Hi! Drama
May 2008

With the Current is a 1904 piece by Sholem Asch, translated and adapted by a new company, New Worlds Theatre Project, devoted to preserving Yiddish Theatre. It’s in english though, let me say that first.

This is a wonderful production as directed by Marc Geller. He uses the space wonderfully. He has excellent actors, beautiful lighting and sets and really beautiful costumes too.

It’s the story of a young man studying for the rabbinate that feels completely hemmed in by his society. He has to break free to see what else there is out there in the world for him. Unfortunately he has to leave his wife and infant child to do this. He then returns years later when the child is seven years old.

First we see the ancestors and then we see the ancestors turning things over to the modern people. This is a fine evening of theatre. It’s very brief but I highly recommend it and I look forward to their future work.

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Time Out New York
April 2006

By Peretz Hirshbein. Dir. Isaac Butler. with Hanna Cheek, David Little.
78th Street Theatre Lab (see Off-Off Broadway).

Dramaturgical law states that if a gun appears in Act I, it will be fired by Act III. There are no firearms in The Amulet, but its kissing cousin is a bowl of water, positioned front and center throughout the entrancing allegorical journey. In fact, liquid is a constant in this well-crafted adaptation of a 1906 Yiddish play. A granddaughter (the gorgeously fragile Cheek) and her blind grandfather (the forceful Little) are caught in a terrifying storm next to a rapidly flooding river (vividly underscored by Matt Temkin’s percussion). As the two are forced to seek higher ground, the grandfather's mysterious, possibly magical amulet necklace becomes lost. Hope appears in the form of a stranger, played by the calming yet eerie Daryl Lathon.

But don't expect an upbeat ending: Russian writer Peretz Hirshbein is questioning both faith and the lack of it. Throughout the drama, water (our source of life, don't forget) brings about gallons of despair, giving the production, an unavoidable heaviness. In the hands of a lesser artistic team, this story could easily become cringeworthy melodrama. Luckily, Isaac Butler's bold staging combines realism with expressionist touches, and is well complemented by David Birn's brooding, earthy set and Sabrina Braswell's mystical lighting. Certainly this is not easy-to-swallow theater (read the program notes afterward for eye-opening religious and political insights), but if you can handle it, you'll find that in the last moments there's a sharp, shocking payoff, water bowl and all.

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The Amulet by Peretz Hirshbein receives a sensitive, haunting production from the New Worlds Theatre Project, a company founded in 2005 and dedicated to bringing the work of Yiddish playwrights to modern audiences. Hirshbein's play, titled Oyf Yener Zayt Taykh (Across the River) in Yiddish, dates from 1906, and this centennial production is its first in English. The lilting translation by Mark Altman and Ellen Perecman -- respectively artistic director and executive director of the company -- effectively captures the play's mysticism and mystery.

Director Isaac Butler creates an eerie atmosphere with droning New Age music, flickering votive candles, and actors who quietly daven (read from prayer books). Live drumming by Matt Temkin adds to the mood. David Birn's flexible set consists primarily of a wooden platform that separates and is propped up as a hill; a lighted water basin makes an effective river.

The plot is simple: Blind former ferryman Menashe (David Little) and his granddaughter Mirel (Hanna Cheek) wait uneasily while the river rises. Mirel fingers an amulet left to her by her mother, who received it from a tzaddik (a holy mystic). "She was as radiant as the sun," says Menashe. Hirshbein, best known for his pastoral play Green Fields, may have been alluding to Zionism with the difficult river crossing, or critiquing superstition, or just dramatizing a legend.

After the flood, Mirel, who has lost the amulet, is approached by the Stranger (Daryl Lathon), who tells her, "Life is calling you." He paints her pictures of castles of gold on the opposite hill. Is he a demon? Menashe has died. Mirel is then cared for by Yachne (Anita Keal), who fears for the girl's sanity. The end is startling and inevitable. The expressionistic style of the production and the restrained, compelling performances suit the piece perfectly and create alluring theatre.

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In the program notes for The Amulet, New Worlds Theater Project's artistic director Mark Altman admits that the play's meaning is somewhat obscure. Although his notes are titled "for after the play," they may read better as an honest advance warning.

Not that the writing has nothing for modern audiences to enjoy. The play, from a new translation of a 1906 Yiddish work by Russian playwright Peretz Hirshbein, is poetically rich. The story is simple—a blind ferryman (David Little) and his grown granddaughter (Hanna Cheek) are forced to flee their riverside home in the wake of a spring flood, and as they take shelter on shore, the girl rescues a mysterious stranger from the river (Daryl Lathon). He in turn rescues her from freezing to death, but enchants her so with tales of his home country across the river that after the flood she can think of nothing but joining him there someday.

