Immigrant Imaginations 1

 

[Immigrants and immigration has become a top-of-mind subject in recent years, especially so at this moment in time.  When I saw that the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled its Summer 2025 issue “Immigrant Imaginations,” I thought it would be useful and interesting to repost some of the articles on the topic on my blog. 

[The first one that struck me is a conversation among six playwrights working in the U.S. whose origins are all beyond our borders.  In the published discussion, the writers touch on several aspects of their work that have been affected by their change of venue, so to speak.  Some of that has to do with culture, some with language, and some, I was curious to read, has to do with time.  I won’t try to explain that last one; I’ll let you read it for yourself.

[The article ran in volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025), of AT.  It was also posted on the journal’s website on 29 July 2025.] 

“HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:
AN IMMIGRANT THEATREMAKERS ROUNDTABLE”

by Lyndsey Bourne 

Immigrant theatremakers working in the U.S. reflect on what they write 
and who they’re writing for.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

That’s an Agnès Varda quote I love. I think about it often. These past few months, I’ve been thinking about landscape and place, and how they are present in a play. How, for example, Cuba feels so present in María Irene Fornés’s work.

[Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, and photographer. The quotation is from her 2008 autobiographical documentary film The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès; Ciné-tamaris and Arte France Cinéma; distributed by Les Films du Losange).

[María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in Off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. See a report on Fornés’s play Drowning in “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016).]  

I’m a playwright, a Canadian with an O-1 visa. I’ve been living in New York for nearly 15 years. Even when the plays I write are set in the U.S., somehow I’m always writing Canada.

[According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security that administers lawful immigration and naturalization, the O-1 visa is for the nonimmigrant individual

who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and have been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.

[There are two classifications of O-1 visas; the applicable one for this discussion is the second one (O-1B):

O-1A: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)

O-1B: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the arts, or extraordinary achievement in motion picture or television industry

[There are also special visa classifications for those accompanying O-1 visa holders.  See the USCIS website for details.]

In early April over Zoom, I spoke with a group of international playwrights all living and making theatre in the U.S., writing stories and landscapes between places: Bazeed [aka: Mariam Bazeed; born ca. 1976 in Kuwait; relocated with their family to Eqypt during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990], an Egyptian playwright, poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn; Francisco Mendoza, a playwright who was born in Argentina and partly raised in Brazil before moving to the U.S. a decade ago, now also based in Brooklyn; Stefani Kuo [b. 1995], a playwright and actor raised in both Hong Kong and Taiwan now based in New York City; Khristián Méndez Aguirre, a director and playwright from Guatemala now based in New York City and Austin; and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke [b. ca. 1988 in Helsinki, Finland], a playwright and director (and sometimes actor) from Sri Lanka now based in New York City.

Together, we reflected on the ways our immigration status, cultural distance, and shifting audiences shape our work. It’s a precarious thing to be an immigrant artist—a tension too often made invisible. For immigrant and diasporic theatremakers working in the U.S., writing is often shaped not only by personal or political urgency, but by the realities of bureaucracy, translation, and institutional legibility.

Here we gathered to engage in questions of authenticity, audience, representation, and survival, from the politics of language and translation to the very real pressures of visa applications and institutional gatekeeping. We considered how lived experience shapes approaches to our artistry, and how for international artists working in America, storytelling itself becomes a site of both constraint and possibility. What happens when you write about a country you no longer live in? How do time, language, and place intervene in the storytelling?

Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for concision and clarity.

LYNDSEY BOURNE: I want to start by asking about your writing practice. What is your process like these days? How are you thinking about your plays and where they come from? Who are they for?

FRANCISCO MENDOZA: I came to the U.S. as a student and then I transitioned to an O-1 visa. In some ways, the O-1 did shape the writing, because I was writing plays that were most easily going to lead to the kind of achievements that I needed to show for my visa. Then I got my green card, and my writing has gotten weirder and weirder. The further I walk away from the necessity of achievement, the more the plot doesn’t necessarily make logical sense. I am not as afraid to branch into a way of writing that maybe people won’t understand. And it’s okay if they don’t! I think the safety of not feeling like I have to perform has influenced, not necessarily the kind of stories I’m telling, but definitely how I’m telling them.

ARUN WELANDAWE-PREMATILLEKE: In Sri Lanka, I ran a theatre company [Mind Adventures Theatre Company in Colombo; an associate artistic director, 2011-17], and I worked with the same people from the time I was 18 until I was in my 30s. Moving somewhere else, of course, changes the way you work and what your concerns are. The day I got into NYU was the day everything shut down in the world [in 2020], so my first semester was in Sri Lanka over Zoom. But the writing changed when I was writing for that audience, even from home. At that time, we were heavily under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime—essentially a dictatorship. My work had always been political, and we had always changed scripts to get through censor boards. I was very used to it, and I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say. But the moment it had the safety of a different audience, the work changed—I became much more willing to point at the thing and name the thing in a very different way. If anything, I found a kind of political freedom.  

[Mahinda Rajapaksa (b. 1945) served as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2005, then the sixth President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015, and then PM again in 2018 and from 2019 to 2022. He was the Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2004 and 2018 to 2019, and the Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2015 and 2019 to 2021.

[When Rajapaksa was forced from office in 2022, he launched what amounted to an attempted coup, but ended up signing a letter of resignation. During his political career, he’s been accused of war crimes during the last years of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) as well as other criminal accusations including human rights violations during his presidency, corruption, and for instigating violence on anti-government protestors during the failed 2022 coup. As of 2023, he’s been sanctioned by Canada for human rights violations.]

STEFANI KUO: I write a lot about Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially Hong Kong. I remember going through a phase where I was reading about all these theatres and their mission statements, which all have the word “American” or “America” in it. So even if I’m writing about an international thing in Hong Kong, it still has to relate back to America. Sometimes the actors I work with in the U.S., even if they have heritage from where I’m from, don’t understand how to relate to my work, even if they speak the language or understand the culture from their grandparents or parents. That was shocking to me; I thought we were all in the same box. But there’s a gap because of where I grew up versus where they grew up.

That gap really interests me—the shared feeling of “I’m not from here.” It leads to my next question: A lot of the plays getting produced in the U.S. telling stories that represent other countries and other cultures are written by second- or third-generation Americans, who are often writing about the experiences of their own parents or grandparents. There are obvious reasons for this: Bureaucracy, gatekeeping, and systemic barriers make it much harder for immigrant artists to break through. As we’ve been saying, there are also the ways in which we have to tailor our writing to an American audience. Is this something you think about? How is this sitting with you?

KHRISTIÁN MÉNDEZ AGUIRRE: Right now, I’m trying to find Guatemalan actors and a director for a reading I’m doing, and you can imagine what that process is like. The assumption is that I have something in common with someone who is Guatemalan but perhaps grew up in the U.S. and is first-generation Guatemalan American. That’s an assumption that makes both of us legible to the artistic leadership of those institutions and how they make us legible to their audiences, because the question always is: Will the audience get it? Will the audience come? 

FRANCISCO: I think Americans are always more comfortable seeing immigration as a cultural issue rather than a legal one, because it demands less work to make space for a cultural experience than for a legal reality. I have been here 10 years and I’ve seen more and more plays about international experiences, and even about immigration, getting produced. Yes, the vast majority of those plays have been written by Americans, even if they come from families who were not originally American. So clearly the appetite for the experience is there. The barriers that prevent immigrants from getting to write and direct their own experiences on American stages are also in place. 

BAZEED: There is a divide that I feel as someone who very much still identifies as “fresh off the boat.” I am not from America. I am not of America. I just live here—and that has meaning in my life. There’s a sense of belonging that isn’t here. I’ve lived in New York since January 2002, so it is the place where I have spent most of my life. At this point, English is more accessible to me than Arabic. It comes easier because I use it every day. But I was born into a condition of diaspora. I was born in the Gulf. I was there for 14 years. Egypt is where I have spent the least amount of time in my life.

All of those things funnel me into a certain perspective and positionality. I’ve worked with first-generation Arab Americans and we’re different—we’re trying to tell the story of these places differently. In some ways, their access to their culture has been mitigated. There’s a local access that happens in the family home, or you may have it in the community around you, but otherwise, in most American immigrant households, it’s these tiny nuclear families that are still getting access to the stories of their cultures through imperialism and through American hegemony and American media. So the version of life that they’re often talking about when they talk about their cultures is a little bit Orientalized, and you can see that filter; mine is becoming more Orientalized as I have more distance from my culture. I can’t make a contemporary reference or joke if my entire life depended on it. For me to name a cultural meme from Egypt that’s big right now? I wouldn’t know. I’m not there. 

