A New Wives’ Tale : The Housewives of Mannheim explores changing roles in 1944 Brooklyn

From left, Pheonix Vaughn as May Black, Wendy Peace as Alice Cohen, Corey Tazmania as Billie Friedhoff, and Natalie Mosco as Sophie Birnbaum). DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS
From left, Pheonix Vaughn as May Black, Wendy Peace as Alice Cohen, Corey Tazmania as Billie Friedhoff, and Natalie Mosco as Sophie Birnbaum).
DAVID BAZEMORE PHOTOS

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The setting of Alan Brody’s play is 1944 Brooklyn, where modest apartments were small, the denizens were mostly women waiting for their men to return from the war, and America was in flux between the scrimping and saving of the wartime effort and the flowering of post-war prosperity and consumerism. As Mr. Brody shows it, some women were decorating bars of what would soon become a cage, and some were realizing that there was more out there in the wide world.

In this new play enjoying its West Coast premiere at the opening of Ensemble Theater’s 2010-11 season, we meet three housewives whose lives are all about to be upturned with the arrival of a new neighbor.

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The Merry Wives of Brooklyn – Ensemble’s season opener is straight outta New York City

David Bazemore Photos
David Bazemore Photos

Theater is a living, evolving art, and that is aptly demonstrated this weekend when Ensemble Theatre Company opens its 2010 – 11 season with Alan Brody’s “The Housewives of Mannheim.” Brody’s play made it out of the 2007 writers workshops to the desk of director SuzAnne Barabas, whose New Jersey Repertory Company has since been living with the play, molding, creating and claiming the characters as its own.

In a rare move for Ensemble, the director and cast have come to Santa Barbara to mount this West Coast premiere.

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