Strange Land

Conceived in Vienna and carried across the Atlantic on an Italian ship, Leo Spitzer arrived in Bolivia in 1939, a passenger in his mother's womb. Like many other wandering Jews, his parents fled an Austria that had become unlivable after the double blows of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht. And like many of those lucky Jews who found an escape route, they found themselves truly strangers in a strange land. While many countries were turning Jewish refugees away from their shores, Latin America was famous for providing sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Nazi infestation of Europe (and equally notorious a few years later for hiding some of the infesters)

Multimedia can be ruinously expensive for a choreographer -- and money is the smallest price. It'll cost you brightness, color, the free exploration of stage space: everything that blocks ideal conditions for projecting images and everything that's missing from Bebe Miller's "Landing/Place," a 75-minute meditation on homelessness that opened at REDCAT on Wednesday.

Start with a cliche. A young football player -- straight out of Inglewood by way of Compton Community College -- arrives in Nebraska and steps into a wintry landscape. "My first time in snow," he says. An even bigger surprise awaits him soon after, shopping at Wal-Mart. "People walking up to me, hugging me," he says. "I didn't know those people. I hadn't done anything on the field, but they already knew everything about me, my high school and junior college stats."

Soon after Shoshana Maimon flew off to Israel, she learned that David Cohen, an ex-lover and former business associate, was not only dating her friend Nureet Granott but also sharing Granott's home in Beverly Hills, where Maimon and her daughter once rented a room. That was last summer. Now, Maimon, a well-known Israeli journalist who formerly wrote for Tel Aviv's largest paper, is in the Los Angeles County Jail, unable to make bail on charges of arson and four counts of attempted murder in connection with a fire at Granott's house.

To secure an audience with the Obama family matriarch at her farmhouse in western Kenya, you are told to pay respects at the local seat of power. This is a run-down government building where the district commissioner, a scowling man in a black suit, receives you without warmth. You've come to see Sarah Onyango, you explain, the woman referred to as "Granny" by the president of the United States. You are coming with the blessing of the president's half brother Malik Obama, you quickly add. District Commissioner Boaz Cherutich, who controls the woman's 24-hour security detail, dismisses you brusquely, saying: With the family's permission, you don't need mine.

If Ween isn't your favorite band of all time, taking in a concert by the long-running East Coast outfit can feel like crash-landing on an alien planet where everyone speaks a language you don't understand. You see the people around you pumping their fists to rhythms that seem limp. They thrill to guitar solos that sound pretty lame. They laugh uproariously at jokes you didn't realize were intended to be funny.

The overlapping comebacks of Crocodile Dundee at the movies and Randle Patrick McMurphy on Broadway (in the hit revival of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") only reconfirms a nutty paradox of hero worship: People will enthusiastically embrace fictional characters they would otherwise cross a busy street to avoid were they to encounter them in real life.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS: Penniless Across America by Mike McIntyre (Berkley Books, $12, paperback) Mike McIntyre had worked at newspapers for more than a decade when he contracted a bad case of journalist's disease. This is a malady that makes reporters, who flit from subject to subject, feel unconnected and uninvolved with the real world. At the same time, McIntyre says, he began to confront a variety of long-held fears: fear of taking chances, fear of commitment, fear of death, fear of life.

Every week for the last two years, Xay Kaignavongsa has made forays into fierce nightmares. Each day the Laotian counselor sifts through the psyches of the mentally ill refugees he meets at the East Wind Socialization Center in Linda Vista, purging their bad thoughts, cultivating the good ones. Trying, some say, to raise the dead. "People come here very, very scared," Kaignavongsa said, his speech slow but determined. "Many have seen their families get killed by Communist soldiers.