Director Isaac Butler has chosen an intriguing approach to the production side as well, with a bare-bones set and lighting effects standing in for the storm and the riverbank. An onstage percussionist (Matt Temkin) plays throughout the show, his instrumentation standing in for the whistling wind and the rushing floodwaters. Two men sit along the edge of the stage throughout, serving as stagehands and extras; they are even on stage as the audience walks into the space, lighting candles and praying to themselves. (A health warning for some: part of the pre-show setting may involve the use of some sort of incense, as the room was very hazy when I walked in. [Editor's Note: Director Isaac Butler writes, "We use an Actors Equity-approved non-allergenic haze maker that is specifically designed to avoid health problems. There's no incense in the show."])

So there are lovely phrases in the play, and lovely images in the staging. But for a good chunk of the production, these two elements didn't seem to fit together neatly. Little’s ferryman speaks in great circling loops of allegory, returning again and again to the same points in his speeches—and he indeed speaks in speeches, leaving his poor granddaughter with little to say for most of the first scene. Temkin's percussion is definitely an intriguing element, but with a play this wordy, constant percussion might not have been the best idea—at times the actors were simply drowned out. Little especially was overtaken by the percussion at times, and some of the nuances of his speeches were lost, which made them sound even more repetitive.

Lathon stands out in his one scene as the Stranger—his character also repeats himself, but somehow he sounds emphatic and persuasive rather than redundant. The scene is something of a dance of seduction, though, so the circling and backstepping fit; even so, Lathon brings a delicate balance of innocence and ardor to his performance, and it's not surprising that Cheek’s character responds to him.

I know that I'd find plenty of wonderful things in Hirshbein's script if I were reading it on the page; the notes in the program speculate about several of the allegorical layers found in the work. I also know that I'd like to see some of these production elements in a play less bound by language. Pairing them just seems to add too many layers to the work, leaving them both somewhat out of reach of our understanding.

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The Forward
June 24, 2005

The closest that most New York theatergoers will come to Yiddish literature this year is the blockbuster revival of "Fiddler on the Roof," an $80-a-ticket affair in which Sholom Aleichem's novel about pain, suicide, abandonment, death and family meltdown has been turned into a feel-good song-and-dance number. But a few blocks down from the musical's massive Broadway digs, on the fifth floor of a tiny building, you'll only need $15 to see a play that will make you first cringe and then gasp, and then finally it will transform your idea of Yiddish theater forever. The choice is clear, but are you brave enough?

"Carcass," written by acclaimed playwright Peretz Hirshbein in 1906 and translated into English a century later, has been brought to life by the Diaspora Drama Group, created by three former affiliates of the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater, the last remaining Yiddish-language theater in New York. Frustrated by Folksbiene's reliance on simultaneous translations and actors who must rote-learn Yiddish for their parts, Ellen Perecman, an actor and neurolinguist, had the idea to start a theater group dedicated to presenting Yiddish plays in English, as art for art's sake. Joining forces with Mark Altman, a former Folksbiene artistic director who co-translated "Carcass" with her, and David Mandelbaum, who found a performance space for the group, Perecman saw her idea come alive this month. A series of dramatic readings, some in Yiddish, coincide with the main play's run. "We want to present good theater to people who want to see good theater, not to people who just want to see Yiddish plays," Perecman said in an interview. "We are not a Yiddish theater, but a theater."

That's a loaded statement, of course. Yiddish theater began as a quasi-religious pursuit, through the tradition of the Purim shpiel. When secular Yiddish theater began to take hold in the 19th century, the legacy of religion remained evident in the painfully obvious moralizing that many playwrights embraced, and the theater sometimes took on the role of the synagogue as a place for publicly performed moral lessons. Another historical trend in Yiddish theater is a kind of forced ethnography: Yiddish plays are often studded with irrelevant scenes of holiday, prayer and wedding customs, inserted deliberately by playwrights who believed they were preserving a world perpetually on the brink of disappearance. Many of the classic plays of Yiddish theater fit this almost pre-modern mold: a combination of didactic and nostalgic that often adds up to melodramatic, if not downright sappy.