[I can’t be certain if Bazeed chose the word ‘Orientalize’ for the overtones expressed by Edward Said (1935-2003; Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist) in his 1978 book Orientalism (Pantheon Books), but it sounds as if they did. In Said’s terms, the word means to represent or portray cultures of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa in a stereotyped way that emphasizes their exoticism and otherness, often reinforcing colonialist views of Western superiority.]

I would love to talk a little more about something that you just brought up, Bazeed, which is how time shifts your relationship to your own culture and the ways that you are writing about culture and place.

STEFANI: I write a lot about Hong Kong, but I didn’t used to. I remember in 2019, when the Hong Kong protests [15 March 2019-30 June 2020] started, a friend was like, “Have you written a play about it?” Which I was totally taken aback by, but then this friend said, “Well, you know, if you don’t write it, some British guy who’s never been to Hong Kong is going to write it.” So I wrote a play, and in the play Trump is mentioned because he was president back then. Because of that, because American politicians are mentioned, the play is relevant to America. There’s a relatability thing that I find to be very American. People often ask, “Would you do this play in Hong Kong?” And the thing is, if this play was done in Hong Kong, it would be done entirely in Cantonese. It would be a different play. People think because it’s multilingual, it’s globally applicable. That’s not true. If you put it in another place, it will become a different play. It has to.

FRANCISCO: I often feel like I’m existing in a world that asks me to be sure of who I am. My bio starts with my markers, and I am those markers: I am this sexuality and this race and this nationality, and this is what I’m bringing into the rehearsal room. I have a connection to Argentina, of course, but, as Bazeed was saying, ask me to pull up a meme and I won’t get it. I think the natural instinct is to feel shame about it, like I’m an imposter, and I feel like that shame has the potential to bring in a harshness about my identity—that I have to defend it. So I actively have to build for myself a flexibility that maybe the industry itself won’t necessarily permit. Maybe my experience and my nationality and my passport don’t endow me with an automatic authority to speak on everything that relates to my identity. I don’t want that for myself. There would have been a time where I would’ve felt ashamed of the distance that I’m acquiring from the culture that spawned me. But I don’t live there; I live here. There’s no shame about that. That’s just what it is. 

ARUN: A lot of the stuff that I’ve written is a period piece, now that Sri Lanka has a democratically elected, left-leaning socialist government. An extraordinary thing has happened in our lifetime, and only a few months ago. Finally! So I’m very conscious of the idea of becoming a diaspora writer who is constantly trapped in a vision of a country that you left rather than what that country is now. I’ve had moments back home where we thought we were in a better place, and the work did become sort of irrelevant, and then, five years later, it became relevant again. It is constantly moving, and your work is constantly shifting to both place and time. I think you can’t really escape that.

[Anura Kumara Dissanayake (b. 1968) was inaugurated on 23 September 2024 as the tenth President of Sri Lanka. He is the leader of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing and progressive parties. Dissanayake, however, is, himself, a Marxist.]

KHRISTIÁN: I do think we have this capacity or this privilege or curse of trying to make sense of a thing without having to live it every day by virtue of being outsiders. Some of the environmental issues that are now happening in the U.S. have happened in my country for a long time. My family hasn’t had steady water in northern Guatemala City for over 10 years. I’m able to be here in the U.S. and take a break from not having steady water and write a play about it, which is for sure privilege. It’s also a way to reflect things back to these communities that we come from, and there’s pride in this. The NGO that I was working with to write my latest play, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re in New York, and you want to write a play about the forest fires in Guatemala?” It puts this expectation on the work. I just want to name that transnational tension and privilege and joy too, because it’s kind of cool that the work also gets to serve that.

[Guatemala experienced an alarming number of forest fires in April 2024 and a "state of calamity" was declared. By May, when the start of the rainy season extinguished most of the fires, over 157.5 square miles of land were affected.]

I’m thinking more lately about the use of theatre and performance in terms of writing place, and how that sense of place lives spatially in theatre; it unfolds and exists physically and in real time. How do you write non-American places into American theatre spaces, knowing that translation or mistranslation—cultural, linguistic, temporal—is inevitable?

STEFANI: When I picture plays in my head, it’s just a vacuum. And then I see things, and those things are usually influenced by where I’ve been. So a lot of plays are set in Hong Kong or Taiwan. They are murky, specific places, but a lot of it is influenced by how time is working with the landscape. I don’t really write linear plays, and I think that’s because I grew up watching and reading so much Taiwanese and Chinese stuff that is very nonlinear, very circular. I was reading this book about the colonization of time that talks a lot about how we think of colonialism as mostly a spatial thing. But it’s also a time thing. It’s not just about land; it’s also about how we perceive and experience time. Even the 24-hour clock or the calendar year are very superimposed Western things. That’s not to say it’s American. But I often feel that tension in how I think about storytelling relative to being in America; it almost feels like I’m trying to bring in a different experience of time into how we experience time in the U.S.

BAZEED: Surveillance is in almost every conversation I have these days. I think being strategic is part of this moment. Right now, I’m interested in erasure and allegory as form. What gets left out becomes part of the argument, not just the aesthetic. I think about Sheikh Imam’s protest songs from Egypt with all these veiled allegories like “They’re taking the milk from the cow” to talk about how the British were stealing our resources.

[Sheikk Imam, aka: El Sheikh Emam (1918-95) was a famous Egyptian composer and singer, known for his political songs in favor of the poor and the working classes. Britain controlled Egypt in one form or another from 1882 until 1956.]

STEFANI: I don’t identify as Asian American. I feel like I’m an Asian in America, but I didn’t grow up here. I have a different experience with language and storytelling. I find it really fascinating that so many playwrights try to use English in place of their native language, because I’m not interested in doing that at all. If the play is in Cantonese, I will be writing in Cantonese, or if the play is in Cantonese and English, then we’ll do half-and-half and you can read subtitles. I understand why people use English for access, but for me it feels like hearing the language is a huge part of experiencing the culture—just the environment of being in that language, what it brings out in people. Because people behave differently when they speak different languages.

ARUN: For me, the hardest thing about language is, like, a Sri Lankan sentence in English sort of has too many words in it for an American mouth. There’s a process I can see of an American actor getting used to it and finding their way into it, which is lovely. But the moment there’s a person who’s grown up in Sri Lanka in the room, and they read the lines—it’s like, Boom! Oh, right, I’ve forgotten what the ease was like.

FRANCISCO: Translation is not just about finding equivalents, but rather thinking, approaching a view of the world from a different perspective. Right? With theatre, in some ways it’s always a translation. I wrote something, and the people who are going to put it up will translate it to that time, to that moment, to who they are, to the resources that they have at hand, to the audience that they’re playing to. When we make a play from one country in another country—even a production that’s been transferred—none of us can have the same experience. There isn’t a complete encapsulation of the theatrical experience that can survive place and time. It’s just going to be completely different.

[Lyndsey Bourne is a Canadian writer, teacher, and doula (born and raised in North Vancouver and Penticton, British Columbia, in Canada’s far west) working with The Doula Project. Her plays include The Second Body (2020), Mabel’s Mine (2025), and I Was Unbecoming Then (2020).  She teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts).

'Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale'

When I got the brochure for the fall season at 59E59 Theaters over the summer and went over the offerings with Diana, my frequent theater partner, she glommed onto an odd little show called Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale, described in the brochure promo this way: “Through the exploration of identity and the piecing together of lives torn apart by war, TOYS ultimately asks what it means to belong.”  This caught Diana’s attention and, though I had reservations, I figured the seats were only $25, so why not give it a shot?  (This was the same brochure from which Diana selected The Violin, my report on which was posted on Rick On Theater on 22 October.)  

I’ve learned over the years now that Diana is susceptible to the hype of promotional prose and ad quotations, at least in theater listings.  I keep reminding her that those little capsule descriptions are composed—and the ad quotations are selected and edited—by theater employees charged with selling her tickets, but she keeps falling for them.  (Following the performance of the execrable pseudo-mystery play Perfect Crime, which had been an impulse-buy so we never read any advanced publicity before buying the tickets, Diana wondered how the ads quoted on the flyer could be so enthusiastic, considering what we’d just seen.  I tried to explain that the ad excerpts were carefully selected, sometimes even out of context—skirting the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs prohibition of that sort of tactic—to give a false impression.  I’d been at a loss on how to write up Perfect Crime until then: I decided to look at how such an awful play could get produced Off-Broadway and stay on the boards for 25 years.  My report on that phenomenon was posted on 5 February 2011.)

