15 February 2020

Some Plays about Jews from the Archives


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?  

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