"Carcass," on the other hand, is anything but light. It feels like the work of a Tennessee Williams or a Eugene O'Neill — an impressive study in characterization, coupled with an excruciating exposé of social class, sexual tension, alcoholism and domestic violence. The play centers on a single fractured family, physically and emotionally filthy both from poverty and from their own failures. In one dark, dirty basement, we find Avrush, a broken man given to drunken bouts of regret over his once-respectable horse-trading business; Brayne, his bitter and abusive second wife; Reyzel, Brayne's sexy, resentful daughter who endures her mother's blows, and Mendel "Nveyle" ("Carcass"), Avrush's enraged son, who has become a tanner after the failure of his father's business, and who is in love with his stepsister. Beyond the room (barely), we meet Berel "the Pig," Reyzel's charmingly disgusting boyfriend; Shprintze, Avrush's bedridden former wife, and Nichomele, Avrush and Shprintze's refined teenage daughter, who is repulsed by her father, her brother and the pit they live in. By the final act, the audience will have seen parents beating their children, children beating their parents, a brother hitting one sister while hitting on another, and — just to liven up things — a murder. Oh, and at one point someone gets skinned alive.

This isn't a feel-good play, but that's precisely the point. "Everyone who read it found it tremendously refreshing that someone had written about a Jewish family that was a bunch of really ugly people," Altman noted on choosing the script. What's almost more devastating than the murder near the play's end is that the action continues around it, with the other characters failing to notice the human carcass in the room — and the realization that the carcasses of the play's title aren't dead horses at all, but the living people in this waking nightmare of a home that might well be a grave.

The founding directors took a tremendous risk by choosing this exceptionally challenging script. The play takes place almost entirely in one darkened room, where absolutely everything depends on the strength of the acting. Overwhelmingly, this risk has paid off. With a few minor exceptions that are largely a matter of taste (Berel the Pig, for example, could be much sleazier than actor David Raine interprets him), the performances here are extraordinary. Of particular note are Soraya Broukhim's Reyzel and David Elyha's Avrush, but Mahayana Landowne's careful direction ensures that the entire ensemble contributes to the play's awesome energy. The compelling performances begin even before the play does. As the audience enters the tiny curtainless theater, Reyzel and Avrush are already on the claustrophobic set — Avrush muttering in drunken sleep, Reyzel scraping dirt off her filthy legs. At 80 minutes, the play has no intermission, but if there were one, the actors probably would continue performing through it and the audience would remain riveted, trapped by this near-flawless illusion of living in this horrifying world. It is excellent theater, no question.

But is it Yiddish theater?

Well, of course — and of course not. The translators have labored mightily to make this play "universal," and they have largely succeeded. But it is precisely those moments when the artists have preserved an occasional Jewish reference — such as when the alcoholic Avrush, played here as an O'Neillian drunk, is asked how many times he "made kiddush," or when we hear an actor use the phrase "keyn aynhoreh" with an almost Southern drawl — that the veil of illusion begins to tear. In such moments, we are suddenly jerked out of our suspension of disbelief, forced against our will to confront the distance we had previously ignored between the play's world and our own. And then we feel the aching enormity of what has been lost.

The word yid in Yiddish appears to have a simple meaning, but it doesn't. It means "Jew," but more often it means "person" — as a standard modern dictionary puts it — "in contexts where Jewishness is irrelevant." Hirshbein's Yiddish theater was such a context. But is Times Square another?

The Diaspora Drama Group certainly would like it to be. But without an audience for whom Yiddish is simply a language, rather than a nostalgic identity or a religious statement, a theater performing these plays must choose between making the productions' Jewishness define them or ignoring their Jewishness as much as possible. Most contemporary "Jewish" theater productions have chosen the former, in the belief that audiences attend for the Jewishness rather than for the theater — and, as in "Fiddler," the audience ends up paying an enormous price. Diaspora Drama has chosen the latter route, and it's a choice that has a price all its own.

But for now, that price is worth paying. Never again will we live in Peretz Hirshbein's world, but pretending that we can — in the theater, the realm of imagination — is the closest we can come to reviving the dead. And for the power of that imagination alone, it is worth seeing a forgotten carcass returned to life.

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Jewcy
2005

New York City's new Diaspora Drama Group brings Yiddish to center stage

The Common Basis Theatre sits on the fringe of New York's Theater District, up on the fifth floor of an unremarkable old building along Eighth Avenue. But it is in little performance spaces like these -- one of dozens in the neighborhood -- where new movements are often born, and, every once in a while, an entire culture is revived.

"I have been dreaming about this for a couple of years," says Ellen Perecman, executive director of the new Diaspora Drama Group. Around her, the cast and staff prepares for a final run-through of the company's first full production, an English-language adaptation of Carcass, which Perecman and DDG co-founder Mark Altman translated from the original Yiddish version Peretz Hirshbein wrote almost a century ago.

"It's just amazing this play was written in 1906," says Jeffrey Evan Thomas, one of the show's eight cast members. Thomas, like most of the cast and some of the crew, is not Jewish and knows only a few words of Yiddish. "I was drawn to the dark, powerful story line, so I auditioned," he says.