I, on the other hand, seem to have a sixth-sense ability to read those promos and get a feeling for whether the show’s likely to be good or bad; I discovered this minor talent when I was trying to be an actor and read casting notices in Back Stage and Show Business.  My intuition warned me about this play, but I deferred to Diana’s wish and we booked the show for Friday night, 24 November, the day after Thanksgiving, at 8:15.  It turned out, my instincts were golden.

Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale by Saviana Stanescu was commissioned and created by J.U.S.T. Toys Productions as “a platform for multicultural theater artists with Eastern European roots.”  Stanescu composed several different versions of this play, going back at least to 2011, following immigrants from Eastern Europe to the U.S. with starkly different experiences.  Earlier productions of Toys ran as long as 70 minutes to as short as 50 (depending, I gather, on how much director Gábor Tompa cut or how much visual imagery he inserted); according to one report, there was also an earlier, “more fleshed-out script with many characters,” but Tompa recommended a two-character “rendition in order to explore the duality of human nature.”  

The final version of play premièred at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles from 6 November to 13 December 2015 before coming to New York City.  In between, it played at the Interferences International Theater Festival in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, at the Hungarian Theater of Cluj (director Tompa’s home theater) from 8 to 26 November 2016, and as a special program selection of the Contemporary Drama Festival, Katona Jozsef Theater, Budapest, Hungary, 9 and 10 December 2016.  Toys was also presented at the Avignon Theater Festival in France from 7 to 30 July 2017.  It opened at 59E59 in Midtown on the East Side of Manhattan in Theater B on 8 November 2017 and closed on 26 November.  

The play is something of a vanity production in that the producers—that is, the founders of J.U.S.T. Toys—are also the two cast members of Toys.  (Director Tompa, who believes in auteur directing, also seems to have had a strong hand in shaping the final script.  He even recommended Stanescu, with whom Tompa has a long-time professional relationship, to the company’s founders when they were looking for “a small scale text” to produce.)  Tunde Skovran and Julia Ubrankovics, according to their own program notes, are both 34-year-old actresses of Eastern European origin living in Los Angeles. (Skovran was born in the Transylvania region of Romania and Ubrankovics comes from Hungary.)  

J.U.S.T. Toys Productions (a name chosen when the troupe decided to produce Stanescu’s play), by its own statement, “produces passionate and provocative theatrical experiences by inviting outstanding professionals from Europe to collaborate with American theater makers” in order to “initiate cross-cultural discussions, foster collaborations, and enrich their community with a diverse cultural heritage.”  The company’s only previous production seems to have been María Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends in May this year in L.A. (in which Skovran and Ubrankovics were among the cast).  J.U.S.T. Toys’ New York production of Toys was presented with the support of the Romanian Culture Institute in New York.

Saviana Stanescu, born in 1967 (on Washington’s birthday!) in Bucharest, Romania, is an award-winning Romanian-American poet, playwright, and journalist whose work has been seen in the U.S and internationally.  She was a college student (in computer science) in 1989 when she participated in the Romanian Revolution that overthrew Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and then worked as a journalist in post-communist Romania.  With a Fulbright Fellowship from the U.S. embassy in Bucharest, she came to New York City in 2001, just two weeks before 9/11.  She is currently the New York State Council on the Arts playwright-in-residence for New York City’s Women’s Project, writer-in-residence of Richard Schechner’s East Coast Artists, and Director of the New Drama Program for the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (which sponsored the New York presentation of Toys).  She taught in the Drama Department of New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and is currently a faculty member in the Department of Theatre Arts at Ithaca College, where she teaches script analysis and playwriting.  Stanescu moved to Ithaca in 2013 after a dozen years as a playwright and part-time professor at NYU.  She holds an MA in Performance Studies (Fulbright Fellow) and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Tisch, and a PhD in Theatre Studies from the National University of Theatre & Film in Bucharest. 

Stanescu has published four books of poetry and three of drama, including Waxing West (2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-length Script) and The Inflatable Apocalypse (Best Play of the Year UNITER Award in 2000).  Her play White Embers was a Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival winner in 2008.  An important question for the playwright, she explains, is whether she did the right thing by leaving her home country.  Does she now inhabit a new land she calls “In-between” and was “moving” into speaking and writing English the right decision? “Since I moved to the U.S.,” says Stanescu, “I’ve been interested in exploring living between two cultures and how you negotiate between the old values and the new.”  We’ll see that these years-old statements are still applicable in Toys.

Gábor Tompa is an internationally-known Romanian-Hungarian theater and film director, poet, essayist, and teacher born in 1957 in Romania.  Born into a totalitarian world just after the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev crushed the 1956 uprising in neighboring Hungary, just 100 miles west, Tomba began early to espouse subversive ideas.  He turned to theater as a way to express these thoughts in a veiled way.  “I hoped and believed that theatre can be a force of opposition,” he’s said, “because its language can be metaphorical and not explicit.”  That sounds like the philosophy of every East  European theater pro in the Cold War era from Janusz Glowacki of Poland to Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia to Russians Yuri Lyubimov and Mark Rozovsky—as well as Athol Fugard and Mbongeni Ngema of South Africa in their fight against apartheid.  For Romanian artists, Tompa explained, the way was “to express themselves in metaphoric ways which were visually strong.” 

Tompa, who adopted U.S. citizenship a few years ago (while retaining his Romanian nationality), studied stage and film directing at the I. L. Caragiale Theater and Film Academy in Bucharest, graduating in 1981; he was a student of Liviu Ciulei, Mihai Dimiu, and Cătălina Buzoianu, founders of the world-famous Romanian school of stage directing.  Since then, the director’s staged plays at the Hungarian Theater of Cluj, the unofficial capital of Transylvania that’s equidistant from Bucharest; Budapest, Hungary; and Belgrade, Serbia (then the capital of Yugoslavia).  (The Cluj theater is the oldest Hungarian theater company in the world, formed in 1792.)  In 1987 he became the artistic director of the company and after the 1989 Romanian Revolution, Tompa became the managing director of the theater as well.  He has staged more than 100  plays and produced others in a variety of languages in Europe, South Korea, Canada, and the United States in addition to Romania and Hungary.  In 2007, the director founded and served as artistic director of the biennial Interferences International Theatre Festival in Cluj.  

Tompa’s taught classes and workshops and run theater programs for actors and directors in many countries in Europe and across the globe.  A sweeping change to Europe’s higher-education system (known as the Bologna Process), initiated beginning in 1999, clashed with the director’s strongly-held philosophy of teaching directing, however, and he left his home country—with which he maintains strong ties nonetheless—and found a new artistic home for this practices in California.  From 2007 to 2015, he was head of the directing program at the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego, where he continues to teach directing classes. 

When Diana and I left the theater after the performance, she asked me if I would be writing about it.  I explained that when I launched ROT back in 2009, I had made myself a promise that I’d report on every play I see—and so far I mostly have.  (The few exceptions have been performances or readings by people I know or was working with.  It was impolitic—and too uncomfortable for me—to write about those shows.)  Then I confessed to Diana that this play may be the one to defeat me.  I almost gave up on one long-ago New York Fringe performance, and the afore-mentioned Perfect Crime almost didn’t make a blog report—but I came upon an approach both times that made it possible to write about them; Toys seemed like another one I couldn’t get my writing mind around.  Now, a day or so later, after working on a couple of other ROT projects, I think I can give it a go.  I did need some help with a synopsis of the script, however.  (I cribbed some of it!  Don’t tell anyone, okay?)

Stanescu’s 55-minute, one-act play opened at 59E59 on a minimalist set, designed by director Tompa (who also designed the lighting and the show’s soundscape and composed the original music), made up of a stage with a completely white back wall and a white square floor.  (59E59’s Theater B only seats 97 and the small stage is just 24½ feet wide by 15½ feet deep.)  There was nothing else on stage but a video camera on a tripod and what looked like a fax machine or computer printer down right.  (There were sounds of an old-style dot-matrix printer working between scenes.)  The actors sat on the floor, sometimes cross-legged in the middle of the stage, sometimes leaning against the back wall with their legs straight in front of them.  Tompa’s lighting threw the actors’ shadows, enlarged and often in multiples, on the rear wall and his sound design included portentous noises and original compositions, along with a mix of both classical and modern music excerpts.

