Although not quite at Fiddler on the Roof levels of ubiquity, The Dybbuk, or, Between Two Worlds, written at the turn of the century by ethnographer and playright S.Ansky, is one of the most widely known works of Yiddish theatre.  The tale of thwarted lovers and demon possession continues to inspire re-stagings and re-imaginings. The latest is Looking Through Glass, a new modern-day adaptation by observant Jewish troupe 24/6 Theater, written by Ken Kaissar and directed by Yoni Oppenheim.

In the original play, Leah is the only daughter of a wealthy widower. Khanan is a poor Talmud scholar whose father died before his birth. They meet over a Shabbat meal the very night Khanan arrives in town to study at the beit midrash, and feel an instant connection—a connection that, unbeknowst to them, is the result of their fathers’ youthful promise that their unborn children would marry each other.

But motions are already in place to betroth Leah to another, much to the displeasure of her and Khanan. Khanan, already a Kabbalist, turns to increasingly fringe rituals to try and magically halt the engagement negotiations and acquire enough money to present himself as a suitable candidate. Eventually in desperation he calls on the Devil— and dies.

In Looking Through Glass, it is Leah’s mother is rather than father who is widowed, and Leah (Judy Ammar) has new dimension as an ER doctor. Leah and her beloved still meet on his first night in town—he is hanging out on her stoop in Brooklyn, reading a book of Kabbalah, as one presumably does in Brooklyn—but he is no Talmud student.

This Khanan— now named Jacob (David Hilfstein)— proudly tells Leah, her boyfriend, and her mother that he is a yeshiva drop-out who prefers to study now on his own. What’s more, he is a full-time “professional protestor” (not his term) from DC, passionate about protecting the rights of immigrants.

Leah’s mother and her boyfriend quickly out themselves as conservatives, asking Jacob why he wants to be an unemployed “agitator” protecting terrorists. (A line made a bit more nuanced by the fact that Vidal Loew, who plays the boyfriend, delivers it in a strong French accent.)

The boyfriend, Shmueli, is far more fleshed out in 24/6’s adaption than the nameless bridegroom in the original. Shmueli and Leah have known each other for years and have been dating for months by the time Jacob shows up. They are comfortable together, but no match for the chemistry the strangers have with one another.

In this version it is Leah, rather than a parent, who invites the stranger into their home for Shabbat dinner. And in this version, they don’t just stare at each other over the candle flames—after mom goes to bed, Jacob quizzes Leah about her level of attraction to him vs. Shmueli, then pulls her close and nuzzles her cheek.

In a talkback after the show, playwright Ken Kaisar said he wanted his adaption to empower Leah—“make her the driving force of the play, bring her to the fore.” But this is the first of several uncomfortable moments in which the script doesn’t seem to fully recognize the unbalanced power dynamic between her and Jacob.

In the modern era, it is not her father’s decision that forces Leah into a marriage, but societal pressures. She picks the stable Shmueli over the unknown passion represented by the stranger. (A choice that to me made a lot of sense, given Jacob’s grating enthusiasm for group meditation exercises—he’s #thatguy at your Shabbos table.)

But more damning is his reaction when running into Leah shortly after she has accepted Shmueli’s proposal. He yells at the woman he’s known for all of one weekend: “How could you expect me to be happy for you?” and then precedes to berate her for breaking his heart and removing all meaning from his life—a line that caused my female friend and I to turn to each other with eyebrows raised high in alarm.

If Leah was really a “driving force,” as Kaissar said, perhaps she would have pushed back a little more on this, but their fated attraction has its pull. She urges Jacob to find meaning in his life and forget her, and they tearfully part.

Like Khanan, Jacob now proceeds to die before his time, by suicide rather than the devil. And like Khanan, Jacob returns on Leah’s wedding night to possess his fated bride.

In The Dybbuk, this possession is invited by Leah—a powerful moment where, for the first time in the narrative she takes control of her own life.  In Looking Through Glass it comes across as far less consensual (though Ammar gives a stunning performance, switching back and forth between her voice and that of the vengeful dybbuk).

