"On the Edge of His Seats in London Theaters"

by Alex Marshall

[The following article about theater seats is from the New York Times of 2 November 2022 (sec. C [“Arts”]).  It’s an entry in my occasional series on Rick On Theater in which I post articles about work in the theater about which most theatergoers know little.  The installation and care of the seats in the house seems like a perfect topic for that series.]

One family firm supplies seating for most of the venues on the West End, from Victorian treasures to flexible new spaces. Its chief designer reveals some tricks and traps of the trade.

LONDON — Earlier this month, during the first performance at the West End’s newest theater, @sohoplace, the audience repeatedly cheered the actors performing “Marvellous,” a comedy about a British eccentric. At one point, several hundred theatergoers even applauded a technician who came on to clean the floor.

[Marvellous isn’t a misprint or a typo; it’s the standard British spelling of the word and the title of a play by Neil Baldwin, Malcolm Clarke, and Theresa Heskins that opened on 20 October and will close on 26 November.]

But there was one person key to the evening whom no one cheered, whooped or even politely clapped. And Andrew Simpson, the designer of the theater’s seats, was happier that way.

“If a seat’s good, you don’t notice it,” he said. “You only notice it when it’s bad.” In the world of theater seating, he added, “No news is good news.”

Simpson, 62, is in a position to know. He is the lead designer at Kirwin & Simpson, a family firm his grandfather founded that started out patching upholstery in a local movie house during World War II and now supplies the seats for most West End theaters. (It works with some in New York, too, including the Hudson Theater and St. Ann’s Warehouse.)

The West End is challenging territory for a seating designer. Many of the London theaters Simpson caters for are Victorian jewel-boxes: tight, ornate spaces built with more attention to gradations of social class than to comfort.

Originally, according to David Wilmore of Theatresearch, a company that restores historic theaters in Britain, they would have had a few front rows of luxurious armchairs — known as fauteuils [French for ‘armchair’] — for their wealthiest patrons. Everyone else sat on wooden benches. When middle-class visitors were finally accorded seats, Wilmore said, theaters preserved their old sightlines by forcing the sitters bolt upright — “part of that Victorian strictness in all areas: ‘You jolly well better sit up and listen!’”

That won’t do for seats that now often cost hundreds of dollars to occupy.

A recent tour of Kirwin & Simpson’s works in Grays, a working-class town east of London, included a room filled with rolls of multicolored cloth and a shed where five men were busy screwing, stapling and gluing sleek maroon seats for the forthcoming Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York [opening in 2023 on the World Trade Center campus]. One warehouse is filled with emergency replacements, so that if a seat rips at, say, the Victoria Palace Theater — the London home of “Hamilton” — a new, perfectly matching one can be installed within hours.

Each theater needs many types of seats. The new, 602-capacity @sohoplace has 12 types, according to Simpson, all removable to allow different styles of staging, but some tricky older spaces require far more.

There are high chairs with built-in footrests, to give a clear view from the back of Victorian balconies where front-row patrons would once have sat directly on a low step. There are chairs with wide backs, but smaller seats, designed to fit perfectly into tight curves, and others with hinged armrests that can be raised so wheelchair users to slip into them. And there may be any number of things in between. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Theater Royal, Drury Lane, has over 160 different designs, with widths and angles tweaked to ensure the best view.

The seats themselves have become less cluttered over time, losing accessories like ashtrays and wire cages for men to store their top hats. But in the most cramped spaces, Simpson still sometimes employs an illusion. Short armrests make a narrow aisle feel wider, he said, because visitors don’t have to squeeze past them to get to their places, and they are then less inclined to start thinking about how little legroom they have. “It’s all psychology,” he added.

It similarly helped if the show was a hit. “If the stuff onstage is really good,” he said, “then people don’t mind what they’re sitting on. If it’s anything less than that, then the surroundings come into focus, shall we say.”

Even with the good will of a good show, it can be tough to accommodate theatergoers of varying shapes, sizes and tastes. Nica Burns, the chief executive of Nimax Theaters, the company behind @sohoplace, said she wanted the seats in all her venues to be comfortable for short people like her (she’s 5 foot 2 inches), who don’t want their feet to dangle in midair, and for tall people like her 6 foot 3 inch husband. While the theater was being designed, she kept two Kirwin & Simpson seats in her office and asked visitors try them. But, she said, “you’ll never find a seat that suits everybody.”

One demand that Simpson hears increasingly is for wider seats. Last year, Sofie Hagen, a popular comedian, began a campaign on Twitter, urging theaters to publish details of seat widths on their websites, to help larger people like her decide if they wanted to attend. “The amount of times I’ve gone to see a musical only to be in constant, excruciating pain,” Hagen wrote. “Once I had to leave before the show even started because the seat was too narrow.”