As the pure, white lights came up at the opening, a pretty, young blond woman was lying on the floor in something of a fetal configuration, holding a stuffed teddy bear while a woman dressed in black leather and wearing dark glasses stood motionless against the wall at stage left.  (As Steven Ross observed on Front Mezz Junkies, “It definitely brings a creepy edge to the proceedings . . . .”)  Unfolding in not only a non-linear manner, but also alogically, Toys focuses on Clara (Ubrankovics), the young blond woman, adopted as a child from Eastern Europe by an American couple.  As an adult, she’s a doctoral candidate at NYU finishing her dissertation about women in war zones.  Her research brings her together with a recent immigrant, Madonna (Skovran), the menacing-looking woman in black, who’s from Clara’s native country and whom Clara wishes to interview.  Madonna, though, has met with Clara to tell her that they’re, in fact, sisters who were separated when Clara—originally named Fatma—was adopted and taken to the U.S. as a baby.  (I was never sure if this was true or a fantasy of Madonna’s—a nickname she adopted but later discards for her birth name, Shari—that Clara buys into.  It wasn’t the last bit in the play that confused me, and I also never sorted out if this was a response Stanescu—or Tompa—wanted from the audience.  It is a “fairy tale,” after all.)

Clara/Fatma was raised in the safe confines of Connecticut (while toiling in the ivory towers of academe and planning her idyllic, suburban wedding) whereas Madonna/Shari has lived in the fictional, war-ravaged country of Karvystan (there are hints that Shari is Muslim or that the population of Karvystan, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, is divided) under constant threat and danger.  While Clara was being coddled in comfort and security, Shari was forced to give up being an English teacher in the capital of Galajevo to “volunteer” as a nurse whose principal duty was to wash the bodies (and unidentified body parts) of the dead and prepare them for burial.  The two women have had diametrically different life—and immigrant—experiences.  This dichotomy is, perhaps, symbolized by the fact that Clara/Fatma is mostly dressed in white (or very light colors like pale blue) and Madonna/Shari wears black leather.  (On stage, Ubrankovics, who vaguely resembles actress Cynthia Nixon, wore her blond hair in a wavy bob, while Skovran’s dark hair was cut in a boyish style.  The costumes were designed by Elisa Benzoni—the only designer who wasn’t Gábor Tompa.)  Soon Shari accuses Clara of having forgotten her roots and when Clara rejects the suggestion, Shari terrorizes her by tearing the heads off Clara’s collection of little rubber dolls while mimicking a conversation in eerie voices between their parents about sending little Fatma to America.  (Shari, by the way, carries a hand grenade around with her.  She produces it a short time into the play.)

As different as Clara and Shari are, through a series of surrealistic and symbolic interactions, often wordless and dance-like (Skovran especially is either a dancer or has acrobatic training), the women come to an accommodation.  In the end, they participate in a mock wedding, wearing long, ratty, black wigs and do-it-yourself wedding gowns made from white plastic bags (some inflated with air to serve as sort of make-shift farthingales.  There’s even a groom or parson in the form of an anthropomorphic dummy.

Stanescu writes often—nearly exclusively, it seems—about immigrants and immigrating; she and all her principal collaborators on Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale are relatively recent immigrants, some permanent residents in the United States and some who split their time between here and abroad.  Indeed, Tompa introduced Stanescu to Skovran and Ubrankovics “because of their passion and their interest in the subject of immigration, which is of personal and political importance to the director,” and the playwright “is herself an immigrant and is interested in this subject.”  Of course, the experiences of immigrants in the U.S. isn’t a new topic in American theater; I think immediately of David Henry Hwang, the son of Chinese immigrants, whose body of work centers on plays about Chinese arrivals coping with adjusting to and often struggling against the ways of their new home.  (I’ve posted performance reports on several of Hwang’s plays: The Dance and the Railroad, 17 March 2013; Golden Child, 9 December 2013; and Kung Fu, 11 March 2014.)

Toys “ultimately asks what it means to belong,” according to the show’s PR.  The playwright has said of the two immigrants in the play:

They have such different experiences. . . .  One is from the West, and one is from the East. . . .  [One] was raised in a country like the U.S. with everything there, with loving parents and everything she needed in terms of education and material needs, and the other one lives in a country torn by wars. . . .  My idea was to bring these two women together.  They confront each other, but then they discover that they share a secret.  They share something.

Tompa has his own perspective on what the play’s about:

The immigrant tries to take a new identity and get rid of the old one.  That doesn’t really work.  In order to be able to go further, I think we have to face and confront our past.  Sometimes, the more we try to get rid of it or deny it, the more it starts to haunt us.  Follow us.  We have to make peace with the former identity, our roots, and our traditions.

He continues in a more universal vein:

One of the problems this play talks about is not assuming.  We are wearing a couple of masks all the time.  In a Freudian way, we lose our real identity.  Because of these masks we get frustrated, or we [become] scared of our own real identity.  This play talks about trying to run away from that identity, instead of integrating it into everyday reality, which is always changing.

“I like to say that initially I wrote the play for these two women as two separate characters,” the playwright remarks, “one coming from a war-torn country, one from the U.S, and now it’s very interesting.”  Reinforcing a frequent interpretation of the play, Stanescu adds: “Now . . . [the] nightmarish confrontation may be with yourself as an immigrant, as a person born in another country, as a person who is still trying to belong here in the U.S.”  Are the two characters Clara and Shari avatars of the same person, perhaps a mind on the verge of disintegrating?  Director Tompa seems to confirm this interpretation: “The characters, at least as I look at them, are almost not two characters, but two sides of the same character.”  I can’t say one way or the other myself, but several theater writers have concluded so (see Howard Miller’s review for Talkin’ Broadway, summarized below). 

My problem, however, wasn’t with the subject matter, but that the play and production were full of hints, symbols, and smoke screens.  What Stanescu or Tomba say in interviews (as I’ve remarked about program notes) is all well and good, but if it’s not on the stage, if I can’t see it in performance, it’s just claptrap.  It’s even worse, I think, when the playwright or director (or both) expressly set out to obfuscate their point, to bury it in theatricality and showmanship (or showing off, as it may be).  My response, when I feel I’m being manipulated for the purpose of deliberately confusing me, is to shut down.  I get pissed off and lose interest in the project.  (And, no, I’m not a fan of Harold Pinter’s work for the most part.)  That’s what happened to me at Toys.  To put it bluntly, the play’s just too peculiar, too self-indulgent.  I felt like I was watching some over-indulged children let loose in a roomful of toys (no pun intended) and allowed to play however they wanted without adult supervision while Mommy and Daddy (ummm—those would be some of the reviewers I’ve encountered on line) uttered encouragement and compliments from the sidelines.  Me, I say the emperor has no clothes!

I’m not going to say much about the performances in Toys—I can’t really: I don’t know what anyone was really doing.  I assume that Skovran and Ubrankovics did what Stanescu and Tompa wanted them to do, and must have done it to the playwright’s and director’s satisfaction because they all stayed together for all the months and even years during which the play was developed and performed before reaching New York City.  As far as I can tell, the four creative people formed a little mutual-admiration society, and it seems to work for them—if not for me.  I don’t know if Toys is typical of the work of any of them, or if this collaboration is a one-off effort.  I don’t know the work of any of the artists, but they all have substantial credits (many accompanied by glowing reviews), both abroad and in the United States.  Then again, maybe that emperor’s been walking around naked for some time.

The press coverage of Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale was minimal—the New York Times, which usually covers almost everything, didn’t publish a review, and neither did any other New York print outlet—but, unlike the two Lincoln Center Festival performances I saw this summer (While I Was Waiting, reported on 1 August 2017, and To the End of the Land, 6 August), there was a round-up on Show-Score.  The review site included several notices from the L.A. première of Toys in its tally of 12 published reviews, so I recalculated the site’s results based solely on the New York coverage.  For seven reviews, the average rating came out to 69, moderately low from my observation.  The highest score was a single 90 (Broadway World), backed up by one 85 (TheaterScene.net); the lowest score was Theatre’s Leiter Side’s 45.  The breakdown for the seven local notices was 43% positive, 43% mixed, and 14% negative.  While the L.A. press was apparently kinder to Toys, with Show-Score giving those reviews four 75 ratings and an 85, raising the site’s average score to 70 with 67% positive notices, the local notices were all over the field.  Because there were so few New York reviews, I’ll be including all seven cited by Show-Score in my survey; I found no additional coverage that Show-Score didn’t include in its calculations.

All the New York reviews were on websites, as I affirmed above.  On Broadway World (the highest-rated notice), Marina Kennedy called Toys “an engaging play, one that stirs the imagination.”  She labeled the play an “adult fairy tale,” reporting that it “is completely original as [it] merges reality and fantasy in surreal settings.”  Kennedy also deemed that Skovran and Ubrankovics “excel in their demanding roles as they master both the dialogue and the action of the show's enthralling scenes.”  The BWW reviewer asserted that the performance “is an inventive show that challenges ideas about people’s backgrounds and lifestyles” and concluded that Toys “is truly an unforgettable production.”

