Two Script Reports

[In the 1980s and ’90s, I did some freelance script-evaluating for several theater companies in New York City and one in Washington, D.C.  I was one of many script-readers at each theater, and our job was to be the first step in the evaluation process before, often, first a “distinguished” panel, and then the theater’s literary manager and artistic director stepped in. 

[The script-reading routine was generally the same at all the theaters.  The readers stopped by the theater’s admin offices and picked up about a half-dozen typescripts from the dramaturg or literary manager; usually, we had to sign out the scripts so the dramaturg/lit manager knew where they were when they were out of the office. 

[(In the theater—as opposed to the film industry—the playwright retains ownership of his or her script even when a theater agrees to produce it.  Most theaters returned rejected scripts if the writer provides a self-addressed, stamped envelope—though with today’s electronic transmissions, I’m sure that practice has changed some.  In any case, the theater is responsible for the typescripts it receives.)   

[The readers took the scripts home (usually for a specific number of days), read them, and wrote an evaluation of each play based on the criteria the theater has established for the kind of play they’re interested in considering.  (The Theatre Communications Group used to publish an annual Dramatists Sourcebook that provided information about its member theaters regarding who accepts unsolicited submissions, what kind of play they produce, and to whom to address submissions and inquiries.  The book hasn’t been updated since 2010, but the information is often available on the theaters’ websites.)    

[We filled out an evaluation form each theater devises—though I usually duplicated the form on my word processor so I could write up my eval on the computer instead of by hand or on the typewriter.  (Raise your hand if you remember typewriters!)  Another reason for transferring the eval form to my computer is that I had a copy of the report for my own files without having to stop by a copy shop every week to make copies and store them in a hard-copy file.   

[One of the theaters for whom I read was The Gypsy Road Company which conducted an annual playwriting contest, the 21st Century Playwrights Festival.  That’s what I read scripts for, and one particular play stood out in my mind for the 24 years since I read it.  (I made reference to this play in the introduction to Article 1 of “Staging Our Native Nation,” posted on Rick On Theater on 24 March 2018.)

[This script is Call the Serpent God to Me by a young writer named M. Elena Carrillo.  The drama focuses on a Hispanic girl in El Paso coping with family oppression and abuse.  I don’t know very much about Carrillo except that she’s from south Texas. is a Tejana, and was a grad student at the University of Texas, El Paso, when she wrote Serpent God. 

[I also don’t know what happened with her play beyond my evaluation, except that it was honored as one of 10 outstanding scripts.  (Gypsy Road required us to write a letter to the playwright with our evaluation—presumably in softer terms than we might have used with the theater’s personnel.  Mine is included below with the eval report.)]

CALL THE SERPENT GOD TO ME

by M. Elena Carrillo

Gypsy Road Company

21st Century Playwrights Festival

9 May 1996

  

Summary:  The Serpent God of the title is Quetzalcoatl, the principal Aztec god usually represented as a feathered serpent.  Call the Serpent God to Me is about the conflicts between the ancient Aztec culture, Mexica, personified by Papane Tranquilo; and the Catholic Spanish culture of the conquistadors, represented by Mamá Domitila and Papá Fernando.  There is also a sort of contemporary Tejano nihilism espoused by the doomed Javier, a young gang member. 

Caught in the midst of this cultural maelstrom is Esperanza, granddaughter of Papane, daughter of Mamá and Papá, and sister of Javier.  More than anything, Espie wants to go to college but her parents won’t recognize her abilities or her value.  They place all their hope in Javier, refusing to see what he is or even that he has no respect for them or their world. 

Papane Tranquilo guides Espie with the wisdom of the old beliefs, and the gods and spirits of Aztec lore appear in dance-like imagery throughout the play.  As counterbalance, so do a representation of Domitila’s Lamentation—a kind of Catholic spirit/conscience—and Fernando’s Diablo, his devil.  (These figures are all wordless, but not silent.)  Though the script reads on the page like Realism, in performance it will be more like Surrealism.

