Theatre Ariel presents Dan Kitrosser’s Marsha Blovotnick and the Marvelous Magical Chicken Soup

Because this play about an angry socialist Jewish lesbian named Marsha Blovotnick (played by Janis Dardaris) is one of the most joyous experiences I’ve had in a Philadelphia theater in a long time.

A truthful fable

Marsha Blovotnick may be a Jewish play, and Theatre Ariel a Jewish company, but that doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible to everyone else. In fact, Kitrosser (of Karen Tenderness fame) goes to great lengths from the start to make sure everyone in the audience is on a level playing field, aided by the Chorus (Adam Pelta-Pauls), a narrator who helps to explain without explicitly explaining that Judaism exists on a political spectrum, that food and ritual are central to our identity, that just because we’re talking loudly doesn’t mean we’re arguing, and that just because we’re arguing doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.

The narration of the play, loaded with backstory and explanation as it is, helps make clear that what we are experiencing is a fable—a story that tells universal truths through fantastical elements. Marsha Blovotnick doesn’t hit you over the head with an Aesop-style moral, and it doesn’t need to: the truths it tells are clear to anyone who’s paying attention.

An authentic volume

To paraphrase Tolstoy: All happy families make themselves heard; each unhappy family operates at its own volume. For whatever reason, that volume for most Jewish families seems to be loud.

This isn’t an exclusively Jewish trait; the difference is that, in my own experience and clearly in Kitrosser’s, Jewish families get loud when they’re happy, too. Really loud. So loud it sounds like they’re unhappy. (And sometimes, they’re happy and unhappy at the same time.) But you can’t just produce a play where everyone yells at each other for 90 minutes.

Director Jesse Bernstein guides the extended Blovotnick family (rounded out by Mason Rosenthal, Susan Riley Stevens, and Jennifer Summerfield) through happy memories, tense situations, and reunions with ambiguous, possibly spectral, elder Jewish relatives at a volume that feels authentic without becoming overwhelming. It is only occasionally truly loud, but it is never quiet. At the post-show talkback on March 12, several audience members pointed out how the Blovotnick family felt so much like their own, and specifically singled out the volume.

See it for yourself

Sometimes it's harder to review shows that you really like, and writing this has taken me longer than usual. I could tell you that the design (Will Lowry on set and lights; Clare Wislar on props) feels like the storage area of an old theater, which makes sense because Marsha’s house is also the site of the socialist theater company her father started. I could call out my favorite performance (all of them). I could do a deep dive into Marsha’s generation of diasporic Jews and why this script doesn’t hit some of the tropes audiences may have come to expect from Jewish theater. Or I could tell you again why plays like this matter with antisemitism on the rise.

But really, I just want to urge you to go see Marsha Blovotnick and the Marvelous Magical Chicken Soup for yourself.

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