Also this issue: Cloaking Devices Susan Fenton and Anne Seidman create revealing work that plays hard to get. -Robin Rice Paradise Redefined -Susan Hagen First Friday Focus Politics Unusual -A.D. Amorosi Becoming: Shakespeare -Debra Auspitz The Outside In -Sam Adams Anatomy Lessons -Meredith Broussard The (Un)Beat(en) Generation -Paul Burress

October 3- 9, 2002

artpicks

Citizen Josef

Imagine finding out that your grandfather, a retired stockbroker and longtime naturalized U.S. citizen, worked for the Gestapo in the early '40s, and is being deported some 50 years later for his actions. This is the situation faced by Gloria and her grandfather Josef in Walt Vail's Dolka. The title refers to a young Jewish girl Josef killed during his stint as a ghetto guard -- a girl who haunts him to this day. In the play, Josef faces the pain of telling his granddaughter the truth and the wrath of Dolka's sister, a Holocaust survivor still out for revenge. Vail, an actor as well as a playwright, was last seen in Bristol Riverside Theatre's lauded production of The Dresser; he developed Dolka in the Hedgerow Horizons New Play Program at Hedgerow Theatre and at the Philadelphia Dramatists' Center. Theater Catalyst presents the premiere of Dolka with Tim Moyer in the role of Josef and Sarah Pauley as Gloria. The play promises to raise uncomfortable questions about accountability, the horrors of the past and the strength of familial bonds in times of tragedy.

Dolka, Oct. 9-27, $15-$20, Theater Catalyst at Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330.

—Debra Auspitz