(I don’t know if this is significant, though I suspect it is: the main characters’ names almost all have symbolic meanings.  Tranquilo means ‘quiet’ or ‘peaceful’; Domitila means ‘mistress of the house’; Fernando means ‘bold adventurer’ or ‘conqueror’; Esperanza means ‘hope.’  Only Javier confuses me in this context: his name means ‘castle,’ which I suppose could be understood as ‘fortress’ or ‘redoubt.’)

Critique:  Carrillo has a very interesting voice and her invocation of Aztec, Catholic, and contemporary secular figures (the last include a Professor, a Policeman, and a school principal) promises some excellent theatricality.  The conflict among the forces essentially vying for Esperanza’s allegiance is an interesting dramatic focus, and Carrillo never gives away which force will win.  In fact, Espie pretty much defines her own route to happiness in the end, though the influence of Papane Tranquilo is most tenderly dealt with. 

You can be sure that the images of Aztec gods will result in some wonderfully colorful and theatrical designs, and their dance-like “scenes” (there’s also music throughout the text; Carrillo calls the play “a folk ballet”) will add much non-realistic movement to the staging.  Call the Serpent God to Me (possibly an awkward title) shows definite promise for a terrific—and visually beautiful—production.

Serpent God’s one draw-back—more or less a problem, depending on your point of view—is the amount of Spanish dialogue Carrillo uses.  Papá, for instance, speaks no English in the play, and other characters often converse entirely in Spanish for as much as half a dozen lines.  As important as this is for Carrillo’s dramaturgy, I can’t help but fear that it will be hard for spectators who, like me, don’t understand Spanish.  A reading before an Anglo audience would provide some clue about how much may be lost, and perhaps Carrillo can find a way to lessen the amount of Spanish in the text without damaging her point.

Recommendation:  Second Read

Suitability for public reading series:  Yes

Comments:  I say this because the script is good enough for a public reading, but there are two factors that may make one ineffective.  First, as I mentioned above, there is a lot of Spanish (requiring actors fluent in Spanish for all major speaking roles).  A non-public, test reading would be valuable to determine if this is a real problem.  Second, there is a good deal of non-verbal theatricality that is important to Carrillo’s work.  The visual impact of the wordless characters and the movement aspects of the spirit figures’ appearances will all be lost in a mere reading of stage directions.  (Without these elements—not to mention the music—the play will sound pretty much like a Realistic script, which is definitely a misconstruction.)

(If I may be permitted a personal comment, I’d like to say that, from a purely gut-response perspective, I really like this script.  My hesitation to rate it a finalist straight out is based solely on the language issue.  Though on a realistic level I don’t know if it can be produced successfully for a general audience (as opposed to, for instance, the bilingual audiences of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre or the Repertorio Español), its appeal is such that I would love to give it a try somehow.  I don’t know how much developmental work GRC does on prospective scripts, but if you have the facility to work out any problems this text might pose, my recommendation is to do so.  Of course, if the problems are all in my own mind—all the better!)

CALL THE SERPENT GOD TO ME

by M. Elena Carrillo

Reading your script was a great pleasure!  The juxtaposition of Aztec, Catholic, and Tejano cultural elements provides a unique perspective that makes reading Serpent God a constant surprise and keeps the reader—and most likely, an audience—intrigued and rapt.  The incorporation of the images of Aztec gods, as well as the figures of Domitila’s Lamentation and Fernando’s Diablo, gives the script a theatrical aspect that is also theatrically provocative.  The addition of appropriate music as you call for should make Serpent God a truly magical theatrical experience.  The only appropriate comparisons for this piece are non-Western: Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Kathakali—all highly theatrical, multi-disciplinary forms.

There is only one aspect of Serpent God that is troublesome, and that only from a production (as opposed to playwriting) standpoint.  You use a great deal of Spanish in your dialogue.  Though you admonish us that this will not be a “barrier to a non-Spanish speaking audience,” the length and significance of some of the extended passages are a concern.  The dramatic importance of your use of Spanish is clear—there is no dispute about your reasons for doing it—but is there any way that the potential for losing parts of a general audience can be lessened?  Can, for instance, Esperanza (or some other character) “translate” more of the Spanish for us, say by responding in English more or otherwise commenting on what’s being said?  Even if this sacrifices somewhat the impact of the Spanish dialogue, it may pay off by keeping your non-Spanish speaking spectators in touch with the text.