In both iterations of this story, the exorcism efforts of the community fail, because ultimately Leah does not want to be saved.

The end of 24/6’s show reveals that, like in the original play, the fathers’ had made a pact of betrothal for their children. So how does the fact that Leah’s attraction to Jacob may not have been her own, but the machinations of a dead father? It’s never explored.

The show’s premise has a lot of promise, and brilliant, compelling performances from the two leads and from Avi Soroka (who plays the ghost of Sholem Ansky, as well as of Leah’s father, and is hard to take your eyes off of while he speaks). The staging at Jewel Box Theater in Manhattan was gorgeous, and it will be exciting to see what the cast brings to the next performance of the play, this Sunday at Ansche Chesed synagogue in Manhattan.

But it seems strange that a retelling that aims to delve into Leah’s inner life has so many moments that don’t fully explore her reactions—perhaps she doesn’t call out Jacob’s manipulations because of her Orthodox background, or because of her lack of a father figure, but we can only guess. If she’s still okay with the fact that she dies on her wedding day because of another man’s pact, then we need to know why.

It seems Leah has resisted capture once again.

24/6 will perform a reading of the play at Ansche Chesed in their chapel at 4pm this Sunday January 7th. Free and open to the public.

Photos by Paul Terrie

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A new year— a chance at new beginnings, and most importantly, a new round of Broadway and off-Broadway shows. The fall season brought us singing sponges, live goats, and Amy Schumer. What will the next months bring, and, of course— is it good for the Jews?

It depends on what you’re looking for. While musicals continue to boast Jewish stars (Elsa in the upcoming Broadway production of Frozen went to Camp Ramah!) and creators (shows by writing teams Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe are being  revived), if you want to look for overtly Jewish content onstage, you’re probably going to need to see a play. But on Broadway and off, you’ll have plenty of options, first off-Broadway, and later on in the season, on the Great White Way itself:

Off Broadway:

In the Body of the World (begins performances January 16):

While the play may not have much Jewish content, it is a new autobiographical piece (based on a recent memoir) by an artist of Jewish descent— Eve Ensler, the creator of The Vagina Monologues, has a one-woman show about becoming deathly ill while doing advocacy work abroad.

Jerry Springer the Opera (January 23):

This one is a revival, and, yes, an opera. It actually has fairly Christian themes, but it is what it says on the label: an opera about Jewish television personality Jerry Springer.

Amy and the Orphans (February 1):

This new family drama features a bickering bunch on a road trip on the Long Island Expressway following the death of their father; while the degree of Jewishness is not yet clear, one character is a Jewish convert to Christianity, so it follows that the rest of his family is probably of Jewish origin as well.

Admissions (February 15):

This play is the latest from Jewish writer Joshua Harmon, the mind behind Bad Jews and Significant Other. It features a woman trying to diversify a prep school and explores larger questions of ideology and privilege. The main character’s name is Sherri Rosen-Mason, and like many Harmon protagonists, she is a secular Jew.

Broadway:

Angels in America (February 23):

Tony Kushner’s famous two-part play on New York and the AIDS crisis is revived in New York, by way of London. It features the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg serenading a dying Roy Cohn in Yiddish. Enough said.

Travesties (March 29):

This production is another revival— of a 1974 play by Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard. One of its three protagonists (the other two being Lenin and James Joyce) is Tristan Tzara, the Jewish co-founder of Dadaism.

Photo of Jerry Springer the Opera via Wikimedia

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You may not heard of Rags, but perhaps you should have. It may not be a mega-hit like Fiddler on the Roof, but in some ways it holds a similar appeal.

And, no, this isn’t Ragtime—Rags predates that more famous musical by over a decade. Think of it a bit like a spiritual sequel to Fiddler. It’s the story of Jewish immigrants struggling in the Lower East Side in the early 20th century (for example, one rather tragic plot line involves the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire). And it had a heck of a writing team—score by Charles Strouse (Annie), lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked and like half of your favorite Disney movies), and book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof!).

