This article appeared in the June 18, 2003 Jewish Advocate.

Step Into My Love

Explores ancient themes in modern context

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

Stan Edelson’s formal education began and ended on the streets of Depression-era New York City. His early experiences have, by admission, predominantly influenced the professional and artistic life of the playwright and director, whose new play, “Step Into My Love,” will run this and next weekend at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Harvard Square. Selected for performance group Diversity Theatre’s third annual show, the work is both serious and comedic, and, for Edelson, an adjunct professor at Lesley University’s Creative Arts and Learning program, characteristically topical.

Inspired by the recent war in Iraq and the ancient history of the region, the story features a biblically-named, interracial cast who come to grips with the challenges of coexistence, within a contemporary, reality-TV show framework. It’s quite a mix, but Edelson, a civil-rights era activist and longtime champion of socially progressive causes, is not one to avoid provocative issues.

"The only way to deal with the hell of the world is to engage with it, and do something about it,” he said. “That’s why I wrote this play.” His characters, named Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, examine their relationships as they traverse pavilions in a theme park called The Garden of Eden. “The play is about the struggles we all go through to make love and not war,” said Edelson.

Born in the Bronx a week after the 1929 stock market crash, Edelson grew up amid working class Jews. “Their daily struggles gave me an awareness and understanding of the general challenges of Judaism,” he said. “After all, this was when the Holocaust was taking place, though we weren’t completely aware of what was happening in Europe,” he noted. When his family moved to New Rochelle, the 16-year-old Edelson moved to the Lower East Side, perplexing his father, who had left that neighborhood himself at an early age. A visual artist, Edelson focused on the local people as his subject matter. At the Art Students League school, he was surrounded by worldly classmates who had served in the war, and when he later moved to Boston, he decided to go into theater, largely due to its universal appeal. “Theater was social art, as opposed to one person in an attic or a loft by themselves,” he recalled.

He became active in the civil rights, women’s, gay and other 60’s era movements; his Caravan Theatre was at the forefront of those times.

Edelson was in Israel during the recent Iraqi war as part of a teacher’s group; it was his second time there. Though he was undaunted by the threat of terrorism (“I found the Israeli drivers more frightening than the thought of suicide bombers,” he quipped), he was profoundly affected by his interaction with Arabs and Jews who peacefully coexist. He visited the Neve Shalom community outside of Jerusalem. “It’s one of the few places in Israel where Arabs and Jews live neighbor to neighbor and sit on the same government councils,” he said. “Even though they had their own perspectives, to see the people getting along together and caring about each other felt so hopeful.” Edelson also met with a Jewish-Arab theatre group in Yaffa, several political activists, and Arab Israelis. On the plane back, he began another play called “Step into my Fear – the Seven Deadly Fears and How to Overcome Them,” based on his observances.

On a prior trip to Israel, 12 years ago, Edelson stayed on a kibbutz on the Lebanese border, where he sketched an emotional panorama of 30 Jewish faces. “I have always felt at home in Israel,” he said. “I know that many Americans who visit experience that same feeling of being among their ancestry.”

“Being Jewish means being human,” he said. “My life, my Jewishness, my theater, my existence is based on where I came from.”

Step Into My Love: A New Play by Stan Edelson will be performed on Saturday and Sunday, June 21-22 and June 27-29 (Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m.) at the CCAE, 56 Brattle St. in Harvard Square. Tickets, $15 and $12 for seniors and students, are available at the door. For reservations, call Laura Godtfredsen at 781-237-5128, email will@ccae.org or visit www.ccae.org.