Please do not think for a moment that the concern about the Spanish dialogue is in any way a criticism of your playwriting or even of Call the Serpent God to Me as a piece of theater.  The concern is purely practical with respect to an audience outside a community like that in southern Texas where Spanish is part of the culture, even among Anglo-Americans.  Artistically and theatrically, you have produced a remarkable piece of writing.

*  *  *  *

[Another play I read that has stuck with me all these years was from the Arena Stage in Washington.  In 1985-86, Arena was one of the theaters participating in the FDG/CBS New Play Program.  (The initials stand for the Foundation of the Dramatists Guild, the playwrights’  professional association, which administered the now-defunct program, and the Columbia Broadcasting System television network, which funded it.)  

[The goal was to encourage the production of new plays around the country by regional rep companies by subsidizing a play contest for unsolicited manuscripts.  The theaters received $15,000 to defray the cost of running the contest and hiring reader-evaluators like me.

[Once again, we were the first rung on the ladder.  The FDG/CBS program lined up five regional theaters each season.  (I recall that the life of the program was finite, something like five or ten years, and then simply expired.)  The reward was a production during the next season for each regional winner, plus $5,000 for the author; a national winner split $10,000 with the theater.  

[Herman Raucher’s Littlefield’s Book intrigued me because, as I say in the evaluation, it’s “very interesting, funny, and surprising; different.”  Raucher (b. 1928), who’s better known as a screenwriter, is the author of the screenplay for Summer of '42, a critically and popularly successful 1971 film, and the subsequent novelization that was an instant bestseller.

[I don’t know what happened to Littlefield’s Book after I submitted my eval.  There’s no record of the play on the ’Net, so I assume it didn’t go on to production—at least not one that left a footprint after the Internet was established.  Raucher apparently effectively retired from writing in the ’80s—around the time he wrote this script about a man’s struggle with the deaths of his loved ones and his own sanity.]

LITTLEFIELD’S BOOK

by Herman Raucher

Arena Stage

FDG/CBS New Play Program 1985-1986

9 November 1985

Gut reaction:  Very interesting, funny, and surprising; different

Synopsis (2 or 3 short sentences):  Josh (short for ‘Joshua,’ Hebrew for ‘Jesus’) Littlefield’s book is a new version of the Bible.  While he’s writing it, he unites with his parents, wife, and daughter—all long dead.  He considers whether to stay with this living lover or return to his dead family, with Jesus as his adviser.  He chooses his family.

Please give this play a rating from 1 (worst) to 5 (best):  5

What is the play’s genre:  Fantasy – surreal tragicomedy (?)

Number of characters:  2 males; 6 females; 1 extra

Any unusual production demands?  1 female is 12 years old

Please rate these elements from 1-5, with page numbers of examples: Pick any 10-12 pages, especially Act II – it’s all different and keeps getting better.

            Plot  5

            Character  5                             

                                                           

            Dramatic tension  5                  

                                                           

            Language  5                             

            Theatricality  5

Assuming this play is of interest to Arena, how much revision do you think is needed to bring the script to production quality?

One revision (mostly trimming)

Should this play be considered further for the FDG/CBS project?  Yes

Is this playwright of interest to Arena?   Yes   Why?  The guy can write, he’s got style and imagination. He’s also already “established.”

Other comments:  Describing this play is impossible.  It has elements of Oh, God; Pennies from Heaven; Blithe Spirit; It’s a Wonderful Life—all with sophistication, wit, and unpredictability.  It may offend religious purists—the folks who got exercised over Jesus Christ Superstar.  The first scene with Jesus (Act II, scene 8 to ACT II, scene 19) is hilariously irreverent.