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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The Jewishness of Falsettos isn’t apparent in its summary: a man named Marvin leaves his wife, Trina, and son, Jason, to be with his male lover, Whizzer, even though he still wants everyone to have dinner together. It’s awkward. To help with the awkwardness, Marvin sees a psychiatrist, who then becomes Trina’s and Jason’s therapist, and later marries Trina. That’s also awkward, but not as awkward as you would think.

The current Broadway production is a revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s 1992 musical, and it still pulls no punches. The unabashed Jewishness first strikes with its opening number, “Four Jews in a Room Bitching” (actually five, counting Trina), a playfully self-deprecating celebration of Jewish neuroses. The men sport Biblical robes and beards before ripping off their costumes to reveal late 70’s-era attire. Lyrics include “Now we’re at the Red Sea/Pharaoh is behind us/Wanting us extinct-ed/And then the Red Sea/Split before us/No more tsouris!” and “I’m neurotic, he’s neurotic/They’re neurotic, we’re neurotic/Bitch bitch bitch bitch/Funny funny funny funny.”

Based on its opening number, you’d expect a cast of over-the-top, insufferable Jerry Seinfeld- and Woody Allen-types, but with the exception of Brandon Uranowitz, none of the cast members are Jewish. As the therapist Mendel Weisenbachfeld, Uranowitz both channels Chip Zien, the role’s originator, and adds his own distinct charm with his wry Jewish delivery of the book’s wry Jewish humor.

As for the others? Christian Borle isn’t Jewish—or gay, although he sure has a habit of getting cast as such. Whizzer is played by Andrew Rannells, a Midwestern Catholic schoolboy whose breakthrough role was a Mormon. (To be fair, Whizzer self-identifies as only “half-Jewish.”) Stephanie J. Block (Trina), was also raised Catholic and, despite his last name, Anthony Rosenthal is only a quarter Jewish.

Despite the opening number, the first act of Falsettos could be an ethnically generic family drama. It’s in the second act that Jewish references hit full-force—hard to avoid when a major plotline is planning a bar mitzvah.

For the first half of the second act, Judaism is treated with classic self-deprecating humor. One song is about “watching Jewish boys who cannot play baseball.”

“It’s weird how he swings the bat,” Marvin moans, “and why does he have to throw like that?”

Mendel implores Jason to “Remember Sandy Koufax…take heart from Hank Greenberg/It’s not genetic.” With a little intervention from the half-Jewish Whizzer, Jason hits the ball and scores a strike, or some good baseball thing that I don’t understand.

But more important than baseball is Jason’s bar mitzvah, which Marvin and Trina contentiously plan. “It’s the last loving thing we’ll ever do together,” Trina says, but they argue over everything, from catering to the guest list.

Jason would rather cancel the bar mitzvah than hear his parents fight over it. It’s supposed to be a “celebration where [he gets] richer,” and his parents are ruining it. They treat him to the familiar guilt trip of “You are gonna kill your mother/Don’t feel guilty, kill your mother/Rather than humiliate her/Killing your mother is the merciful thing to do.”

It could just be confirmation bias, but Borle and Block don’t quite capture the Jewishness of the guilt trip, but Uranowitz more than makes up for it. It’s the distinctly Jewish Mendel who comforts Jason with “Everybody hates his parents—that’s in the Torah!” and who argues that Marvin and Trina should just “throw a simple party/Religion’s just a trap that ensnares the weak and the dumb/Stop with the prayers.”

“How can you stop with prayers at a bar mitzvah?” Trina counters, yet Trina and Marvin also seem to be more cultural and secular than religious. (Isn’t that always the case with Bar Mitzvah stories? 13 the musical is similarly areligious, despite the Bar Mitzvah plotline.)

Halfway through, the show takes a dark turn: Whizzer comes down with a mysterious illness. The disease is clearly HIV, but at the time the second act takes place, 1981, it’s a nameless killer.

