ANNULLA, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Emily Mann
The New Theatre of Brooklyn
28 October 1988
About halfway
through Annulla, An Autobiography, a Young Woman’s Voice explains,
“Annulla’s art was her life.” In
essence, the art of Emily Mann’s play, too, is this remarkable woman’s
life. As the Voice goes on to say, “In
many ways her life embodied the history of central Europe from 1900 through the
two great wars.” With minimal
interference, Mann gives us a mini-history of that period, seen not only “from
a Jewish perspective,” but from the perspective of a woman with “crackpot
ideas.”
Growing out of an
oral-history project, the play derives from Mann’s 1974 interview with the aunt
of her best friend from college. Born in
1900, Annulla Allen endured the constant flux and change in Eastern Europe in
the first half of this century. Without
ever leaving her native Galicia, she was at one time or another a citizen of
Germany, Russia, Poland and, for a year, the Ukraine. She could stand in for the entire East
European Jewish Diaspora, shifting as the tide of politics and anti-Semitism
moved her family to Vienna, Italy, Germany and, finally, England, where Mann
recorded her story.
Interspersed with
commentary representing Mann’s thoughts some ten years later, Annulla is
really a rambling, often disjointed, but always fascinating monologue,
contained in the kitchen of the old woman’s flat in Hampstead Heath, London. She’s making tea for herself and chicken soup
for her sister in the hospital. A more
commonplace activity with which to contrast her life could not be
imagined.
Perhaps more
emblematic of her life is the play she has been writing, which she has “boiled
down to just over six hours.” Crammed with
ideas and characters like her memory, its unnumbered pages are “all out of
order.” Searching through the manuscript
she dropped just before the visit, Annulla remarks, “Ah, here is something. No, it is not applicable.” Life is disorganized, our memories even more
so; Mann astutely has not structured Annulla’s into neat, little thematic
blocks for us.
Opening on the eve
of the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), The New Theatre
of Brooklyn’s production marks the New York première of Annulla, a
revision of Mann’s first play, Annulla Allen: Autobiography of a Survivor. Directed by the playwright, the original,
two-act version premièred in 1977 at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. Later revived at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre
and recorded as a radio drama for Earplay, the play was revised and the
recorded Voice added for the 1984-85 productions directed by Timothy Near at
the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. TNT’s version, compacted into one 90-minute
act, has had further alteration.
Like Mann’s two
other plays, Still Life and Execution of Justice, Annulla
is, among other things, about violence.
Where Still Life examines the brutal anger of a Vietnam veteran
and Execution the violence perpetrated by a manipulated justice system, Annulla
explores a more internalized violence.
With the anti-Semitism and Nazism of her youth as background, Annulla
verbally abuses her invalid sister even as she makes chicken soup for her,
nonchalantly chopping and dismembering the bird.
Furthermore, Annulla
deplores the “barbarism” of the world’s male leaders. Her play, The Matriarchs, posits, “If
there were a global matriarchy, you know, there would be no more of this
evil.” Unsurprisingly, however, Annulla
seems to ignore one female world leader, Indira Gandhi. In an interview in David Savran’s In Their
Own Words (Theatre Communications Group, 1988), Mann acknowledges that
Annulla hated the Indian tyrant. Annulla
is “not exactly consistent in her political theory,” observes Mann. “That’s one of the things I love about
her.”
Under Mann’s fluid
direction, Linda Hunt’s incarnation makes Annulla—holocaust survivor, feminist,
author, intellectual, iconoclast—a real and palpable person. You come away with the odd sense of actually
having met an extraordinary woman. Were
it not for Hunt’s fame, I could easily have thought I was kibitzing in the
kitchen of the real Annulla Allen.
When the lights come
up on the kitchen, the tea kettle is whistling.
In lurches Annulla, laden with packages, apologizing for being
late. Making tea, she launches into the
story of her sister’s accident. Then,
recounting a metaphor for her passing as an Aryan in Vienna, she asks
rhetorically, “Do you know this old fable by Heine?” The audience responds aloud. At the end of the evening, Annulla tells us,
“I am so glad you could come to see me today.”