Some Plays about Jews from the Archives

ANNULLA, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Emily Mann

The New Theatre of Brooklyn

28 October 1988

About halfway through Annulla, An Autobiography, a Young Woman’s Voice explains, “Annulla’s art was her life.”  In essence, the art of Emily Mann’s play, too, is this remarkable woman’s life.  As the Voice goes on to say, “In many ways her life embodied the history of central Europe from 1900 through the two great wars.”  With minimal interference, Mann gives us a mini-history of that period, seen not only “from a Jewish perspective,” but from the perspective of a woman with “crackpot ideas.” 

Growing out of an oral-history project, the play derives from Mann’s 1974 interview with the aunt of her best friend from college.  Born in 1900, Annulla Allen endured the constant flux and change in Eastern Europe in the first half of this century.  Without ever leaving her native Galicia, she was at one time or another a citizen of Germany, Russia, Poland and, for a year, the Ukraine.  She could stand in for the entire East European Jewish Diaspora, shifting as the tide of politics and anti-Semitism moved her family to Vienna, Italy, Germany and, finally, England, where Mann recorded her story. 

Interspersed with commentary representing Mann’s thoughts some ten years later, Annulla is really a rambling, often disjointed, but always fascinating monologue, contained in the kitchen of the old woman’s flat in Hampstead Heath, London.  She’s making tea for herself and chicken soup for her sister in the hospital.  A more commonplace activity with which to contrast her life could not be imagined. 

Perhaps more emblematic of her life is the play she has been writing, which she has “boiled down to just over six hours.”  Crammed with ideas and characters like her memory, its unnumbered pages are “all out of order.”  Searching through the manuscript she dropped just before the visit, Annulla remarks, “Ah, here is something.  No, it is not applicable.”   Life is disorganized, our memories even more so; Mann astutely has not structured Annulla’s into neat, little thematic blocks for us.

Opening on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), The New Theatre of Brooklyn’s production marks the New York première of Annulla, a revision of Mann’s first play, Annulla Allen: Autobiography of a Survivor.  Directed by the playwright, the original, two-act version premièred in 1977 at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater.  Later revived at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and recorded as a radio drama for Earplay, the play was revised and the recorded Voice added for the 1984-85 productions directed by Timothy Near at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.  TNT’s version, compacted into one 90-minute act, has had further alteration. 

Like Mann’s two other plays, Still Life and Execution of Justice, Annulla is, among other things, about violence.  Where Still Life examines the brutal anger of a Vietnam veteran and Execution the violence perpetrated by a manipulated justice system, Annulla explores a more internalized violence.  With the anti-Semitism and Nazism of her youth as background, Annulla verbally abuses her invalid sister even as she makes chicken soup for her, nonchalantly chopping and dismembering the bird. 

Furthermore, Annulla deplores the “barbarism” of the world’s male leaders.  Her play, The Matriarchs, posits, “If there were a global matriarchy, you know, there would be no more of this evil.”  Unsurprisingly, however, Annulla seems to ignore one female world leader, Indira Gandhi.  In an interview in David Savran’s In Their Own Words (Theatre Communications Group, 1988), Mann acknowledges that Annulla hated the Indian tyrant.  Annulla is “not exactly consistent in her political theory,” observes Mann.  “That’s one of the things I love about her.” 

Under Mann’s fluid direction, Linda Hunt’s incarnation makes Annulla—holocaust survivor, feminist, author, intellectual, iconoclast—a real and palpable person.  You come away with the odd sense of actually having met an extraordinary woman.  Were it not for Hunt’s fame, I could easily have thought I was kibitzing in the kitchen of the real Annulla Allen. 

When the lights come up on the kitchen, the tea kettle is whistling.  In lurches Annulla, laden with packages, apologizing for being late.  Making tea, she launches into the story of her sister’s accident.  Then, recounting a metaphor for her passing as an Aryan in Vienna, she asks rhetorically, “Do you know this old fable by Heine?”  The audience responds aloud.  At the end of the evening, Annulla tells us, “I am so glad you could come to see me today.”  As a measure of Hunt’s believability, we feel we have truly been her guests. 