With Whizzer dying, Trina and Marvin offer Jason the choice of canceling the bar mitzvah. Jason is naive enough to believe Whizzer will get better and he wants to wait until then. It’s the pragmatic Mendel who tells Jason: “We can’t be sure he’ll ever get better, when or if he’ll ever get better…so what we’ll do is your decision.” But Jason doesn’t want to decide and, distressed, he runs off.

Mendel asks Trina: “Why don’t we tell him that we don’t have the answers…Tell him things happen for no damn good reason/That his lack of control kills what’s best in his soul and that this is the start to his becoming a man.”

The bar mitzvah is no longer a sitcommy plotline, but a device to show Jason’s growth. For the first time in his life, Jason prays to God: “Hello, God, I don’t think we’ve ever really spoken.” He promises to have a bar mitzvah if God saves Whizzer.

Suffice it to say, that doesn’t happen, and Jason finally makes his decision: he will have his bar mitzvah in Whizzer’s hospital room. From a guest list of 200, the party is whittled down to seven. Jason is called to the Torah as “son of Marvin, son of Whizzer, son of Trina, and son of Mendel.” It’s an unconventional arrangement, especially for the time period, to say nothing of the fighting and heartache that led up to that moment. But their differences are put aside for a joyous celebration of life and family, devoid of the superficialities that so seemed important at first. Whizzer dies shortly after.

Heavy-handed? Yeah. Borderline emotionally manipulative? A bit. Did I sob anyway? You bet. Using a bar mitzvah to show a boy’s emotional maturation in the face of family tragedy might be too on the nose, but Falsettos—the book, the cast, and in particular Anthony Rosenthal’s performance—earns enough emotional currency to get away with it. And, to be fair, I doubt Falsettos was “heavy-handed” when it first premiered, an early show to deal with the AIDS crisis. If there are some moments that chafe on my cynicism, it’s more a mark on me than on a wholly beautiful, still-resonant show.

Plus, how often do you see a meaningful Bar Mitzvah in entertainment, really, beyond a symbolic shrug that a boy is reaching maturity, or a one-off joke? It doesn’t even have its own TV Tropes page.

Image by Joan Marcus

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Buckle up, because currently playing in New York is NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. Yes, that is the full title, a quote from Disney’s “Carousel of Progress,” stylized in bold and all, and it’s way too fun to abbreviate. If you can’t handle the name, you can’t handle the show.

Describing the interminably-titled play is a bit like recounting the dream you had last night. As in, …and then there’s a man, and over time I realize he’s Diedrich Knickerbocker, and he’s in an abandoned Catskills resort, and he’s complaining about his unfinished work, and all of a sudden Rip Van Winkle is there and start’s singing ‘Manhattan’ and then there are CREEPY GNOMES EVERYWHERE.

So let’s take a step back. Little Lord is a New York-based experimental company; their work tends to be Jewish and queer in themes, historical pastiche in background, and zany in execution.

Take their most recent work before this, 2015’s BAMBIF*CKER/KAFFEEHAUS. The central figure was Felix Salten, the Jewish creator of both Bambi and a famous pornographic satire novel, plopped in a maelstrom of cultural references and contexts, playing with coincidences that were too delicious to ignore (like the fact that Salten knew Theodore Herzl).

NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. follows a similar formula; instead of Salten, the main “character” is Diedrich Knickerbocker, the historian alter-ego of Washington Irving who is the reason that Knick is a synonym for New Yorker. Knickerbocker famously went “missing” in a publicity stunt to promote Irving’s work. Irving, of course, also wrote Rip Van Winkle, the story of a New Yorker who sleeps for decades and wakes up to find his world entirely changed. The Borscht Belt was a series of resorts in the Catskills Mountains in Upstate New York that attracted predominantly Jewish clientele, were immortalized in Dirty Dancing, and have now largely shuttered or fallen into disrepair.