As a measure of Hunt’s believability, we feel we have truly been her
guests.
The interpolations
of the Voice, which are not a direct interview but commentary relating to Mann’s
life and the search for her own family roots in Poland, act as
counterpoint. Delivered smoothly and
sonorously by Karen Ludwig, they bring us back to the present, but do not jar
us, or interrupt Annulla’s activities.
Reading the script, this technique looks as if it would disrupt the flow
of the monologue; a disembodied Voice appears undramatic. In performance, it serves as a momentary
respite to reflect and absorb the events of this strange life.
The setting for Annulla
is more confined and naturalistic than those of Mann’s other plays. At the New Theatre, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg
and Diann Duthie’s set is a cluttered, functional kitchen with cabinets and
shelves overstuffed with the detritus of Annulla’s daily existence. The kitchen table, occupying the center of
the floor, overflows with papers—Annulla’s manuscript among them—and other
paraphernalia. The room is specific and
real, except that the walls are covered with translucent scrim-like fabric
instead of opaque muslin. This and the
ambiguity of the space beyond the kitchen, particularly the room off to the
right to which Annulla retreats to answer the phone, has no clear symbolic
connection to the script or production.
Known for
adventurous programming, the six-year-old New Theatre of Brooklyn [now long
defunct] won an Obie in 1987 for “Artistic Excellence.” In the words of the New York Times,
TNT “can stand alongside . . . the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and
BACA Downtown [also disbanded] as reminders of the renewal of theatrical life
in this . . . borough.” Bringing
together an Oscar-winning actress and an Obie-winning playwright and director
(for Still Life) is a mark of TNT’s good producing.
* * * *
THE JEW OF MALTA
by Christopher Marlowe
Theatre for a New Audience
The Duke Theatre on 42nd Street
9 March 2007
March [2007[ was Jew
Month on stage in New York City for me. The Theatre for a New Audience
presented F. Murray Abraham in a rotating rep of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Abraham, of course, played
Shylock and Barabas.
My friend Diana and
I saw Merchant on Friday, 2 March, at TFANA’s latest abode
(it’s itinerant), the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street. (I posted the Merchant portion of my original
2007 report on Rick On Theater on 28 February
2011 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/02/tfanas-merchant-of-venice-2007.html].)
The Duke’s one of those theater spaces in a highrise that was either built or
renovated during the revival of 42nd Street, right in the center of the
honky-tonk. I’d never been to anything
here [I have since], and it’s a rather nice space. A little high-tech in
decor, perhaps, but functional, with good sightlines—it’s a thrust
configuration—and no obstructions.
The Duke’s a small
enough theater that no seat is far from the stage—even the little balconies
that run around three sides of the auditorium. We were in the last row (‘F,’
mind you!) of the "orchestra," if that’s what they call it there, and
we had perfect views and no hearing problems. [TFANA moved to its own
building, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 2013.]
My theater companion
Diana and I saw Christopher Marlowe’s Jew
of Malta on Friday, 9 March,
and the tenor of the production was entirely different from that of Merchant. It was played entirely
for laughs, mixing many period acting styles and cultural references.
When the Jews file in after Barabas to confront the Governor and his soldiers,
for instance, they are backed by “Hava Nagila,”
an Israeli folksong that postdates the Renaissance by a number of
centuries. (The scene-change and other incidental music is an eclectic
selection of periods and cultures.)
The Maltese knights,
by the way, though attired in 16th-century military garb, strike Restoration
poses, with their legs in a balletic stance and the ever-ready handkerchiefs
fluttering about their noses. When Barabas and Abigail dissemble for the
benefit of the Maltese, they do so in 19th-century acting style.
