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Back in 1986, when A Traveling Jewish Theatre first began work on a play about the doomed love affair between exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, the world was a somewhat different place. The Berlin Wall had yet to fall, Gorbachev was still in power, Kahlo was not yet a household name in the American arts community. The ensemble company itself had slightly different priorities back then. Although it had migrated from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 1981, it was, strictly speaking, still homeless, still traveling.
Now, in sync with the aging first wave of the baby boom generation, the company--Albert Greenberg, Helen Stoltzfus, Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman--has firmly put down roots. A revised version of Trotsky and Frida (which underwent further development in 1994 at the Center for the Arts in San Francisco) will open the 17-year-old troupe's first full season in its first permanent space--a remodeled 75-seat theatre in Project Artaud, a huge live/work/performance warehouse for artists in the Mission District, where it is scheduled to run Oct. 12-Nov. 19.
An affair and an assassination
Created by Greenberg and Stoltzfus along with Fisch and director Mark Samuels, the piece is based on biographies of Frida Kahlo, books about the Russian Revolution and Trotsky's own writings. With A Traveling Jewish Theatre's patented blend of humor, music, puppetry and masks, Trotsky and Frida explores select dramatic events in the lives of these two passionate, tormented and ultimately tragic 20th-century historical figures.
Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union after the Revolution by his erstwhile comrade Stalin, found refuge in Mexico in the...