At the other end of the Show-Score scale (the lowest rating at 45), Samuel L. Leiter, reminding us on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, that he has “a friend who compiles an annual list of plays under the rubric ‘Bombs of the Year,’” declared, “Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale is a ripe contender although, given its subject matter, it should probably be ‘Grenade of the Year.’”  (That’s a reference to the hand grenade Shari carries with her.)  Leiter signaled his displeasure with this anecdote:

It’s been a while since I exited a production only to run into people standing right outside the door complaining about what they’d just seen, or for another critic, someone I barely know, anxious to tell me that his review will express his gratitude that the play was only 50 minutes long.  I had that same thought myself.

Characterizing Toys as “an antiwar play,” the TLS blogger acknowledged that both actresses “deserve kudos for their strong and valiant work on behalf of a play . . . whose appeal, reportedly, is strong for some but seriously knotty for most others.”  He found, though: “If a play is going to seek universal understanding and compassion for a serious problem, it will have to do better than that.”  Leiter had problems with all the information that the script doesn’t provide, concluding, “We must, I imagine, remember that this is ‘A Dark Fairy Tale’ and forget logical considerations.”  He went on to say, “However much this loose narrative seems to make sense of a sort on the page, regardless of the many huge expositional gaps it exposes, in performance it often becomes indecipherable.”  He put the blame for this on director Tompa, who “has given [the production] a radically theatricalized, nonrealistic, surrealistic, avant-garde staging that diminishes whatever it’s saying by drawing attention away from content to style.”  After describing the mock wedding scene as “dancing around like asylum inmates,” Leiter summed up his estimation of Toys with these words:

Assuredly, there are metaphorical explanations that exist for the women’s experiences and relationship, and one could even assume that Shari/Madonna and Clara/Fatma are projections of a single personality.  These, however, are irrelevant when you’re watching a play that seeks to evoke awareness of and sensitivity to dilemmas concerning immigration, war, violence, and family disruption.

This isn’t to say some won’t find the production and its subject engrossing, and even comprehensible.  But for those who find themselves wishing even a 50-minute running time were shorter, it’s not likely they’ll want to spend more time trying to find a cerebral explanation for what should be a visceral response.

On Front Mezz Junkies, Steven Ross (who uses only his last name in his byline) called Toys “a complicated creature to digest.”  He explained: “It begs us to try to dissect the feast of abstractionisms served up in this short 65-minute piece.”  (Note: estimations of the running time of this play at 59E59 varied anywhere from Leiter’s 50 minutes to Ross’s 65.  Possibly it varied from performance to performance.  I timed it at 55 minutes.)  The FMJ reviewer characterized the play as a “convoluted dissertation of what it means to be a woman in a war-torn country as opposed to one removed and raised in an American suburban fairy tale existence.”  He wondered, “Is this a dream, a fantasy, or a nightmare, playing out in the suburban’s guilt-ridden mind?”  Stanescu, who, Ross asserted, is “considered by many as one of the most exciting voices to emerge in Eastern Europe” since the end of communism, “has written a piece that demands attention, but confuses as much as it enlightens.”  As the cyber review-writer explained:

Throwing images of dead babies and boyfriends, both real and imaginary, all over the stage she’s attempting to create a theatre of war and its impact on women.  Some of her lines and structures are provocative and drenched with meaning, such as “you can’t say ok and everything bad is gone”, but more often than not, we are left to try to put together the oddly shaped pieces of this dark fairy tale all on our own.

Ross blamed some of this on the director, whose “go-for-broke creation is meandering and disturbing as much as it is thoughtful on and off throughout this experimental piece.”  The reviewer’s judgment of Tompa’s staging was:

There are some disturbing visual and sound concepts that are off-centered leaving much to be interpreted and discussed after the show.  It fluctuates from being engaging to confusing within its non-linear psychology. . . .  As theatre, it left me with lots [to] think about, but not engaged enough to try too hard.  Either you will be charmed and inspired by this creation, or, like me, amused but disinterested.  Toys is like a box filled with the mis[-]matched pieces from at least two puzzles, but not in their entirety, begging us to try to assemble the images without too much guidance or structure.  More time is needed than the 65-minutes given, that is if you are still interested in the end to do the reconstruction with the hope the finished images will be meaningful.

In stark contrast, interestingly, to Samuel Leiter’s evaluation of the final scene, Ross found “the last scenario playful as the costume designer, Elisa Benzoni[,] discovers a creative use of plastic bags to make a strong but abstract comment on the dramatically different focal points for those women at war and those that are not.” 

In the second-highest-rated review on Show-Score (85), Darryl Reilly of TheaterScene.net declared of the play, “Hilarity and menace converge in Romanian-born playwright Saviana Stanescu’s absorbing and mysterious theater piece” that unfolds “over the course of 50 delirious minutes.”  Asserting that the actresses “are sensational,” Reilly found that Skovran and Ubrankovics “are a dynamic team who each offer vivid portrayals with their powerful physicality and resonant voices.”  The playwright’s “dialogue is a heady mixture of Ionesco-style absurdism and fierce realism,” wrote the TS.net reviewer, and Tampa’s direction had “the intense sensibility of one of Ingmar Bergman’s cinematic dramas and the look of Andy Warhol’s 1960’s screen tests and home movies” that was “visually and emotionally arresting with its striking imagery.”  Reilly praised Tompa’s “hypnotic lighting design that has strobe bursts, pulsing electronic original music, enveloping sound design and stark scenic design” and “Elisa Benzoni’s artfully simple costume design.”  His final word was: “Though brief in length, Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale is stimulating, provocative and memorable.”

Howard Miller said, “Watching Toys . . . is like attending an exhibit of abstract expressionism and trying to make heads or tails out of what you are seeing,” on Talkin’ Broadway. He continued:

Cryptic, bewildering, absurd, nightmarish.  Take your pick of adjectives.  They all apply to this work, which is more a piece of performance art than a play, elucidating little and requiring you to interpret as you will.

A “few minutes” into the performance, found Miller, “meaning become muddied and open to multiple perspectives.”  He warned, “But do not seek coherent explication, as things become more and more metaphysical from here to the end.”  The “inference” Miller “came away with” was “that Clara/Fatma and Shari/Madonna are one and the same, and that we are viewing the piece from inside a PTSD-ravaged mind,” which perspective gives the play “some seriously disturbing images” in Tompa’s direction “with a distancing air of dispassion.”  Miller concluded:

Toys is unusual, to say the least, opaque in its delivery but nevertheless packed with meaning, like a particularly dense poem.  But if you are interested in experimental theater, now is your opportunity to see a piece by Ms. Stanescu, an award-winning Romanian-American writer and teacher.  You will either shrink away in bafflement, or take up the challenge to piece together the scattered remains of this convoluted jigsaw puzzle of a play.

On Theatre Is Easy, Piper Rasmussen reported, “An eerie, floating feeling pervades the production” of Toys, which has a “story that . . . must be pieced together from the abstract staging.”  Asserting that the play is “a timely one for a country struggling to empathize with refugees,” Rasmussen felt that the staging “is less about the story than about recreating a feeling of loneliness and disembodiment.”  Quoting Shari saying, “You never know what animal hides inside a person,” the Theasy reviewer declared, “It is a true pleasure to watch these actors share some of the animals inside them in Toys’ unpredictable fantasy world,” but added, “To connect with the story and zesty dialogue, best to read the play.”  In conclusion, Rasmussen confessed, “I would be interested to see a production of Toys that combines Stanescu's poetry and humor with less frenetic movement and fewer splashes of bright colored light.” 

“The process of creating a connection can be instant and peaceful, it could feel like fate intervened so that it happened,” contended Nelson Diaz-Marcano on Manhattan with a Twist. “It could also be the opposite, a violent and breaking process that interconnects two ideals that usually don’t connect.”  He posited, “It’s this brutal undertaking that drives the plot  of ‘Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale.’”  Skovran and Ubrankovics “are fantastic as the two women” in the play, whose souls by the end of which “are connected in a way that only a violent procedure could connect people.”  Diaz-Marcano found, “We are yearning to be part of their journey.”  But the Manhattan with a Twist review-writer went on, “It’s when the linear narratives are broken down by more experimental scenes that interest gets a bit muddled.  There are some truly perplexing moments, but most of them either are longer than they need to be or serve as a distraction of what’s happening between them.”  His final assessment, nonetheless, was: “Despite this hiccup, ‘Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale’ delivers a strong and powerful tale of the links the human condition creates and how they can help us move forward.” 