Mahayana Landowne, the director, interrupts. "Are you working with blood tonight?" she asks. "Oh, and you're leading the fight call in five minutes."

Carcass, as the title might suggest, is no Yidl with a Fiddle, and that's exactly the point. "It's shocking as a Yiddish play, and we wanted our first show to be something people wouldn't expect," Perecman says. "Yiddish literature is so rich. It's not all one thing." There's no reason, she says, why its scope shouldn't be appreciated, as is that of any great world literature."

Naturally, the disconnect lies in the fact that most people, certainly most Jews, do not speak Yiddish -- something Perecman not only acknowledges, but emphasizes. "In order to feel the play, it has to be in your language," she says.

Born in the well-known shtetl of New Haven, Conneticut, Perecman's first language was Yiddish, the only tongue spoken by her grandfather, who, like her parents, grew up in Poland and survived the Holocaust. As an actress, Perecman performed with the Folksbiene, the only full-time Yiddish theatre in New York (or anywhere in the U.S.), and later worked there as a translator.

It was then that she quickly realized the problem with the few English versions that already exist: They are quite literal. That might be fine for scripts as historical documents, but translating a play, she says, means interpreting across languages and time. Her goal with DDG is to make the great works she loves, accessible; to give English-speakers in 2005 the same experience Yiddish artists and audiences enjoyed in 1906. "I want my [24-year-old] son to want to see these plays," she says.

Perecman, who holds a Ph.D. in linguistics, says it was her studies of how brain-lesioned patients experience language that helped her realize what was needed -- to capture not only what the playwright "was doing with language," but how he meant for his audience to hear it.

So, she and Altman act more as interpreters than translators, she says. While he recites the original Yiddish script aloud (Perecman never learned to read or write her first language), she types in English. [see clarification below] Next, they consult with the director, who suggests changes, a process that continues in rehearsals as actors bring the play back to life in its new language and for a new generation.

The smallest change can make the difference, Perecman explains. While the line, "Yidn, Yidn!" literally translates as "Jews, Jews!" that's not how the all-Jewish audiences of a century ago would have understood it. So it becomes, "Gentlemen, Gentlemen!"

And to have a character shout "Thief!" today would rob the play of the nasty punch that "Goniff!" packed in the original, especially when modern, more vulgar options abound.

No one involved in the production -- professionals included -- are getting paid. Not that they would be in it for the money, anyway. "Anything you can do to keep this culture alive is important, even if it's not Broadway or off-Broadway," says Amitai Kedar, an Israeli-born actor who has appeared in Yiddish productions in Israel and is volunteering to operate the sound for Carcass.

Perecman is counting on the US$11,000 they've raised so far, along with ticket revenues, to carry them through the first month. Meanwhile, the group is amassing an impressive advisory board, including Broadway legend Elaine Stritch and Gordon Edelstein of the venerated Long Wharf Theatre in Perecman's native New Haven.

To launch DDG's first-ever public event, a staged reading of Yossel Rakover Speaks to G-d, Perecman recruited another board member, Vivian Matalon, her former acting coach and a Tony Award-winning director (for the 1980 Broadway revival of Morning's at Seven). First published anonymously in a Yiddish newspaper in Beunos Aires in 1946, Yossel Rakover was believed for decades to be an authentic first-person account found in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, until writer Zvi Kolitz admitted authorship in 1968.

Born in London and raised in Jamaica by Sephardic parents, Matalon says Yiddish had for him little relevance or resonance. "I always thought it was a very uncontrolled language," he says. "The emotions seem much bigger -- 'Oh, G-d in heaven, I'm the most unhappy of human beings!' might just mean, 'Well, I'm a little depressed.'" But the English version of the story, a man's declaration of faith in the face of pure tragedy, touched him. "It's important to bring this out there," he says.

However, DDG also plans to do its part to keep the mother tongue alive. After intermission, veteran New York actor David Mandelbaum (who's also the group's managing director) replaces Matalon, repeating the entire reading in Yiddish. The effect is intense. While my high-school German and college Hebrew only help me keep up for so long, the fact I had just experienced it in English allows me to absorb the emotional effervescence of the original.

And, among the few dozen people present for this new beginning, I'm apparently not the only one who feels that way. "I didn't like the English version as much -- it doesn't roll," comments one young, male audience member, as he leaves. "I think it's better in Yiddish."

Clarification: This sentence can be misleading. In fact, what Wishno intended to say was that although Yiddish is Perecman's first language, she did not learn to read or write Yiddish as a child, but rather learned as an adult.