Hagen said in a telephone interview that every venue on her current British tour had agreed to display details of the width of their seats and she hoped more would follow. “If theaters had signs up saying ‘Fat people are not welcome,’ people would be like, ‘What?’,” she said, “but that’s subliminally the message we’re being told.”

At @sohoplace, some dozen seats at the orchestra level and balcony discreetly offer an extra three inches of width, on top of the standard 20 or so. Simpson, the designer, said that during a test event he had happily shared one with his 27-year-old son.

For some, however, a big seat might be a little too much comfort. Seats that leave theatergoers “practically rubbing shoulders with one another” make for more of a communal experience, Wilmore, the theater restorer, said.

Michael Billington, who resigned in 2019 after nearly 50 years as The Guardian’s chief theater critic, said he felt “a degree of austerity” helped keep audiences awake. For example, Shakespeare’s Globe in London has both Elizabethan-style standing space and backless wooden benches: Billington described those benches as “a form of terror,” but added that he certainly paid attention whenever he sat on one.

The new seats at @sohoplace drew typically mixed reviews from some of their first paying users. In interviews with a dozen audience members at the recent “Marvellous” performance, seven were glowing. John Yee, 22, visiting from Canada and sitting in the balcony, said they were “comfy as hell.”

Josh Townsend, who had a spot in the orchestra level, said he was 6 foot 2 and often struggled with seats that lacked legroom, yet @sohoplace’s were “really good.” The week before, he had watched “Dear Evan Hansen” in London’s Noël Coward Theater — whose seats are also by Kirwin & Simpson — and his legs were jammed against the seat in front. This was a huge improvement, he said.

But though she had loved the show, Ayesha Girach, 26, a doctor, said the seats were so hard they were “probably the most uncomfortable” she had ever sat in. She then praised those at the Gillian Lynne Theater, just a few blocks away, where she’d recently seen “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” “Those were really comfy,” she said. They were Kirwin & Simpson seats, too.

[The mention above of the men’s hat holders jolted my memory.  I remember them in movie theaters in the 1950s when I was a boy.  They were attached to the underside of the seat bottoms, and they were no longer made to accommodate top hats—which no one really wore any longer—but for fedoras. 

[I remember mentioning this to friends some years ago, and no one else remembered them!  Maybe I was more cognizant of this sort of thing because movie theaters were my dad’s business in those days (see my post “Lincoln & Howard Theatres: Stages of History,” 2 December 2011).

[Alex Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London.]

*  *  *  *

[The Times is very accommodating in its online versions of articles: it includes links to websites and other articles—from both the Times and other publications—that provides interesting commentary on the article one’s reading (or posting, as in this instance). 

[Among the links in the article above on the theater-seat company, is one on theater seats and their issues with respect to theaters under renovation—looking for better accommodations for their audiences, I decided to post this report as a companion to “On the Edge of His Seats in London Theaters.”  The piece below ran in the New York Times on 23 August 2021 (sec. C [“Arts”].) 

“YES, THAT OPERA SEAT DOES FEEL ROOMIER”
by Adam Nagourney 

Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.

SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.

“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.

When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones.

And San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.

Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.

“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington [DC]-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”

The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.

Even before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?

“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”

“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”

San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial.

The new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).

Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.

The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats on its main floor was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.

“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”

“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”

Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.

The seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”

The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.

“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”

With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”

The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 600 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.

The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.

“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating, which designed the seats in collaboration with the main architect, Shalleck Collaborative. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”

Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”

Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.

“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.”

[Adam Nagourney covers West Coast cultural affairs for the Times. He was previously the Los Angeles bureau chief and served eight years as the chief national political correspondent. He is the co-author of Out for Good (with Dudley Clendinen, 1999), a history of the modern gay rights movement.]

Is 'Star Trek' Founded on Jewish Principles?

 

“JEWISH ROOTS OF ‘STAR TREK’ ARE EXPLORED BY EXHIBITION”
by Adam Nagourney 

[The following article appeared in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 5 January 2022.  In it, Adam Nagourney explains how Sheri Bernstein, the director of the Skirball Cultural Center, an educational institution in Los Angeles, California, devoted to sustaining Jewish heritage and American democratic ideals, and Jessie Kornberg, the president of the center, justified hosting an exhibit of Star Trek memorabilia.

[I confess that, with one salient exception, I find the argument that Star Trek, of which I am a great fan (in college, I never missed an episode of the original series on the big color set at the frat house), is somehow infused with Jewish thought and wisdom hard to buy.

