daily school-year performances. He has won Emmy recognition for writing for the children’s show Rugrats in it premiere season. He worked from 1999-2005 as the literary manager and dramaturg at InterAct Theater Company and since then has worked as a free-lance dramaturg for New Paradise Laboratories, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and Lark Playwrights Week, among others. Larry teachers film history at the University of the Arts where he is an adjunct Full Professor, and play writing in the theater department of Arcadia University. He has a BA in English from Temple University, an MA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and an MFA in Film and Television from Temple University.