“Toasting History In A Cellar Saloon”

by Edward Rothstein

[Last 19 December, I published “Lower East Side Tenement Museum” on ROT, a report on the unusual museum of the immigrant experience here in New York City and across the country from the middle of the 19th century through the pre-World War II years of the 20th.  On 8 February, the New York Times ran an exhibition review by Edward Rothstein of LESTM in the “Weekend Arts II” section.  I’m republishing the article below as a follow-up and supplement to my original report because Rothstein not only adds some additional information about the museum and the era it covers, but he reports on a new installation (which I noted was in the planning at the time I posted “Lower East Side Tenement Museum”).  As Rothstein intimates, LESTM is an extraordinary experience, and I still strongly recommend making a visit to 97 Orchard Street.  (My original article includes information about arranging a visit, buying tickets, and getting there, including phone numbers and websites.)]

Something exciting happens in a museum when its objects and displays take on a life of their own, when they seem almost too large, too various or too unruly for scripted roles or predicted places. Sometimes this happens because they are seen with new eyes or because they are understood in new contexts; sometimes it is because they possess an aesthetic grandeur that resists any interpretive grid.

But at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which has begun a major new venture in its remarkable excavations of New York’s past, it happens because the themes explored are actually too ordinary. They are mundane and usually go unnoticed, yet as uncovered here they cannot be easily contained, nor will they fit into some ready form, which may be part of the point.

It is daily life we are asked to imagine here, in all its plainness and struggle, its dirt, noise and passions. It is also a daily life of the past—really of a series of pasts. And the main theme is as vital now as at earlier moments: immigration.

And how is this accomplished? What is the focus of this excavation? In a word: shops. Half of this new installation, “Shop Life,” is a lovingly detailed re-creation of the kind of German saloon that the immigrants John and Caroline Schneider opened in 1864 in the same spot we see it: the basement of the tenement at 97 Orchard Street. The neighborhood was then called Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), and New York had the third-largest German-speaking populace in the world (after Vienna and Berlin). There are brass musical instruments on shelves (John played in a Union Army regiment), beer steins ready for the opening of a keg, plates heaped with ersatz sausages and cheeses. (Food came with the purchase of lager.)

The method of recreating a historical space based on city records, the Census and found artifacts has already been used upstairs in the living quarters of 97 Orchard, where some 7,000 people from more than 20 countries lived, at one time or another, from 1863 until 1935. The Tenement Museum, founded in 1988 by Ruth J. Abram, purchased the building in 1996 and was prepared to create model apartments based on different periods of immigration

But records about residents were so extensive, and the details so suggestive, that there was no need to invent anything. The actual history could be excavated. Now about 200,000 visitors a year take guided tours of many of these 350-square-foot apartments, restored to reflect the lives of tenants at different times.

In one, in 1897, Harris Levine ran a small dressmaking factory, where he and his wife, Jennie, reared their family. Other tours visit the 1869 rooms of an Irish family, the Moores, whose infant daughter died of malnutrition, and an Italian family, the Baldizzis, whose daughter helped the museum recreate the apartment of her 1930s childhood. Some apartments were kept as “ruins,” showing how their peeling layers of paint and wallpaper were interpreted. And there are plans to tell the stories of the neighborhood’s more recent Chinese and Hispanic immigrants, perhaps in an adjacent building.

But now the museum has done something more elaborate, overseen by its vice president for programs and education, Annie Polland. A sequence of about 30 shops had been in the basement between 1863 and 1988. One of these was restored—the saloon—including a room where, in the 1870s, German patrons might have gathered for meetings of immigrant fraternal associations, a small kitchen where Caroline prepared the saloon’s food, and the couple’s bedroom with windows looking out on the privies serving the 83 residents of the five-story tenement.

The saloon was more than just a business (and there were at least three others on the block). It was a meeting place, even a living space outside of the cramped three-room apartments. Politics was debated. Families were welcomed. And in 1870 some of the 29 or so children living upstairs must have been expert carriers of metal growlers filled with lager.

The re-creation also conveys a sense of the Schneiders themselves, teased out of newspapers (in The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung in 1864 John announced the saloon’s opening “to his fine friends and acquaintances as well as the honorable musicians”), city records (John had been living in New York for 22 of his 34 years) and other documents. (Caroline died of tuberculosis in 1885; John died in 1892 in a public hospital.) Through the narrative we sense the ambitions, the community ties and the precarious positions behind the saloon’s public face.

In the other half of the basement space the museum does something quite different. First it shows a room in its half-ruined state. A cabinet contains the few items that digging had uncovered: a shattered beer stein from the saloon era and cosmetics from a 1920s store. There is also a large red leather-bound book: “Solution for Retail Merchandising Problems.” Its credited author, Max Marcus, was a proprietor of an auction house here during the Depression. Inside, the book is hollow, hiding a bottle of Ambassador Scotch.

Max turns out to be one of the characters introduced in the final gallery, which uses high-tech video-display tables to survey the lives of three storekeepers who used the space. Max (shown in that very room in the 1930s) was the kind of spirited entrepreneur who might have found a solution for merchandising problems by buying someone a drink. And these well-executed light tables also tell the story of the butcher and his family from the turn of the last century, and the underwear salesman from the 1960s, whose family gave the museum photos and samples. Additional videos of current store owners in the area, including one from the Dominican Republic, echo a hundred years of immigrant narratives.

In all, such care is taken with the setting, the artifacts, the interpretation and the guides’ interaction with visitors that we begin to feel, as in fine novels, plays and histories, some understanding of these individuals and their relationships to the larger theme.

This connection is also worth examining more closely. The museum declares that its purpose is to “promote tolerance and historical perspective” by presenting a “variety of immigrant and migrant experiences.” But initially Ms. Abram seemed to have a more polemical perspective, drawing on 20th-century working-class histories and their theories of exploitation. In 1999 the museum organized the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, which included the Tenement Museum; the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa; the Gulag Museum at Perm 36 in Perm, Russia; the Terezin Memorial in the Czech Republic; and others. The coalition’s mission is “to help sites the world over inspire visitors to become actively engaged in issues from slavery to poverty.”

This suggests that the Tenement Museum was partly conceived to demonstrate a series of injustices that should trouble contemporary consciences. But even by looking at the most horrific of tenements (which 97 Orchard clearly was not) the implied comparison to some of these institutions is grossly disproportionate.

Much of that polemical spirit has been shed. But even now there is sometimes an edge, as if we were being offered a lesson that we should be more welcoming and tolerant of contemporary immigrants.

But is that really an issue? There may always be some resentments of newcomers. But the passionate contemporary debates are not about immigration but about how to deal with large-scale violations of immigration law that dwarf earlier examples. As for legal immigration, since 2000 both the number of immigrants admitted to the United States and the number naturalized are stunningly greater than during any other period. The country is not wary of immigrants; it is welcoming them at an astonishing rate.

As far as the museum experience is concerned, though, this doesn’t really matter. Its imposing achievement in these new shop installations, and in at least two tenement tours I have taken, is that the daily lives become far more important than any arguments. Historical understanding is found in the details. And amid the travails, sweat and sorrows, we find the continuing pulse of aspiration.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

[I didn’t really plan it, but I seem to have started an occasional series of articles on New York City tourist sites.  I’ve written about the High Line Park, our “park in the sky” (10 October), and Governors Island, a floating park in New York Harbor (19 November).  I’ve also covered a number of New York peculiarities, including sites that might interest a visitor, in my collection of shorts called “A Helluva Town” (15 & 18 August 2011, 9 January 2012).  Now I’m going to publish an article on another place in the city that I think is either unique or nearly so, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a restored (though not by much) 19th-century apartment building in the part of downtown Manhattan that has been home to newly-arrived immigrants for two centuries.  One afternoon last April, when my mom was here for a birthday visit, we rode down to have a look at this still-new (and, as far as I can tell, relatively unknown) museum of New York City’s (and America’s) immigration experience.]

97 Orchard Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is an unprepossessing building.  If you walked down Orchard Street back in 1997 and passed the 6-floor red-brick tenement, you probably wouldn’t even turn your head, except maybe to have a passing glance in the windows of the stores on the stoop level or the basement.  If you did, you’d notice, perhaps, that the building was old (after September 1992 there was a plaque identifying it as a National Historic Landmark and putting its construction date as 1863) and, except for the shops, empty.  It would have been exactly like many others in LES, buildings built between the middle of the 19th century and the years between the World Wars, some of them still occupied, others abandoned and derelict.  A haunt for bargain-hunters—its fabric and notion shops and upholsters have been a treasury for costume and set designers for decades—and seekers of echt Jewish deli and dairy cuisine aimed for the neighborhood.  I may well have passed by the building myself back in the late ’70s or early ’80s because aside from the fabric stores along Orchard Street, it was also home to shops that custom fit sheets and made and repaired umbrellas.  Generally speaking, however, it wasn’t a tourist area.  Little of LES was slated for gentrification.