[Yes, the two stand-out leads in the show, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, were both Jewish, but how much sway would two actors have over the series’ content?  Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator and guiding influence, wasn’t Jewish.  If there’s any crossover, I’d think it was coincidental, or the consequence of the humanist values with which Roddenberry imbued the project that coincided with fundamental Jewish humanism.

[The one exception to which I alluded above is the hand gesture Nimoy invented for the Vulcan greeting.  That came directly and specifically from a symbolic religious gesture from a particular Jewish blessing.  It went viral even in the days long before social media and is almost universally recognized and even imitated.  But is that enough to assert that Star Trek has Jewish roots?

[Read Nagourney’s presentation of the Skirball’s exegesis and decide for yourself.]

This show, which has plenty of artifacts to delight Trekkies, notes the origins of the Vulcan salute.

LOS ANGELES — Adam Nimoy gazed across a museum gallery filled with “Star Trek” stage sets, starship replicas, space aliens, fading costumes and props (think phaser, set to stun). The sounds of a beam-me-up transporter wafted across the room. Over his shoulder, a wall was filled with an enormous photograph of his father — Leonard Nimoy [1931-2015], who played Spock on the show — dressed in his Starfleet uniform, his fingers splayed in the familiar Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.

But that gesture, Adam Nimoy noted as he led a visitor through this exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center [Los Angeles], was more than a symbol of the television series that defined his father’s long career playing the part-Vulcan, part-human Spock. It is derived from part of a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston as a boy and brought to the role.

The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.

But walking through the artifacts Adam Nimoy recalled how his father, the son of Ukrainian Jews who spoke no English when they arrived, had said he identified with Spock, pointing out that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise.”

Jewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality, said David Gerrold, a writer whose credits include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” one of the most acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes [Season 2, Episode 15; 29 Dec. 1967], which introduces the crew to a cute, furry, rapidly reproducing alien life form.

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”

[The Talmud, which translates as ‘instruction’ or ‘learning,’ is the collection of commentaries on biblical texts that forms, with the Torah, the foundation for the theology and religious law of Judaism.  It dates from between the 4th century to the 6th century CE.  The Torah is the law on which Judaism is founded (torah is Hebrew for ‘law’).  This law is contained in the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).]

That connection was not explicit when the show first aired. And a stroll through the exhibition, which covers the original television show as well as some of the spinoffs and films that came to encompass the “Star Trek” industry, mainly turns up items that are of interest to “Star Trek” fans. There is a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode, a Klingon disrupter from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” [second series, 1987-94], and a display of tribbles.

To some extent, the choice of this particular exhibition — “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” — to help usher the Skirball back into operation after a Covid shutdown reflects the imperatives museums everywhere are facing as they try to recover from a pandemic that has been so economically damaging. “These days — honestly, especially after the pandemic — museums are looking for ways to get people through the door,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the show for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Museums are struggling to find an audience and are looking for a pop culture hook.”

It seems to have worked. The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months here, a robust turnout given that the Skirball is limiting sales to 25 percent of capacity.

“This has been bringing in new people, no question,” said Sheri Bernstein, the museum director. “Attendance is important for the sake of relevance. It’s important for us to bring in a diverse array of people.”

Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

The intersections between the television series and Judaism begin with its two stars, Nimoy and William Shatner [b. 1931], who played Capt. James T. Kirk. “These are two iconic guys in outer space who are Jewish,” said Adam Nimoy. And it extends to the philosophy that infuses the show, created by Gene Roddenberry [1921-91], who was raised a Southern Baptist but came to consider himself a humanist, according to his authorized biography.

Those underlying connections are unmistakable for people like Nimoy, 65, a television director who is both a devoted “Star Trek” fan and an observant Jew: He and his father often went to services in Los Angeles, and Friday night Sabbath dinners were a regular part of their family life.

Nimoy found no shortage of Jewish resonances and echoes in the exhibition, which opened in October [7 Oct. 2021] and closes on Feb. 20. He stopped at a costume worn by a Gorn, a deadly reptilian extraterrestrial who was in a fight-to-the-death encounter with Kirk [“Arena,” Season 1, Episode 18; 19 Jan. 1967].

“When he gets the Gorn to the ground, he’s about to kill him,” Nimoy recounted. “The Gorn wants to kill Kirk. But something happens. Instead he shows mercy and restraint and refuses to kill the Gorn.”

“Very similar to the story of Joseph,” Nimoy said, referring to the way Joseph, in the biblical book of Genesis, declined to seek retribution against his brothers for selling him into slavery.

Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. Shatner, who is 90 and recently became the oldest person to go into space [13 Oct. 2021 aboard a Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule, built by Jeff Bazos], declined to discuss the exhibition. “Unfortunately Mr. Shatner’s overcommitted production schedule precludes him from taking on any additional interviews,” said his assistant, Kathleen Hays.

The Skirball Cultural Center is set on 15 acres, about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles [in the Sepulveda Pass].

The exhibition ran for about two years in Seattle after opening in 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek” TV show’s [8 Sept.] 1966 [U.S.] debut. (That version was on NBC for three seasons [1966-69; now commonly known as Star Trek: The Original Series].) The exhibition had been intended to tour, but those plans were cut short when the pandemic began to close museums across the country.

The exhibition was assembled largely from the private collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and founder of the Museum of Pop Culture, who died in 2018.

Peck said he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the series with an exhibition that explored the outsize influence the television show had on American culture. “The answer that I am offering is that ‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents — the good character of many of its characters,” Peck said. “They are characters that people would like to emulate.”

“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”

Bernstein, the Skirball director, said the exhibition seemed a particularly good way to help bring the museum back to life.

“There was never a better time to present this show than now,” she said. “We very much liked the idea of reopening our full museum offerings with a show that was about inspiring hope. A show that promised enjoyment.”

By spring, ‘Star Trek’ will step aside for a less surprising offering, an exhibition about Jewish delis [“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli; no dates announced], but for now, the museum is filled both with devotees of Jewish culture, admiring a Torah case from China, and Trekkies, snapping pictures of the captain’s chair that Kirk sat in aboard the Enterprise.

“There is no such thing as too much ‘Star Trek,’” Scott Mantz, a film critic, said as he began interviewing Adam Nimoy after a recent screening at the museum of “For the Love of Spock,” a 2016 documentary Nimoy had made about his father. A long burst of applause rose from his audience.

[Adam Nagourney covers West Coast cultural affairs for the New York Times.  He was previously the Los Angeles bureau chief and served eight years as the chief national political correspondent.  He is the co-author of Out for Good, a history of the modern gay rights movement.

[For the incipient Trekkie, there are five television series in the Star Trek franchise: Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69), ST: The Next Generation (1987-94), ST: Deep Space Nine (1993-99), ST: Voyager (1995-2001), and ST: Enterprise (2001-05).

[There are also streaming series: ST: Discovery (2017-present), ST: Picard (2020-present), and ST: Strange New Worlds (upcoming in May 2022).  There have also been animated series and 13 films released between 1979 and 2016, with several more in production.

[This tally doesn’t include the countless documentaries, books, comics, magazines, and items of merchandise, plus the parodies and fan products that pop up all the time.]

*  *  *  *
“THE JEWISH ROOTS OF LEONARD NIMOY AND ‘LIVE LONG AND PROSPER’”
by Abby Ohlheiser

[The following article is from a Weblog post of the Washington Post on 27 February 2015.  Abby Olheiser reports on an interview Leonard Nimoy did with a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language and the culture and history those books represent.  I’ve reposted it on Rick On Theater because the explanation provided in Adam Nagourney’s New York Times piece above concerning the invention by Leonard Nimoy of the Vulcan greeting gesture is incomplete and I wanted to fill it out.]

Leonard Nimoy first saw what became the famous Vulcan salute, “live long and prosper,” as a child, long before “Star Trek” even existed. The placement of the hands comes from a childhood memory, of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service in Boston.

The man who would play Spock saw the gesture as part of a blessing, and it never left him. “Something really got hold of me,” Nimoy said in a 2013 interview with the National Yiddish Book Center.

Nimoy, who died on Friday [27 February 2015 at 83], spoke about the Jewish roots of the famous gesture for an oral history project documenting the lives of Yiddish speakers, of which Nimoy is one.

At the beginning of the interview, Nimoy talked about his childhood in Yiddish. He was born in Boston, but his parents came from a village in what is now Ukraine [Iziaslav], where his father worked as a barber. “My first language was English,” Nimoy told the interviewer in Yiddish, “but I needed to speak Yiddish with my grandparents.”

A disclosure: Years ago, as a college student, I worked part-time at the National Yiddish Book Center, which is located on my alma mater’s campus [Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts].

Although Nimoy never hid his upbringing from the world, my short experience there is why Nimoy’s work to preserve the language of his childhood came to mind today. I reached out to the Center, which explained that Nimoy started recording Jewish short stories, from Eastern Europe, in 1995, for a radio show hosted by the Center. He funded another project to record Yiddish stories and distribute them to children.

