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The Melting Pot, a play with music: Free staged reading

By Carol S. Lashof, playwright, & Erika Oba, composer

Directed by Susannah Martin

When: 7:30 pm Saturday, April 9, 2022

Where: St. Alban's Church Parish Hall, 1501 Washington Ave, Albany, CA
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Seating is limited and may fill up quickly! Reserve your tickets here.

Will the United States offer a welcome to refugees from all nations? It’s a vexed question now and it was a vexed question in 1908, when Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot premiered in Washington, DC. 

The Melting Pot, a play with music. Written by Carol S. Lashof, with music by Erika Oba.

 This script has been composed by interweaving voices from the United States culture wars of the early twentieth century. In particular, the core of the present play is an adaptation/distillation of Israel Zangwill’s immensely successful 1908 melodrama The Melting Pot, which introduced its central metaphor to popular discourse about America’s national identity.

Staged Reading: Saturday, April 9, 7:30 pm at St. Albans Church, Albany, CA

Plan to arrive by 7 pm to check in; proof of vaccination and masks required.

The Melting Pot, a play with music, is a revisiting and framing of a melodrama of the same name, written by British author Israel Zangwill in 1908. At the time, the United States was embroiled in a bitter dispute over immigration. Nativists warned that a flood of new immigrants—Russian, Italian, and most dangerous of all, Jewish—posed an existential threat to American identity, while liberals fought to further the ideal – unrealized then and now – of America as a haven for all races and cultures. Zangwill leapt into this fray with The Melting Pot, celebrating the metaphor of its title; and both the wildly popular play and the metaphor were seized upon as powerful weapons by those fighting to keep borders open to immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Lashof’s current play distills the immigrant love story at the heart of the original melodrama and interweaves it with the story of Zangwill’s play itself, and its role in America’s early twentieth-century culture wars. This play premiered with Everyday Inferno Theatre Company in New York City in 2018. The current script has been revised since its original production.

The Melting Pot will be directed by Susannah Martin and will feature the debut performance of an original score by Berkeley composer Erika Oba.

Tickets are FREE but require advance reservation. Register here: https://themeltingpot2022.bpt.me/ Or email ThoseWomenProductions@gmail.com to inquire about availability.  For now, we are limiting seating at the venue to 50% of capacity, but we expect to make additional seats available if the covid infection rates in our area decrease and/or remain low.

All audience members are required to wear masks and present proof of full vaccination. For those who are eligible – based on initial dates of vaccination – this also includes boosters. 

THE COMPANY

Cast
Nurse – Elaine Magree

David – Caleb Cabrera
Vera – Bianca Catalan
Mendel/Chorus – Sedrick Cabrera
Frau Quixano/Chorus – Michelle Talgarow*
Kathleen/Chorus – Anne Hallinan
Quincy/Chorus – Max Forman-Mullin*
Baron/Chorus – Kal Naga (Khaled Abol Naga)*

*Member, Actors’ Equity Association

Musicians
Carolyn Walter, clarinet
Erika Oba, piano
Christina Walton, violin
Andrea Landin, cello

Production Team/ Artistic Leadership

Susannah Martin, director

Erika Oba, composer & music director

Carol Lashof, playwright & co-producer

Kit Lanthier, stage manager

Julie Sarabia, covid safety manager

Elizabeth Vega, co-producer

Dramaturgy for The Melting Pot by Cristina (Cha) Ramos 

 


Those Women Productions
A Feminist Community Theater
c/o P.O. Pack #288
1700 Shattuck Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94709

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