Is it all starting to come together? Well, Let Little Lord give it a try, using all of the elements above, and then some. On a set that looks like a hurricane hit Grossinger’s fifty years ago (and no one ever cleaned up the mess), Knickerbocker (Michael Levinton, who also directs and co-wrote the show with Laura von Holt and the company) is our central figure, lamenting the magnitude of producing a truly comprehensive history of anything. His companion is, yes, Rip Van Winkle (Lisa Rafaela Clair), a source of Yiddish flair with a rumination about food here, a ditty there. The ensemble dressed as creepy garden gnomes are a sort of chorus, at times, for example, representing guests of the once vibrant resort (one of the more affecting moments in the play is a poignant, eerie round of the “Kellerman’s Anthem” from Dirty Dancing).

As the play progresses, there’s no plot in the conventional sense, but threads are followed through and discarded, and Knickerbocker’s anxiety is a reminder to the audience that lost is an entirely reasonable place to be. Th work is largely found text, and characters quote everything from old tomes to memoirs to the Princess Bride as the show tries to grasp the vastness of history (with New York as its center-point, naturally).

After all, what does it mean to long for the past? Is there any authenticity to an idealized New York City? New York State? What about specific mysteries we can never uncover, like the fate of Henry Hudson? And wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on? The play has no answers, of course. There’s hardly time to ask all the questions.

NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. solidifies that Little Lord is a company to watch, especially if you’re interested in Jewish theatre that does more than prop up stereotypes as characters or make cultural winks that will make an audience laugh with recognition but stop short of looking beneath the surface. Asking questions, as this play does constantly, is the most Jewish thing you can do.

In this show, even playing bingo at a resort is a heavy prospect. After all, Jewishness, fixated on some ephemeral idea of “continuity,” means seeing all of time stretching behind you. While the universe is all at once dark, or silly, or make no sense at all, the weight of it all can still be overwhelming. This show perfectly replicates that sensation.

Plus, snacks seem to feature prominently as a running bit in Little Lord shows (free pickles at this play!), and if that’s not Jewish theatre I don’t know what is.

Yes, seeing a Little Lord show can be a bit much, and make you feel like you need to do homework. To prepare for this play, for example, you might benefit from reading the complete works of Washington Irving. And watching Dirty Dancing. And reading the Henry Hudson’s Wikipedia page. And Jenny Grossinger’s, while you’re at it. And reading Ecclesiastes in both English and Hebrew. And checking out the photo exhibit “Echoes of the Borscht Belt.” And learn some schoolyard rhymes.

Or, you could give up, dive into the experience, and accept that at some point you will fail to follow the text and let it be what it is; Jewish theatre, thought-provoking, and a real good time.

NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. plays at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St., through November 5.

Photo (L-R): Sauda Jackson, Avi Glickstein, Kaaron Briscoe, Ry Szelong, Lisa Rafaela Clair. By Kelly Stuart.

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Theatrical company Little Lord is mid-campaign to Kickstart their next project, entitled (and the bold is part of how it’s stylized): NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. Watch the video below:

So, are we clear? No? Well, let’s try this:

This play was inspired by a bit of history: Washington Irving (who wrote Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, etc.,) also wrote about New York under the pen-name Diedrich Knickerbocker— it’s from where the New Yorker as “Knick” originally comes. And so, NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. (the title is too fun to abbreviate), will move Knickerbocker upstate to a Kutsher’s-like resort, convalescing in decay as the world changes around him. Kutsher’s during its heyday was a model for the retreat in Dirty Dancing, which will feature prominently in the play. Other sources for the text include Prometheus Bound and the book of Ecclesiastes.

Is this starting to come together yet?

“Knickerbocker is writing about the Dutch immigrants making a new world in America, nostalgic for the good old days,” One of the company’s artistic directors, Michael Levinton, explained to Jewcy. “This felt very very tied to the Borscht Belt heyday — again, immigrants and the children of immigrants carving out a piece of America/New York for themselves, building up their own mythic worlds, and its subsequent decay and return to the earth. A very personal history getting sucked up into the larger American history and march of progress and change.”

