Missing Link

by Debra Auspitz

Theater

Often a play comes with a local name attached to it -- the writer, the director or members of the cast. InterAct's season closer, Missing Link, opening this weekend, has all of that and then some. Written by Seth Rozin, InterAct's producing artistic director, Link is directed by Villanova professor Harriet Power and features Harry Philibosian, Catharine K. Slusar, David Jadico, Drucie McDaniel, Seth Reichgott and Maureen Torsney-Weir. The cast represents a spectrum of Philly theater experience, from ComedySportz and Lunchlady Doris performer Jadico to Dell'Arte trained Reichgott to this year's Otto Haas Award recipient Slusar. The show's subject matter, like so many plays this season, has been made eerily apt by the events of the past six months. Link focuses on Nathan and Gloria Berman (Slusar and Reichgott), parents who have lost their only daughter in a plane disaster. The play follows the couple coming to terms, differently, with their faith in the wake of such tragedy. The show concludes InterAct's science-and-religion-themed season.

Opens Fri., March 29, through April 28, $12-$24, InterAct at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-569-9700.

Theater

Hedgerow Theater opens a New Play Festival this weekend, featuring local husband-and-wife playwrights Roberta Spivek and Craig Eisendrath (both have contributed to City Paper in the past). Spivek and Eisendrath's play, The Angel of History, has already won awards from the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in Michigan and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Angel is based on writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin's attempt to escape the Nazis by fleeing over the Pyrenees in 1940. Leading the way were German resistance members Lisa and Hans Fittko. Lisa Fittko, now 92, has published two memoirs on her wartime experiences. Spivek learned of Fittko on a trip to Berlin with her mother, a German Jew who fled the Gestapo in 1939. Eisendrath realized that Fittko was living close to his mother in Chicago, and the couple went to interview her and began writing their script. The show has been through workshops in Detroit, Chicago and locally at InterAct, but has its first full performance this weekend at Hedgerow, directed by Ken Marini, a co-founder of the People's Light and Theater Co. Eisendrath sees the show as a tale of "different kinds of resistance, both the active kind [like Fittko] and the philosophical kind" illustrated by the writings of Benjamin.

Opens Thu., March 28, through April 14, $10-$22, Hedgerow Theater, 64 Rose Valley Rd., Media, 610-565-4211.