Blood Relative

In the opening scene of Traveling Jewish Theatre's Blood Relative, a young man returns home with a broken nose and a bloodied shirt. His external appearance -- which quickly extends to the state of his surroundings, as he proceeds to trash his formerly tidy, modestly furnished apartment -- only hints at the battle raging inside him. The son of a Jewish mother and an Arab father, Avraham (or Ibrahim, depending on your ethnic affiliation) belongs at once to both communities and neither, a dangerous place to exist in a society that demands exclusive allegiance to a single side. Blood Relative has been three years in the making, and this mesmerizing ensemble production proves itself well worth the wait. Weaving together powerful storytelling, caustic humor, bold characterizations, and lyrical music and dance, the artists involved in TJT's Middle East Project have taken a subject so bogged down with the rhetoric of political and religious fundamentalism as to seem practically abstract, and shaped it into something touchingly human and bitterly real.