In 1984, historian and social activist Ruth Abram, the first president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, came up with the idea of a museum to focus on the American immigrant story that would stress tolerance and understanding.  Three years later, looking for office space for her new project, she happened on the largely abandoned building at 97 Orchard Street.  Feeling as if she’d come across a time capsule, the sense that the building had been sealed up with its history for half a century, Abram knew she’d found a perfect home for her vision.  When the building was opened, Abram found that everything was exactly the way it had been when the last landlord sealed it up.  It was just like an urban Pompeii, a pharaoh’s tomb for New York City’s immigrant past.   

The first two apartments, the second-floor homes of the Gumpertzes (1870s) and the Baldizzis (1930s), were opened to the public in 1992.  On 19 April 1994, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark and on 12 November 1998, it was labeled a National Trust Historic Site associated with the National Park Service.  The Italianate building, however, is owned and operated by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a non-governmental agency.  The museum serves about 170,000 visitors a year, of whom about 40,000 are students. 

Restoration has been minimal, mostly structural to shore up floors and staircases that were in danger of collapse from age and neglect, and, as far as the eye is concerned, stripping away much of the accumulated layers of flooring and wall coverings down to the oldest level to show what the building was like in its early years.  The researchers, preservers, and restorers at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum included a demographer, genealogist, historian, urban archeologist, architectural historian, and wallpaper conservator.  Beneath the layers of wallpaper—as many as 15 or 20 layers—and floor coverings, objects, notes written on the walls, and other artifacts have been uncovered giving glimpses into the world of the tenants of 97 Orchard Street.  More than 1,500 items, including kitchen utensils, toys, cosmetics, medicine vials, soda and milk bottles, family and business papers, letters, newspapers, buttons, coins, fabric scraps, and so on, were found in the building as it was restored, many under the flooring or in the mailboxes.  The museum conducted an archaeological dig in the rear yard and historians and genealogists have tracked down the outlines and even many details of the building’s occupants, examining photographs, diaries, and letters to reveal the stories of the real people who lived at the tenement over its 72-year history as an apartment building.  (The most well-known of the tenants at 97 Orchard was Sam Jaffe, the late actor who played the title role in Gunga Din in 1939, but whom I’ll always remember from my childhood as Dr. Zorba, the title character’s boss on the 1961-65 TV series Ben Casey.  Jaffe, who was also featured in one of my favorite moves, the 1951 original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, was born in the building in 1891.) 

A tenement, when 97 Orchard Street was built, wasn’t the slum building the word conjures today.  It was simply a word that meant a building with multiple dwellings rented to “more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises,” as New York’s Tenement House Act of 1867 defined it.  This differentiated it, I suppose, from a boarding house or a rented room in someone’s home.  The original tenement houses, which began to appear in the 1840s and ’50s, weren’t intended to be slums, though they were deliberately inexpensively built with few, if any, amenities to keep down costs and quickly became associated with poor tenants and shoddy conditions.  The word became derogatory and newer accommodations became known as ‘apartment houses’ instead, until that phrase was seen as ordinary and upscale home seekers began flocking to ‘condos’ and ‘co-ops.’

The building at 97 Orchard Street, valued at about $8,000 when it was erected, was, in fact, nicer than many others built at around the same time.  In fact, the owner himself, tailor Lukas Glockner, chose to live there, having moved from St. Mark’s Place in what is now the East Village.  There was no indoor plumbing yet, but that was common in the 1860s; the backyard privies were clean and the stairs, while narrow and unlit (also common), were well-built.  Interior rooms had no windows, but there were transoms that brought in light from the front and back windows; a later law required these small windows but the ones at 97 Orchard seem to have been original construction.  The front and rear windows also let in more air than was usual for mid-19th-century tenements.

Between its construction by Glockner, a Saxon immigrant who fled the European unrest of 1848, in the middle of the Civil War and 1935, on the eve of World War II (which began in Europe in 1939), 97 Orchard Street was home to some 7,000 tenants, mostly families, from over 20 different countries.   (LES wasn’t David Dinkins’s “gorgeous mosaic”; it was the original melting pot.  Russians, Italians, Germans, Letts, Irish, Poles, and scores of other nationalities, were all crowded together in the same buildings on the same few blocks—and they came out Americans as their children and grandchildren moved on.  Later Chinese, Vietnamese, Caribbeans, Latin Americans occupied these same tenements in a continuing cycle.)  Glockner lived on the second floor and rented the rest of the building out.  There are 22 apartments in the building which has five stories above street level, starting with a stoop level a short flight of stairs up, and a basement whose separate entrance is a few steps below the sidewalk.  The basement originally housed a saloon and restaurant run by the Schneider family from Bavaria from 1864 to 1886.  (The museum has plans to “reopen” Schneider’s saloon in the future.)  Over time, the building was altered to meet the changing laws of the city and the basement was converted into two apartments and then into commercial space; the four stoop-level apartments also became stores; one of the rear units was Professor Dora Meltzer's Palmistry Studio at the turn of the 20th century (and which the Tenement Museum may also open to tourists).  When the rest of the building was vacated, these spaces remained occupied.

There are four apartments per floor in the building, two in front and two in the rear.  Between the two north and two south dwellings runs the dark, narrow corridor and staircase.  Each apartment has three rooms, a large front room (11 x 12½ feet), called the living room or parlor, a kitchen, and a tiny bedroom (8½ square feet).  Only the front room gets direct sunlight and outside air (the rear units looked out over the backyard).  The apartments, which typically housed families of six or seven, cover about 325 square feet.  The Confino family who moved onto the fifth floor in 1913, had ten family members at 97 Orchard Street, the largest family to live in the tenement.  As you might imagine, sleeping arrangements took some careful and clever maneuvering.  There’s no toilet or bathroom—privies were originally located in the rear yard—and no running water in the apartments.  Heat was supplied by the kitchen fireplace, which burned either coal or wood.  (Gas was piped in later.)  Coal-burning stoves, which may have been the apartment’s source of heat as well, had to be purchased by the tenants. 

Modernizations were made periodically: indoor plumbing was brought in, but only cold water ran into the apartments—the original meaning of “cold-water flat”—and there were two toilets on each floor; an airshaft was created to provide the interior rooms with light and air; gas was installed around 1905 and then electricity sometime in the early 1920s.  (Interestingly, an exterior fire escape was required by an 1862 law, so the tenement was built with one, though the present structure, a replica of the original, was mounted by the museum in 1997.)  These improvements were costly to the landlord, cutting into his rental profits, and in 1935, instead of continuing the process, then-owner Gottlieb Helpern, whose family continued to own the building until 1988, evicted the residents.  The upper floors were closed off and boarded up; only the commercial shops in the basement and the stoop level remained open.  (Even today, with the museum’s renovations, parts of the upper floors are still closed.)  97 Orchard stayed in that state of suspended animation until 1988 when the East Side Tenement Museum took control of the premises.  Though it slowly deteriorated as unoccupied buildings tend to, 97 Orchard had in a way become the amber that’s preserved a glimpse back into the way New York’s immigrants lived in the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries.

Visitors can only enter 97 Orchard with a tour group and a guide from the museum.  There are three different way to visit the Tenement Museum: take a tour the building and see the restored apartments, including period-accurate furnishings, of several residents from different decades; meet some of the building’s residents portrayed by costumed “interpreters”; or  take a walking tour of the neighborhood and learn about the Lower East Side and the life of the immigrants that shaped its culture.  (Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the 150-year-old structure, the building itself isn’t wheel-chair accessible.  The neighborhood tour, however, is fully accessible to wheelchairs.) 

To visit the building, there are six different tours, each one with a different focus.  In “Exploring 97 Orchard Street,” the museum guide takes you behind the scenes to display the “layers of history” revealed by the building’s many alterations and improvements.  The tour shows how the restorers stripped away the overlays of paint and wallpapers to find ever-older appearances of the tenement and how these revelations have been interpreted by “urban archeologists.”  (This tour covers parts of the first, second, and fourth floors of the tenement.  Keep in mind that the first, or stoop, floor is nine steps above street level.)

“Irish Outsiders” uses period-appropriate objects in the home (though not original to the family or the building) to tell the story of the Moores, Irish Catholics on the fourth floor who suffered the malnutrition death of five-year-old Agnes in 1869.  The tour compares the Moore’s efforts to keep their family healthy with those of the Katz family, Jewish immigrants from Russia who lived at 97 Orchard in the 1920s and ’30s. 

