ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Avi Aharoni

(Photo & Design by Pedro Juan Fonseca)

by Pedro Juan Fonseca, an actor, writer, filmmaker,

and Manager of Marketing and Communications at Six Points Theater

"The wolves are at the door. I've been there. Many, many, many times.” In Six Points Theater’s upcoming production, an intimate, incendiary kitchen-sink scene unfolds between Sally Wingert and Avi Aharoni. Wingert plays Chava, a survivor of past Jewish persecution; Aharoni plays Paul, facing current threats of antisemitism. “What kind of Jew are you?” Chava presses as Paul pours her tea. “The kind that doesn’t want to be noticed,” he says. As Chava shovels spoonfuls of sugar into her cup, Paul adds, “I don’t know what to do. I’m terrified. Every minute of every day.”

It’s a moment that resonates with Aharoni’s own feelings as he prepares to play Paul in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s The Last Yiddish Speaker, opening on October 25th. Audiences at Six Points Theater know Laufer from our 2018 production of The Last Schwartz. A Juilliard alum whose work blends existential dread with deadpan humor, she brings clarity to the hot-button debates that drive and divide American life. Her newest play is a family-drama fever dream set in 2029, in the aftermath of the insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

In the world of the play, the United States has been reshaped by an authoritarian regime in which people are being arrested and disappeared. At the center is Sarah (Charleigh Wolf), a brash seventeen-year-old, and her cautious father, Paul, played by Aharoni, returning for his sixth show at Six Points Theater. Their strategy of assimilation is shattered when Chava appears on their doorstep seeking shelter. As inspections intensify and neighbors close in—including John (Carter Graham), Sarah’s would-be boyfriend and a teenage government informant—Sarah bonds with Chava through the Yiddish language and Jewish ritual, drawing her and her father closer to their identity and deeper into danger.

Critics have compared Laufer’s dystopian imagination to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, with reviewers calling the play “as beautiful and surprising as it is disturbing.” Audiences at the Jewish Plays Project voted The

Last Yiddish Speaker a finalist in their national contest, and now, Laufer’s play is set to make its Twin Cities premiere.

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The café around us is sunny, spacious, and empty in the late afternoon as we sit down to hot coffee and hotter topics, talking faster and faster as the caffeine electrifies our nervous systems. “I’m not worried about being a Jewish actor under a spotlight.” Aharoni admits. He isn’t new to exposure, having performed his solo play Operation Immigration both in person and on video for Six Points Theater. “My brother was saying, ‘Be careful, don't put your face out there. They’re coming after Jews,’ and like, to an extent he had a point. I know antisemitism has increased in the last two years, but I'm not worried because, in some ways, I’m less out than if I walked around with a yarmulke on all the time, you know what I mean?”

He flips off his banana yellow baseball cap, the better to gesticulate wildly without braining himself. “Like, we're seeing this with refugees, and I.C.E. raids; with trans rights, and antisemitism, and every group that’s under threat right now.” For a moment, his diaphragm supported actor’s resonance turns the upper level of the café into the mezzanine of a theater with a single audience member, taking in his passionate plea: “Like, just, for the love of God, pretend for a second that it's you! What if you are the one hiding in plain sight, and you know that if you're discovered you could get killed? That's not farfetched!”

“Might happen next year,” I mutter darkly, tossing back the last of my espresso.

“Might happen before the year is out!” Avi shouts in my face as we both chuckle. “But yeah,” he continues, “like, if you were in Chava’s shoes. In Paul and Sarah’s shoes... wouldn’t you want everybody shouting out on your behalf?”

The question hangs between us as we both suddenly grow aware that the silence in the shop has gone from soothing to eerie. Nobody is shouting on our behalf. Aharoni scratches absently at the edge of his coffee cup as he describes how, after the presidential election, he spent sleepless nights looking up visa applications to make a new life abroad.

(Photo by Pedro Juan Fonseca)

But whenever his fears start spiraling, he checks himself. “I don’t know if antisemites are gonna come to Six Points Theater in general, you know what I mean?” He laughs. “How many of them see theater to begin with, right? I don’t think I’m important enough for anybody to want to go after.” The chill, he says, actually comes from his inner circles: “my own peers and friends… leftists, progressives, liberals,” and dialogues that soon become circular and calcify into tribalism. “We live in a world that doesn’t want nuance because hate sells. You almost have to make yourself black and white just to survive. But having dialogue with my own peers is important to me, so, I’m happy to always have hard conversations with my community.”

His sentiment as an actor is antithetical to the survival math that drives Paul’s self-immolating caution in the play. “Paul feels like he has to kill a part of himself in order to save his own child,” Aharoni says. The actor, meanwhile, insists on showing up fully. “You have to be unafraid to be who you are, ’cause that’s all you have when you’re on stage.” This is the tension at the core of Aharoni’s performance: an actor committed to visibility inhabiting a character who survives by disappearing.

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From classics of the American theater to contemporary Jewish narratives, Aharoni gravitates toward whimsical helpers burdened by ethical duty who find themselves crushed by the politics that surround them. At Park Square Theater he played Whit in Of Mice and Men, the eager ranch hand who lives for Saturday-night trips into town to escape his hardscrabble life, and Benvolio in Romeo & Juliet, the clear-eyed peacekeeper trying to talk hotheads out of violence in Verona. In a meta turn, he understudied William Shakespeare, a scheming upstart making art under a watchful crown, in Born With Teeth on the Guthrie’s Proscenium stage. This was a return for Aharoni, who first appeared on Twin Cities stages at the big blue building on the river in Transatlantic Love Affair’s production of Promise Land in the Dowling Studio.

(Photo by Pedro Juan Fonseca)

That’s when he found a home at Six Points Theater, where he has worked steadily for almost a decade, first as Yossi in Natasha and the Coat, Abe in Shul (both World Premiere plays), and Zeblyan in Two Jews Walk Into a War. The last time he was on the Highland Park stage he played Schmuli in The Wanderers, a devout Orthodox Jew whose love for his wife becomes a test of his faith. Taken together, these characters reveal Aharoni’s character: an artist driven by intelligence, morality, and the growth that can blossom when we truly listen to one another.

His role as Paul in The Last Yiddish Speaker marks a bend in his career track: his first professional performance since completing an MFA from Northwestern University in Chicago, and his last in the Twin Cities before moving to New York. “Working with Six Points really feels like coming home,” he says. “Barbara takes care of you, the audiences welcome you back with open arms. There’s something beautiful about having this be my first job outta’ grad school. That training made me a different person, and I’m in a different place in my life now where I want to go higher. But in order to do that, I need my roots to run deeper.”

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About Laufer's play, he shares on final thought. “I think if your needs are threatened by hiding somebody, the cost of risking those needs to help someone else is an equation you can’t solve until it happens to you. And I feel like Paul, in the play, is a Jew who deep down doesn't want to be persecuted for his Judaism, because individual identity isn't as important to him as survival.”

“And what's your stance on that?” I ask. “In the tension between individual identity and larger survival, which wins out for you?”

He answers without hesitation. “I have put so much importance on community, however that looks. It doesn't have to be based around religion or culture. Could be like…

backgammon, or like—”

“—Seeing theater,” I say with a wink.

“Yes! Seeing theater. I think you have to know your individual identity in order to be part of something larger than yourself. And I think survival comes with being part of something larger than yourself. Because there is no survival alone.”

(Photo by Pedro Juan Fonseca)

TALENT: Avi Aharoni

WRITING / DESIGN / PHOTOS: Pedro Juan Fonseca

EDITORS: Barbara Brooks & Art Allen