Review

My friend Deborah Strod, a photographer and writer, has her first one-woman show at the Pierce Gallery, at the Cary Memorial Library, 1874 Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington, MA 02420. I hadn’t seen Deborah for years so I welcomed the chance to view what turned out to be highly impressive photographs.

Naomi Wallace’s The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, is three one-act plays, set in the Gaza Strip, West Jerusalem, and Baghdad. The pieces were separately written and performed over five years and first combined in 2008; the play runs at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge through December 19. The first piece, “A State of Innocence,” is the most ambitious. Yuval, an Israeli soldier, is a Zionist Beetle Bailey, who fell asleep on duty and was made keeper in the zoo in Rafah, southern Gaza. There he meets Um Hisham, a Rafah woman, who knows his name.

American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Wars make poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

More than sixty years after the war that cemented Israel’s statehood, known both as the War of Independence and The Catastrophe, Jews and Palestinians alike can affirm the truth in King’s declaration. In the film, Little Town of Bethlehem, coming out this October, three men from either side of the concrete wall that now separates Israel and Palestine, talk about growing up under the cloud of this long conflict and how it has shaped each of their lives.

At five tons, the pale pink cube that dominates the lobby at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, may be the largest, heaviest piece of glass ever cast. Then again, maybe it’s not. The art in the museum’s latest exhibition, titled “Roni Horn A.K.A. Roni Horn,” is ambiguous.