The interpolations of the Voice, which are not a direct interview but commentary relating to Mann’s life and the search for her own family roots in Poland, act as counterpoint.  Delivered smoothly and sonorously by Karen Ludwig, they bring us back to the present, but do not jar us, or interrupt Annulla’s activities.  Reading the script, this technique looks as if it would disrupt the flow of the monologue; a disembodied Voice appears undramatic.  In performance, it serves as a momentary respite to reflect and absorb the events of this strange life.

The setting for Annulla is more confined and naturalistic than those of Mann’s other plays.  At the New Theatre, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg and Diann Duthie’s set is a cluttered, functional kitchen with cabinets and shelves overstuffed with the detritus of Annulla’s daily existence.  The kitchen table, occupying the center of the floor, overflows with papers—Annulla’s manuscript among them—and other paraphernalia.  The room is specific and real, except that the walls are covered with translucent scrim-like fabric instead of opaque muslin.  This and the ambiguity of the space beyond the kitchen, particularly the room off to the right to which Annulla retreats to answer the phone, has no clear symbolic connection to the script or production.

Known for adventurous programming, the six-year-old New Theatre of Brooklyn [now long defunct] won an Obie in 1987 for “Artistic Excellence.”  In the words of the New York Times, TNT “can stand alongside . . . the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and BACA Downtown [also disbanded] as reminders of the renewal of theatrical life in this . . . borough.”  Bringing together an Oscar-winning actress and an Obie-winning playwright and director (for Still Life) is a mark of TNT’s good producing. 

*  *  *  *

THE JEW OF MALTA

by Christopher Marlowe

Theatre for a New Audience

The Duke Theatre on 42nd Street

9 March 2007

March [2007[ was Jew Month on stage in New York City for me.  The Theatre for a New Audience presented F. Murray Abraham in a rotating rep of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.  Abraham, of course, played Shylock and Barabas.

                                                                                                    

My friend Diana and I saw Merchant on Friday, 2 March, at TFANA’s latest abode (it’s itinerant), the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street.  (I posted the Merchant  portion of my original 2007 report on Rick On Theater on 28 February 2011 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/02/tfanas-merchant-of-venice-2007.html].)  The Duke’s one of those theater spaces in a highrise that was either built or renovated during the revival of 42nd Street, right in the center of the honky-tonk.  I’d never been to anything here [I have since], and it’s a rather nice space.  A little high-tech in decor, perhaps, but functional, with good sightlines—it’s a thrust configuration—and no obstructions. 

The Duke’s a small enough theater that no seat is far from the stage—even the little balconies that run around three sides of the auditorium.  We were in the last row (‘F,’ mind you!) of the "orchestra," if that’s what they call it there, and we had perfect views and no hearing problems.  [TFANA moved to its own building, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 2013.] 

My theater companion Diana and I saw Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta on Friday, 9 March, and the tenor of the production was entirely different from that of Merchant.  It was played entirely for laughs, mixing many period acting styles and cultural references.  When the Jews file in after Barabas to confront the Governor and his soldiers, for instance, they are backed by “Hava Nagila,” an Israeli folksong that postdates the Renaissance by a number of centuries.  (The scene-change and other incidental music is an eclectic selection of periods and cultures.) 

The Maltese knights, by the way, though attired in 16th-century military garb, strike Restoration poses, with their legs in a balletic stance and the ever-ready handkerchiefs fluttering about their noses.  When Barabas and Abigail dissemble for the benefit of the Maltese, they do so in 19th-century acting style. 

Lodowick and Mathias both wear their initials sewn onto the back of their costumes like some high school athletic award.  When the two monks fight over who will convert Barabas (and his gold), they battle with their staves as if they are kung-fu fightin’ with pugil sticks.  Now and then, a young female stage hand, headset, power-pack, and all, runs on stage like a Noh koken to give Barabas or one of the other characters a needed prop.