With “Sweatshop Workers,” visitors experience the lives of the Levine and Rogarshevsky families on the third floor.  At the turn of the 20th century, the Polish immigrant Levines, who arrived in 1870, ran a dressmaking shop in their home, a common practice in LES, and Abraham Rogarshevsky, who, with his large family from Lithuania moved into 97 Orchard in 1901, worked as a presser in a garment workshop in the first decades of the 20th century.  The Rogarshevskys later changed their name to Rosenthal.

In “Hard Times,” visitors learn how immigrants living at 97 Orchard survived the economic depressions of the era, starting with the Gumpertz family on the second floor, German Jews whose patriarch, Julius, disappeared during the Panic (stock market crash) of 1873.  He worked cutting heels for Levi’s cobbler shop nearby and left for work one October morning in 1874 and never came home, leaving Nathalia, his wife, to work as a dressmaker to support their children.  The tour then visits the second-floor apartment of the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family who lived in the tenement during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Adolfo tried to find work as a mason while his wife, Rosaria, did piece work sewing at home, but like so many in those years, the Baldizzis survived on welfare.  Adolfo and Rosaria’s daughter Josephine was located by museum historians and helped restore the Baldizzis’ apartment. 

(The “Hard Times” and “Sweatshop Workers” excursions both offer an extended, two-hour tour and discussion version.  The simple visit is an hour, as is “Irish Outsiders”; “Exploring 97 Orchard Street” takes 90 minutes.  Note that for most of these, there are stairs to climb—no elevator has been installed in the Tenement Museum—and the staircase is narrow and quite steep.  Visitors should also be aware that no additional lighting has been installed, either, so hallways and stairs are also fairly dim.)

To walk the neighborhood, the museum also offers three alternatives.  “Outside the Home” (1½ hours), which doesn’t go into any neighborhood buildings, explores LES the way immigrants have experienced it for 150 years.  Sites that had significant impact on new Americans include the Jarmulowsky Bank building, where prospective citizens put their life’s savings, which many lost when the bank failed in 1914 when German depositors caused a run by withdrawing their money to send to family at the start of World War I; the Daily Forward building, the socialist-oriented Yiddish newspaper (now published as a weekly with an English-language edition) that fought for worker rights; and P.S. 42, the area school that taught generations of immigrants how to become “American.”

In “Then & Now,” the two-hour tour explores the district’s history with a focus on why it became such a center of immigrants, comparing its present day with its past.  (This tour also doesn’t visit any buildings.)  For “Foods of the Lower East Side,” visitors must bring not just their appetites, but their culinary adventurousness.  As the museum describes this two-hour tasting tour, it explores “the immigrant experience and some of the ways immigrant foods have shaped American food” by sampling the cuisine of the Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean newcomers, among several others, who have resided in LES in their turns and are represented in the neighborhood by the many ethnic restaurants.  Tour participants sample about a dozen different foods at various stops and you learn some of the hidden histories of common American dishes that have perhaps surprisingly evolved from immigrant traditions. 

On the first floor of 97 Orchard, museum-goers can visit with “Victoria Confino” in the Meet the Residents program, an hour-long encounter with the 14-year-old resident of 97 Orchard Street in 1916.  Played by a costumed “interpreter,” known in the museum business as a “first-person character,” Victoria answers questions from visitors, always remembering the year and her circumstances (or, as we say in the theater: staying in character), about her life in LES as an immigrant learning to negotiate her new environment.  The Confinos, Sephardic Jews from Kastoria, Greece, in the days when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, came from comfortable circumstances, but her family became the object of scrutiny during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and ’13, so they packed up and emigrated to America in 1913.  Victoria, who grew up speaking Ladino, the Spanish-based vernacular of the Sephardim, has begun to learn English in her new school, a part of the role the museum interpreter has to internalize as visitors go back in time to meet her.

The meeting with Victoria Confino requires the visitors to play roles along with the interpreter.  They are expected to put themselves into the time and place of the young girl, assuming the roles of new immigrants themselves.  (The interpreter won’t answer questions on topics outside her time period or her age group.  Take, for instance, World War I: at her age, Victoria wouldn’t be likely to know much about it a year before the United States became involved beyond the fact that the Great War, as it would have been known then, was being waged in Europe.)  Though it’s the most creatively demanding, Meet the Residents isn’t the only inter-active visit in the Tenement Museum’s program.  All the guides at 97 Orchard Street ask tour participants questions and prompt them to relate anecdotes from their own histories or recall things they might have learned in history classes or out of their own experiences.  Objects and artifacts are often the catalyst for stories or historical details someone might remember. 

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is open seven days a week throughout the year (except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Days) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  The times of the different tours vary, so it’s necessary to call in or go on line to plan a visit (and some tours can be reserved on line in advance).  Tours, limited to 15 visitors, are booked and assembled and tickets are purchased at the Visitor Center at 103 Orchard Street, a few doors north at the corner of Delancey, which also houses the Museum Shop (providing many books on the subject of LES and immigration, among other pertinent topics) and the newly-opened Sadie Samuelson Levy Immigrant Heritage Center.  The Heritage Center hosts readings, lectures, panel discussions, films, and other presentations.  Tickets for most tours are $22 ($17 for students and seniors); the “Foods of the Lower East Side” tour costs $45 ($40 for students and seniors).  The museum offers memberships that provide deeper discounts as well.  There are also educational programs, including both actual tours and virtual tours, geared to students and school groups for ages 8 to 18.  There are also resources for teachers, and the website lists books and other sources for research and reading.

The museum is accessible by bus and subway (and many of the sightseeing buses stop at the museum, though street parking in LES is difficult and limited as the streets are narrow and it’s still a busy shopping area.  There are lots and garages, some of which offer free or discounted parking for museum visitors with validation.)  Keep in mind, as I said, that the building tours are not wheelchair accessible.  Some of the outdoor tours offer indoor alternatives for inclement weather and there are also alternative and supplemental arrangements to accommodate visitors with physical limitations such as blindness or deafness.   A good place to start exploring this interesting museum is on its website, http://www.tenement.org, which has links to specific information about the museum and the programs, including advice on group tours and other special arrangements that are available; the National Park Service (which doesn’t operate the museum), has a Tenement Museum site as well: http://www.nps.gov/loea/index.htm.  The general information phone number is (212) 982-8420 and the general e-mail address is lestm@tenement.org. 

[I must add that one visit to the Tenement Museum isn’t enough to get a real impression of what surprises it holds.  Since you have to visit the building with a guide, the operators have planned several different tours, each with a slightly different perspective.  You get a different narrative with each visit and a different view of the immigrant experience in lower Manhattan is revealed. 

[I’ll also point out that this isn’t the first museum about which I’ve written on ROT, though it is the first in New York City (not counting the brief description of The Cloisters I included in the first installment of “A Helluva Town”).  On 25 March 2010, I described a trip to the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., in “Spook Museum.”  There was a private aspect to that visit, as you’ll see if you read the report, but even outside of that, it’s a potentially more exciting experience than is the Tenement Museum.  Not less revealing or instructive, just more lively.  One important difference, though, is that the Tenement Museum is about the way people connected to many of us lived—my dad’s parents and grandparents, for instance.  (My grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t live in LES—they went up to Massachusetts to join other family members—but they did come through Ellis Island and eventually lived in similar neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.)  Not many of us know people engaged in the life displayed at the Spy Museum.  Well, I do—but you probably don’t.  (I’d tell you more, but then . . . well, you know how that goes!)

[I’d also like to note that the life of 97 Orchard Street is almost precisely the same as the heyday of Yiddish Theater (which I recount in “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” Parts 1 and 2, 23 and 26 August), many of whose patrons lived in this very neighborhood.  Many different waves of émigrés lived on the Lower East Side and the flavors, smells, and sounds changed accordingly, but in the era of the Tenement Museum, it was largely Ashkenazi Jewish, German and East European, and Italian.  Unsurprisingly, there was an émigré theater and entertainment scene that represented each national and language community.  (See also my report “Farfariello” on 6 June for a glimpse at an Italian-American performance form that was popular at the same time.)

[And since ROT is ostensibly a theater blog, I’d like to point out an interesting article about the “living history” interpreters, the “first-person characters” like those portraying Victoria Confino at the Tenement Museum: Nahma Sandrow’s “The Actors Who Make History Live” in the New York Times on 30 December 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/arts/the-year-in-review-theater-the-actors-who-make-history-live.html; originally in the Arts & Leisure section).  Though Sandrow introduces the article with a depiction of an encounter with Victoria, she covers many similar living history programs like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg.]