“It’s Halloween,” Levinton added of the work’s impending October premiere, “And this show is a bit of an existential horror show.”

The work will also feature themes of artists trying to claim spaces in NYC, the ever-changing Lower East Side, and a country steeped in anxiety before a surreal election (spoiler: this one).

If this list of elements is starting to look as big as the periodic table, be assured that Little Lord know what they’re doing; I had the pleasure of reviewing their last production, BAMBIF*CKER/KAFFEEHAUS, for Tablet, where I wrote:

“To call the work ambitious is an understatement. It’s fearless in its weirdness, and its wonderful cast can make even the comically erotic retelling of a children’s story feel utterly sincere… This show is theatrical cholent at its meatiest… It’s queer, it’s Jewish, it’s transgressive, but it’s definitely a good time.”

The strange, talented minds at Little Lord have a knack for seeing patterns and creating some sort of order from chaos. BAMBIF*CKER, for example, examined how one man immersed in early-twentieth-century Viennese cafe culture wrote both Bambi and a famous pornographic novel and personally knew Theodore Herzl. Its other references ranged from Cabaret to Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, but somehow it all worked.

Plus, Little Lord always delivers in the snack department. BAMBIF*CKER sold lots of refreshments, including coffee and pop tarts (“strudel”). NOW IS THE TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME. NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE. will reportedly serve pickles and cole slaw.

And if for nothing else, I’m going to see this play to see what the heck they do with the iconic Dirty Dancing lift.

There’s just over a week left on the Kickstarter as of this writing, and about $5K left to go (the Jenny Grossinger ‘zine reward tier looks especially tempting).

The play is set to run from October 19th to November 5th, at the Abrons Arts Center in New York City.

Photo credit: Whitney G-Bowley

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I recently sat down for an interview with Shane Baker: actor, translator, Executive Director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, bon vivant and all around most unusual Yiddishist I know. The pretext was my writing about the current production of the New Yiddish Rep’s Yiddish-language version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “Vartn af Godo” (translated by Shane, beautifully directed by Moshe Yassur). The lure was the taco truck parked outside my building at lunchtime.

Shane and I hadn’t seen each other since the middle of the summer, when he and the other members of the New Yiddish Rep (actors Rafael Goldwaser, Allen Lewis Rickman, and NYR artistic director/actor David Mandelbaum) left for Ireland with Vartn af Godo and I was heading to Klezkanada, the Jewish arts retreat near Montreal.

After playing Vartn af Godo at the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, Shane stayed on in Ireland for a kind of heritage trip (a rare reminder that he isn’t actually Jewish). He came back to North America for Toronto’s Ashkenaz festival, where he performed his riotous neo-vaudeville tribute, “The Big Bupkis!  A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville,” then returned to New York for the current run of Vartn af Godo at Barrow Street Theatre as part of Origin Theater’s 1st Irish Festival.

Shane had been touring the world to great acclaim. I had just premiered a new English-Yiddish play to a crowd of 30 at Klezkanada, in a room whose most prominent acoustic feature was a deafening ventilation hum. We had a lot to catch up on.

Our conversation ranged from deliciously vulgar to intimidatingly erudite within a few bites of taco. When I asked him whether he got in touch with his roots in Ireland, I was treated to a story far too filthy for Jewcy. With great regret, I steered him away from vaudeville and back to the avant-garde Waiting for Godot. Why translate it to Yiddish? I asked. When I had gone to see it a few nights before, it was clear how many Yiddish speakers were in the house just from where the laughs were.

“I wanted to translate Waiting for Godot, and we staged the play, all in line with the great Yiddishist dream—I think first set out ‘shvarts af vays’ [in black and white] by Ber Borochov—that the world’s greatest works must be translated into Yiddish in order to nurture the language, just as works in Yiddish must be translated into the world languages in order to show people what we have,” he said.