John Lee Beatty’s set is deliberately artless—painted flats that look like a high school production, with many doorways and windows—simply holes cut into the flats—slightly out of  plumb and such elements as the stars of David and the crosses placed and replaced on Barabas’s house front clearly cheaply made.  (The Star of David is an anachronism in any case, dating as a symbol of Judaism several centuries after Marlowe’s time )  

David Zinn’s costumes are fully-realized Renaissance dress and quite elaborate, with breastplates for the Maltese soldiers; long, red robes and red turbans for the Turks; scimitars and swords; voluminous, white habits and wimples for the nuns; and so on.  They are generally brightly colored, though, like some musical-comedy version of the Renaissance, and the Maltese soldiers wear pageboy wigs that made me wonder, at first glance, if they weren’t being played by women.  (They weren’t.)

Everyone is having tons of fun—it almost looks as if each actor is sort of doing his or her own thing, though I’m sure director David Herskovits coordinated it all.  Abraham doesn’t quite rub his hands together as he contemplates his evil deeds against his Christian enemies (though Lodowick does give a comic-villainous laugh at one point), but he might as well do—he takes such glee in his machinations. 

And Arnie Burton plays Barabas’s Turkish slave-cum-henchman, Ithamore, as a cross between Igor from Frankenstein and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings (with a smidge of Iago thrown in).  And John Lavelle plays Lodowick as a sort of Renaissance metrosexual (a little like the way he played Gratiano in Merchant).  Never having seen the play or read it before, I kept wondering what it must be like played . . . well, straight, if that’s possible.  (From Marlowe’s perspective, since he was probably a Protestant—though there were persistent rumors he was an atheist—all three groups, Jews, Muslim Turks, and Catholic Knights of Malta, are all figures of either fear or ridicule, I guess.  No one comes off well at all.) 

The Jew of Malta, written in 1589 or 1590, is decidedly a weaker play in all respects than Shakespeare’s Merchant (created between 1594 and 1597), and it isn’t often done, so I suspect it comes off pretty poorly if not tricked out somehow or other.  In any case, purely as a piece of theatrical entertainment, TFANA’s take works—though it throws no light on anything much, including Marlowe’s dramaturgy, the temper of the times, Jews in Elizabethan society, and so on. 

But there’s no law that says every piece of theater has to do that, is there?  No, of course not!  (Otherwise there’d be no place for Bell, Book, and Candle; You Can’t Take It With You; or The Boyfriend—and what a shame that would be!  I’ve never held to the conviction that mere entertainment was an unworthy goal for theater.)

Comparing the two productions makes clear that the Shakespeare is the better play.  Marlowe’s Jew is so dependent on abrupt plot turns and reversals, and over-the-top violence, that it would be hard to believe even if played straight.  Merchant has a much more psychologically complex plot and characters with developments that are not only not tied to stereotypes, but are uniquely keyed to the characters and circumstances of Shakespeare’s drama. 

Marlowe’s characters are far more simplistic.  I understand from reading that Jew includes a prologue that invokes Machiavelli, but it isn’t played at TFANA; however, it apparently gives the play a serious point about politics and hypocrisy.  That element is missing from the TFANA interpretation, so that Merchant alone makes an attempt to illuminate ideas and themes, stressing, as director Darko Tresnjak does, Shylock’s equality in vehemence and bloodthirstiness with the Venetians who provoke him. 

Herskovits’s Jew didn’t seem to have much to say about anything, as far as I could tell, though in both plays and productions, no side is seen to better effect than the other—they are all nasty pieces of work.  But only in Merchant does this make an impression since the figures in Jew are all cartoons.  

Most of the cast comes off better in Merchant than in Jew, but I’m not sure that’s their fault rather than the fault of Herskovits’s approach (and, to a certain extent, Marlowe’s, since he asks so much less of actors than does Shakespeare). 

As Barabas, Abraham is less of a remarkable presence than was his Shylock.  The fact of his long experience and innate talent still makes him seem the solidest figure on the stage, even in the superficial interpretation of Jew, however.  He still looks like a grown-up among kids. 

*  *  *  *

BESHERT

by David Crespy

Frederick Loewe Room, Dramatists Guild

17 December 2008

I had no plans to write about this play, an unstaged reading of which I attended, but since I sat through the two hours and ended up discussing it some over a late snack with my friend Diana, whom I had invited to join me because she’s a nascent playwright herself, I will. 