Lodowick and Mathias
both wear their initials sewn onto the back of their costumes like
some high school athletic award. When the two monks fight over who
will convert Barabas (and his gold), they battle with their staves as if they
are kung-fu fightin’ with pugil sticks. Now and then, a young female
stage hand, headset, power-pack, and all, runs on stage like a Noh koken to give Barabas or one of the other
characters a needed prop.
John Lee Beatty’s
set is deliberately artless—painted flats that look like a high school
production, with many doorways and windows—simply holes cut into the
flats—slightly out of plumb and such elements as the stars of David
and the crosses placed and replaced on Barabas’s house front clearly cheaply
made. (The Star of David is an
anachronism in any case, dating as a symbol of Judaism several centuries after Marlowe’s
time )
David Zinn’s
costumes are fully-realized Renaissance dress and quite elaborate, with
breastplates for the Maltese soldiers; long, red robes and red turbans for the
Turks; scimitars and swords; voluminous, white habits and wimples for the nuns;
and so on. They are generally brightly colored, though, like some
musical-comedy version of the Renaissance, and the Maltese soldiers wear
pageboy wigs that made me wonder, at first glance, if they weren’t being played
by women. (They weren’t.)
Everyone is having
tons of fun—it almost looks as if each actor is sort of doing his or her own
thing, though I’m sure director David Herskovits coordinated it all.
Abraham doesn’t quite rub his hands together as he contemplates his evil deeds
against his Christian enemies (though Lodowick does give a comic-villainous
laugh at one point), but he might as well do—he takes such glee in his
machinations.
And Arnie Burton plays
Barabas’s Turkish slave-cum-henchman, Ithamore, as a cross between Igor from Frankenstein and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings (with a smidge of Iago thrown in). And
John Lavelle plays Lodowick as a sort of Renaissance metrosexual (a little like
the way he played Gratiano in Merchant). Never having seen the play or read
it before, I kept wondering what it must be like played . . . well, straight,
if that’s possible. (From Marlowe’s perspective, since he was probably a
Protestant—though there were persistent rumors he was an atheist—all three
groups, Jews, Muslim Turks, and Catholic Knights of Malta, are all figures
of either fear or ridicule, I guess. No one comes off well at all.)
The Jew
of Malta, written in 1589 or 1590, is decidedly a weaker play in all respects than Shakespeare’s Merchant (created between 1594 and 1597),
and it isn’t often done, so I suspect it comes off pretty poorly if not tricked
out somehow or other. In any case, purely as a piece of theatrical
entertainment, TFANA’s take works—though it throws no light on anything much,
including Marlowe’s dramaturgy, the temper of the times, Jews in Elizabethan
society, and so on.
But there’s no law that
says every piece of theater has to do that, is there? No, of course
not! (Otherwise there’d be no place for Bell, Book, and Candle; You
Can’t Take It With You; or The Boyfriend—and what a shame that would be! I’ve
never held to the conviction that mere entertainment was an unworthy goal for
theater.)
Comparing the two
productions makes clear that the Shakespeare is the better play. Marlowe’s
Jew is so dependent on abrupt plot turns and
reversals, and over-the-top violence, that it would be hard to believe even if
played straight. Merchant has a much more psychologically complex plot
and characters with developments that are not only not tied to stereotypes, but
are uniquely keyed to the characters and circumstances of Shakespeare’s
drama.
Marlowe’s characters
are far more simplistic. I understand from reading that Jew includes a prologue that invokes Machiavelli, but it isn’t played at
TFANA; however, it apparently gives the play a serious point about politics and
hypocrisy. That element is missing from the TFANA interpretation, so that
Merchant alone makes an attempt to illuminate ideas
and themes, stressing, as director Darko Tresnjak does, Shylock’s equality in
vehemence and bloodthirstiness with the Venetians who provoke him.
Herskovits’s Jew didn’t seem to have much to say about anything, as far as I could
tell, though in both plays and productions, no side is seen to better effect
than the other—they are all nasty pieces of work. But only in Merchant
does this make an impression since the figures in Jew are all cartoons.