“Toward the end of his life, he called for increased efforts to teach Yiddish to a new generation,” Aaron Lansky, the center’s president, added in an email. “I’m not sure any Vulcan ever spoke a more geshmak (flavorful) Yiddish. He will be missed.” [The German word for ‘taste’ is Geschmack; the adjective ‘tasty’ or ‘flavorful’ is geschmackvoll or geschmacklich.]

Nimoy’s incorporation of the blessing speaks particularly poignantly about the permeable boundaries between Spock and Nimoy himself.

“This is the shape of the letter shin [ש],” Nimoy said in the 2013 interview, making the famous “V” gesture. The Hebrew letter shin, he noted, is the first letter in several Hebrew words, including Shaddai (a name for God), Shalom (the word for hello, goodbye and peace) and Shekhinah, which he defined as “the feminine aspect of God who supposedly was created to live among humans.”

The Shekhinah, Nimoy has said, was also the name of the prayer he participated in as a boy that inspired the salute. The prayer, meant to bless the congregation, is named after the feminine aspect of God, Nimoy explained in a 2012 post on the “Star Trek” site. “The light from this Deity could be very damaging. So we are told to protect ourselves by closing our eyes,” he wrote in the blog.

“They get their tallits over their heads [tallit (plural in Hebrew and Yiddish is tallot) is a fringed prayer shawl worn by religious Jews], and they start this chanting,” Nimoy says in the 2013 interview, “And my father said to me, ‘don’t look’.” At first he obliged, but what he could hear intrigued him. “I thought, ‘something major is happening here.’ So I peeked. And I saw them with their hands stuck out from beneath the tallit like this,” Nimoy said, showing the “V” with both his hands. “I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of it and the look of it was magical.”

After witnessing the ritual all those years ago, Nimoy practiced making the “V” with his fingers as a child. He “never dreamed” he would one day make the gesture so publicly and repeatedly as an adult.

That was, he said, until a “Star Trek” script required his character Spock to go home to Vulcan [“Amok Time,” Season 2, Episode 1; 15 Sept. 1967]. “It was the first time we’d seen other Vulcans, other people of my race, so I was hoping to find some touching that could help develop the Vulcan sociology,” Nimoy said.

“I think we should have some special greeting that Vulcans do,” Nimoy recalled saying. He suggested the prayer gesture from his childhood.

“Boy,” he said, “that just took off. It just touched a magic chord.

He noted that “most people to this day still don’t know” the history of the greeting, although he repeatedly and enthusiastically shared its origin.

Laughing, Nimoy revealed the best part of it all: “People don’t realize they’re blessing each other with this!”

[Abby Ohlheiser covered digital culture for the Washington Post.  She left the Post in March 2020.

[A few comments on the WaPo article and the interview with Nimoy:

[Like Nimoy, my father (1918-96) was the son of a Ukrainian immigrant.  My paternal grandfather, Jacob, was born in the small city of Uman in 1890 (d. 1963) and came to the U.S. as a child with his parents and grandparents in 1900.  (My dad’s mother was born in Latvia in 1896.)

[In Dad’s family, the language of his grandparents’ household was German, not Yiddish—though they undoubtedly spoke Yiddish as well as Russian and Ukrainian, and probably also Polish.  My dad learned German as a child because, his father being a pharmacist who was at work when school let out, Dad spent his afternoons with his grandmother—who never learned English.

[The blessing of which Nimoy spoke above is called the Birkat Kohanim (“priestly blessing”) or Nesiat Kapayim (“lifting of the hands”).  The text, from Numbers 6:23-7, is: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; / The Lord make His face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; / The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”  (English versions of the blessing differ depending on the translation used.  Particularly in Reform or Liberal synagogues, most prayers are spoken today in English or other modern tongue.

[The blessing is traditionally chanted by the kohanim, the priests of ancient Judaism who are members of the tribe of Kohan (or Cohan), the descendants of Aaron, the bother of Moses.  In modern Judaism, especially among Reform or Liberal Jews, the concept of priesthood has been abandoned and the blessing is spoken by the cantor or rabbi (who isn’t traditionally a priest but a teacher).

[The Birkat Kohanim is meant to bless the congregation in the name of God and keep them safe from evil.  Today it’s usually given as a benediction at the end of the worship service before the congregants leave the sanctuary.

[The hand sign accompanying the blessing, which evolved into the Vulcan greeting, is formed with both hands, the two thumbs touching each other to form the symbolic representation of the letter shin (ש).  Nimoy adjusted the gesture for Star Trek to make it a one-hand sign.]