For the next few months this blog is more or less dedicated to sharing news about plans for premiering the play, Three Testaments: Shalom, Peace, Salam ... with perhaps a few exceptions. For April, I am delighted to announce that Arthur Strimling, an experienced director and a beloved teacher of drama at NYU and elsewhere, has accepted the position of director for the Off Broadway production of Three Testaments: Shalom, Peace, Salam in the spring of 2015.
           From the beginning I have promised actors and others that we would endeavor to engage a top ranked director to ensure the success of our play, so I asked Ellen Frankel, former CEO of the Jewish Publication Society and experienced stage maven, for recommendations. Knowing our play well, she suggested four possibilities, with Arthur Strimling heading the list. We got lucky.
Strimling is the founder and Artistic Director of the Roots & Branches Theater in Brooklyn, and has co-written and directed fifteen of their productions. Before that he was a founding member of The Talking Band, one of the premier avant-garde theater groups late in the twentieth century. He has taught theater at many schools, including NYU, Columbia, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the Sorbonne. Strimling is also a storyteller who has performed all over the world.
 His Roots & Branches Theater is internationally recognized for its rare combination of community outreach and artistic excellence. His book, Roots and Branches, is the text on engaging the community in drama, with interning students working with seniors like those of the great migration, holocaust survivors, war veterans and others to learn their stories and develop drama around them for productions which confront and transcend the stereotypes of age and aging.
Between now and rehearsals beginning around this time next year, Arthur will be fulfilling a writing residence at the University of North Carolina. We hope to have more good news announcements about the Three Testaments premiere in upcoming monthly blog entries.