Most of the cast
comes off better in Merchant than in Jew,
but I’m not sure that’s their fault rather than the fault of Herskovits’s
approach (and, to a certain extent, Marlowe’s, since he asks so much less of
actors than does Shakespeare).
As Barabas, Abraham is
less of a remarkable presence than was his Shylock. The fact of his long
experience and innate talent still makes him seem the solidest figure on the
stage, even in the superficial interpretation of Jew, however. He still looks like a grown-up among kids.
* * * *
BESHERT
by David Crespy
Frederick Loewe Room,
Dramatists Guild
17 December 2008
I had no plans to
write about this play, an unstaged reading of which I attended, but since I sat
through the two hours and ended up discussing it some over a late snack with my
friend Diana, whom I had invited to join me because she’s a nascent playwright
herself, I will.
The play is Beshert; or, The Jewish Dating Cycle by David Crespy. Crespy’s an associate
professor of playwriting at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and founding
artistic director of the Missouri Playwrights Workshop there. He states
that his principal occupation is playwriting, but I only know him as the author
of Off-Off-Broadway
Explosion (Back Stage Books, 2003), a history of the origins of the
Off-Off-Broadway theater scene in the early ’60s which I used as
research.
As I read the book,
some thoughts occurred to me, and I shared them with Crespy by e-mail and we
started a correspondence that went on from time to time for several years.
We’d never met, however, until this reading. I didn’t know his plays
before then, either. The reading was on Wednesday evening, 17
December, in the Frederick Loewe Room of the Dramatists Guild at 1501
Broadway (on Times Square).
The play started out
as a one-act (now the first act of three) for the book Playwriting Master Class (Heinemann, 2000) by
Michael Wright. Crespy then took it to the 2000 Last Frontier Theatre
Conference in Valdez, Alaska, where Beshert received
a Panelist’s Choice Award, and it was a semi-finalist for the 2008 National
Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut,
and has been seen in readings at River Union Stage in Frenchtown, N. J., and at
First Run Theatre in St. Louis (both 2006).
“Beshert,” the title
of the first act of the three-acter, is Yiddish for ‘destiny’ or ‘fate,’ but it’s
usually used to refer to someone’s “perfect match” who’s waiting out there
somewhere, ordained by God to be his or her soul mate. (There are Jewish
matchmaking services that use Beshert as part or all of their
names!)
The word appears
often in The Jewish
Dating Cycle because
Nadya Finklestein has just left her goyishe (a slightly condescending Yiddish word for ‘gentile’)
first husband and wonders if she’ll ever allow herself to love
again.
Nadya is stuck in
the world of academia and in mid-Missouri, far from her family and
religious roots. (Like Crespy, Nadya is a professor at a Missouri
university. She was raised orthodox in
New Jersey and doesn’t really feel comfortable with the looser Reformed
Judaism of the Mid-West.) Her bubbies—her
deceased grandmother and great aunts (well, one’s actually only in a permanent
coma)—haunt her furniture, urging her to find an NJB (a nice Jewish boy) and
settle down. But finding her beshert seems
impossible.
In “Meshugas” (‘insanities’—in
the sense of ‘nuttiness,’ not mental illness), the second act, Nadya tries
to find a love match by going on a date with Avi, a younger Jewish man
and a grad student at her university. Before she opens the door to
welcome the suitor, the spirits of her bubbies
possess her furniture once again.
Nadya finds out that
in order for her relatives to go to “our Lord . . . & Taylor in the
sky,” she has to fall in love. What unfolds is a cavalcade of Nadya’s
worst dating fears, which are ingrained in her partly because of her family’s
infliction of guilt and partly because of her own desires to be an independent
woman.
In the final act, “Ver
Klempt!” (‘choked up’), Nadya faces the death of her mother who died of breast
cancer back in New Jersey, attended by her brother while Nadya stayed
away. Through the spirits that haunt Nadya’s memories, she learns that to
allow herself to love, she must allow for forgiveness.
