Productions & Events featuring Nik Kourtis

Based on the best-selling novel and set in post-war Brooklyn, MY NAME IS ASHER LEV follows the journey of a young Jewish painter torn between his Hasidic upbringing and his desperate need to fulfill his artistic promise. When his genius threatens to destroy his relationship with his parents, young Asher realizes he must make difficult choices between his passion and his faith. This stirring adaptation of a modern classic presents a heartbreaking and triumphant vision of what it means to be an artist at any cost—against the will of family, community and tradition.

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV received its world premiere in January 2009 at the
Arden Theatre in Philadelphia and recently closed a heralded 10-month run Off- Broadway in New York City, receiving the Outer Circle Critics Award for Best New Off-Broadway play. TimeLine’s production is the play’s Chicago premiere.

Originally premiered Off-Broadway in 1985, TimeLine’s production is the first Chicago staging of this landmark play that “blasts you like an open, overstoked furnace” (The New York Times) since its Tony-Award winning Broadway production in 2011. Set at the height of the public and private indifference to the AIDS plague in the early 1980s, this searing drama will feature acclaimed actor/director David Cromer in his return to the Chicago stage as a passionate activist leading the fight to awaken the world to the crisis. Along the way he, and the community he leads into the battle, must face the deeply held fears that led so many to remain silent for too long.