A task like translating Beckett brings up the deepest existential questions for new Yiddish art. For whom is this new translation? Is it for translator, audience, or both? There’s no question that there were a handful of folks in the audience (for example, some Hasidic friends of mine) who were introduced to Beckett via the Yiddish translation. But it goes without saying that the task of translating world literature to bring it to the Yiddish ‘masses’ no longer burns with the same urgency as it did for Borochov and his early-twentieth century colleagues.

On the other hand, Shane tells me that in Ireland—where one would expect even fewer Yiddish speakers—he overheard people after the show saying that they had never understood Waiting for Godot as they had in Yiddish. And this was NOT a Yiddish speaking audience.

I asked Shane if he’d found anything new in the text with this new production. “A yid lebt mit bitokhn (a Jew lives with hope),” he replied. “For me, Beckett is all about hope.” In the optimism of Godot’s Vladimir Shane sees one of the things he fell in love with about Yiddish, “the insistence of the older generation of Yiddishists; the joy and purpose in what they were doing… Vladimir has his questioning moments, but he’s the driving force that keeps them waiting. It’s a purposeful waiting, a Jewish waiting.”

I have to agree. Though on the surface it seems like nothing happens in Godot, what keeps you on the edge of your seat is the development of the relationships between these four brutalized humans. How will they choose? Between life and death? Between hope and despair? These are questions with the most vitality when done with the deepest specificity, which is why I think Godot in Yiddish holds such power for audiences, whether or not they speak Yiddish. Great art needs no further justification.

Waiting for Godot shows through September 21 at Barrow Street Theater in New York. Purchase tickets here. (Use discount code “WAIT35” for 20% off.)

Rokhl Kafrissen writes about Jewish life and culture from a distant corner of New York City. Her new play is a Yiddish-English gangster ghost romance called “A Brokhe” (A Blessing).

(Image by Ron Glassman, via New Yiddish Rep)

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It’s a rare thing when a work of art makes me sit back and say, “Wow,” rarer still when it’s something Holocaust-related. The sheer volume of art that has been produced around the catastrophic events of WWII is overwhelming; but more than that, artists have a tendency to allow their emotions to rule unchecked, sure that the audience will forgive their indulgence; after all, it’s the Holocaust.

All this is to say that when Alexis Fishman’s Der Gelbe Stern (“The Yellow Star”) knocked me over sideways on Thursday afternoon at the New York Musical Theater Festival, I was as excited to be excited as I was charmed, thrilled, moved, and amused by her miraculous turn as Erika Stern, a fictional Weimar cabaret star performing for the last time in 1933 before a jealous, Nazi ex-lover shuts down her show. A mixture of original songs, stand-up comedy, and monologue, the show sparkles every bit as much as Fraulein Stern’s earrings under the spotlight.

For starters, Ms. Fishman, an Australian by birth, manages to convey the deep charisma crucial to pulling off her role as Berlin’s biggest cabaret star. She is laugh-out-loud funny with her Marlene Dietrich accent and her songs about the perfect boyfriend, Attila the Hun. She’s incredibly raunchy, too, in a way that conveys her delight with sex, rather than a two-dimensional performance of sexiness designed to appeal to the audience’s gaze. It’s a post-modern delight rather than a modernist one, but hey, I was into it! I only wished she had done something sexy with the Nazi flag; the forbiddenness of the swastika has, inadvertently, lent it an erotic quality that Fishman seems to know but not actualize. She is the person to do it.

There is real chemistry between Erika and her gay, closeted pianist, Otto, which makes for great fun. I was also reminded of the true pleasure one gets from watching a performer in a show they have themselves written; one feels the intelligence behind the work as a genuine part of the performance, rather than a performance of genuineness.

But the real brilliance of Der Gelbe Stern lies in Fishman’s masterful balancing of sentiment and irony. Just when you’re ready to relax into giggles, she elicits tears, and just when you’re ready to indulge those tears, she cracks the whip of her wit, as if to say, “Snap out of it!” It’s a truly masterful performance. Catch one of her two final shows on Monday, July 21. (Tickets here.)

Image credit: Hunter Canning

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