Okay, I don’t know
how that all sounds to someone who hasn’t heard the play read, but it’s full of
nonsense, both of the playwriting variety and the . . . umm, “life”
variety. First of all, the play is so full of Yiddish and Yiddishisms
that any spectator who didn’t have at least one parent from the old country
would have a very hard time understanding what anyone’s saying. I’m an
assimilated Jew—no one in my household spoke Yiddish when I was growing up—and
I had a difficult time following all the little jokes and cultural
references.
Diana, who’s
gentile, got lost in the middle of the first act. I don’t know whom
Crespy intends as his audience, but even the old Jewish Rep [a New York City
company that ceased producing around 2002] would have a hard time with this
script. (I’d suggest the Folksbiene/Yiddish Theatre—but there’s too much
English in the play for them! [See my
article on the Folksbiene, 23 and 26 August 2012.]) It looks to me like
the ideal audience would be a shul, especially one with an older
congregation. They might also appreciate the content the most, too.
Because the next
problems go beyond the language. The characters, for one, are all
clichés—and not in the breaking-the-stereotype vein, either. The Jewish
characters . . . er, caricatures . . . are so stereotypical as to be
almost cartoons. The four bickering (and cackling) bubbies are not only predictable but
embarrassing. (That not one of them had an actual good marriage—they
settled—makes it all the harder to see why Nadya’d listen to them
anyway.)
The academics at the
(ahem) University of Northern Southeast Missouri
(aside from Nadya, there is her department chairman and the grad
student/suitor) are of an identical stamp, only from a different storage
bin. They can’t speak a word unless it’s hyper-academese (the silly,
exaggerated kind: “I was interested in applying
poststructural theory to narrative phenomena created by nearly illiterate folk
art writers who exemplify the otherness typified by those who had, not of any
of their own accord, become victim to the hegemony of the white, male, European
gaze and who were thus marginalized in odd and poignant ways,” says Nadya at one point).
Then there are the
occasional digs at Missouri/Mid-Western provincialism (that is, non-Jewishness,
Republicanism, and more). The university town is called Wretched Grace,
Mo. (a stand-in for Columbia?); there’s at least one reference to that great
Missouri statesman, John Ashcroft; and the last act is set in Branson, Mo.,
home to “five unique festivals, 60 craft shops, 50 daily shows, 15 rides, and
dozens of delicious, unique dining opportunities guaranteed to bring the fun of
the past to life!”
(Crespy once
confessed to me that he gets “pretty bummed when I’m stuck out here in Missouri.” The
Jewish Dating Cycle was
presented on campus: it’s something of a wonder that Crespy still has a job at
Mizzou!)
Then there are the
gimmicks.
The bubbies arrive to haunt Nadya in the furniture of her
deceased grandmother, and it hops and bangs around as the spirits assert
themselves. Nadya becomes her own brother from time to time (please don’t
ask me to explain this!) and at one point (and I can’t explain this) the characters of Nadya’s
former husband and her new suitor become her mother and herself as a
child.
Nadya’s Cousin Sol
speaks to her from a moose head in the hotel room in Branson and her mother
appears (while Nadya and Avi are having sex) as a 12-year-old child. It
became awfully hard to keep all this straight—I had given up trying to figure
out why it was happening, however.
Other gimmicks:
Avi, who is a student of child parapsychology (huh?), uses a sock puppet to represent his “inner
child”; in one scene “Izzy” (the sock puppet) has a dialogue with a ballerina
doll named Maribell, Nadya’s “inner child.”
Then there are the
extended scenes that are travesties of old movie romances, Laura, Now
Voyager, and Rebecca, in which the actors/characters play the
movie roles as a way to learn about “romance” in the days before . . . well,
sex ruined it all. (These are the movies that instructed mom and
the bubbies back in the day.)
In the second act,
when Avi knocks on Nadya’s door for their first real date, time stops as Nadya
has visions of all her disastrous relationships—-and a couple of imaginary
ones. Each one is acted out, with the characters of her ex-husband,
her department chairman, and so on, taking on the roles of the other halves of
these relationships.
I assume
there would be costume changes or something to help distinguish the “real”
character from the “visionary” one, but it was hard to keep them all sorted out
in the reading, and I wasn’t terribly motivated to work too hard at it
anyway. I can’t even begin to remember all the little gimmicks and stunts
Crespy employs; after a while, MEGO!
Then there’s the
writing itself. Crespy’s characters don’t talk in phrases or words—they
speak in paragraphs. The text is over-written.
Furthermore, there’s
far too much narration. Mostly it’s Nadya, but someone or other
often has long monologues explaining some character history or backstory or
philosophical or psychological point Crespy would have been better to find a
way to express in acted scenes. (This, of course, was attenuated in the
reading by the verbalizing of the stage directions, but that only exacerbated a
situation that would still have been a detriment.)
Maybe Crespy saw
that there was too much talk and that’s why he inserted all that phony
theatrical gimmickry. If so, he’d be better off cutting down on the
language and obviating the need for some (all?) of the stunts. The man
needs a dramaturg!
Finally, all these
contrivances don’t seem to add up to anything. The whole play is directed
at giving Nadya permission to date Avi. Not only has she just ended a bad
marriage, but Avi is 11 years her junior. (I’d have been more concerned
that he’s a student and she’s a professor, but that doesn’t really come
up.)
On the other hand,
as Nadya’s bubbies keep reminding her, Avi’s an NJB, her beshert. You know what? Who cares!
All this sound and fury was focused on freeing Nadya from her self-imposed
constraints, but for what? So she can get a date? We never see her
fall in love with Avi—she says, in the end, that she loves him, but we never
see it happen; it’s just words. (In fact, given the way the
script emphasizes Nadya’s neuroses and psychoses, you have to wonder why
Avi would pursue her. She’d scare the shit out of me!)
The play is so busy
being clever that it never gets around to being human. There’s a lot of
dramaturgy assembled here, all for little purpose, it seems to me. All
Crespy’s theatricality needs a bigger reward, a bigger
bang. Permission to go on a date? Bushwa! The freedom to
fall in love, to take a chance, to risk—that’s an ending worth getting
to!
What it looks like
to me, no playwright to be sure, is that Crespy indulged his urge to take every
idea he had for a playwriting trick—do movie scenes, do puppets, do haunted
objects, do transmogrification!—and dropped them into one script without
worrying about whether they serve a purpose or not.
Diana thought it was
characteristic of a grad student playwright—and she’s right. It’s a
beginner’s lack of restraint—and Crespy’s not supposed to be a beginner.
(He has other plays, according to his bio, but I don’t know any of them or
their production histories. [I later saw
a reading of The Sudden Glide, another
of Crespy’s plays from 2010, and didn’t much care for it, either. But that’s a tale for another time.] It’s certainly possible that Crespy’s an
exemplar of the old bromide that those who can’t do, teach.)
I won’t critique the
acting except to say that the performers who read were adequate. I’m sure
they didn’t have a lot of rehearsal, as few readings do, so the work on display
was necessarily superficial. (The actor who read Cousin Sol did seem to
be channeling Fyvush Finkel. Maybe that’s the only way he knew to do a
Jewish man of a certain age.)
The program says
that Crespy “staged” the reading (it was a sit-down reading!), but I take
that to mean he “supervised” the actors. Though he has a BA in acting
(from my own MFA alma mater, the Mason Gross School at Rutgers), his résumé
doesn’t list any directing credits. My experience with playwrights who
direct their own work is that they stress the words over acting or staging, so
I don’t imagine the cast got much substantive direction.
I don’t know what the purpose of the reading
was. No one attending looked to me like a backer, producer, director, or
theater operator. And it didn’t seem like a reading for the playwright’s
benefit, to hear the script read (since it’s been read or performed several
times already). Why would you come all the way to New York for that
anyway when you can do it just as well in Missouri?