The play is Beshert; or, The Jewish Dating Cycle by David Crespy.  Crespy’s an associate professor of playwriting at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and founding artistic director of the Missouri Playwrights Workshop there.  He states that his principal occupation is playwriting, but I only know him as the author of Off-Off-Broadway Explosion (Back Stage Books, 2003), a history of the origins of the Off-Off-Broadway theater scene in the early ’60s which I used as research.   

As I read the book, some thoughts occurred to me, and I shared them with Crespy by e-mail and we started a correspondence that went on from time to time for several years.  We’d never met, however, until this reading.  I didn’t know his plays before then, either.  The reading was on Wednesday evening, 17 December, in the Frederick Loewe Room of the Dramatists Guild at 1501 Broadway (on Times Square). 

The play started out as a one-act (now the first act of three) for the book Playwriting Master Class (Heinemann, 2000) by Michael Wright.  Crespy then took it to the 2000 Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska, where Beshert received a Panelist’s Choice Award, and it was a semi-finalist for the 2008 National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and has been seen in readings at River Union Stage in Frenchtown, N. J., and at First Run Theatre in St. Louis (both 2006). 

“Beshert,” the title of the first act of the three-acter, is Yiddish for ‘destiny’ or ‘fate,’ but it’s usually used to refer to someone’s “perfect match” who’s waiting out there somewhere, ordained by God to be his or her soul mate.  (There are Jewish matchmaking services that use Beshert as part or all of their names!)  

The word appears often in The Jewish Dating Cycle because Nadya Finklestein has just left her goyishe (a slightly condescending Yiddish word for ‘gentile’) first husband and wonders if she’ll ever allow herself to love again.  

Nadya is stuck in the world of academia and in mid-Missouri, far from her family and religious roots.  (Like Crespy, Nadya is a professor at a Missouri university.  She was raised orthodox in New Jersey and doesn’t really feel comfortable with the looser Reformed Judaism of the Mid-West.)  Her bubbies—her deceased grandmother and great aunts (well, one’s actually only in a permanent coma)—haunt her furniture, urging her to find an NJB (a nice Jewish boy) and settle down.  But finding her beshert seems impossible.

In “Meshugas” (‘insanities’—in the sense of ‘nuttiness,’ not mental illness), the second act, Nadya tries to find a love match by going on a date with Avi, a younger Jewish man and a grad student at her university.  Before she opens the door to welcome the suitor, the spirits of her bubbies possess her furniture once again. 

Nadya finds out that in order for her relatives to go to “our Lord . . . & Taylor in the sky,” she has to fall in love.  What unfolds is a cavalcade of Nadya’s worst dating fears, which are ingrained in her partly because of her family’s infliction of guilt and partly because of her own desires to be an independent woman.

In the final act, “Ver Klempt!” (‘choked up’), Nadya faces the death of her mother who died of breast cancer back in New Jersey, attended by her brother while Nadya stayed away.  Through the spirits that haunt Nadya’s memories, she learns that to allow herself to love, she must allow for forgiveness.

Okay, I don’t know how that all sounds to someone who hasn’t heard the play read, but it’s full of nonsense, both of the playwriting variety and the . . . umm, “life” variety.  First of all, the play is so full of Yiddish and Yiddishisms that any spectator who didn’t have at least one parent from the old country would have a very hard time understanding what anyone’s saying.  I’m an assimilated Jew—no one in my household spoke Yiddish when I was growing up—and I had a difficult time following all the little jokes and cultural references. 

Diana, who’s gentile, got lost in the middle of the first act.  I don’t know whom Crespy intends as his audience, but even the old Jewish Rep [a New York City company that ceased producing around 2002] would have a hard time with this script.  (I’d suggest the Folksbiene/Yiddish Theatre—but there’s too much English in the play for them!  [See my article on the Folksbiene, 23 and 26 August 2012.])  It looks to me like the ideal audience would be a shul, especially one with an older congregation.  They might also appreciate the content the most, too.

Because the next problems go beyond the language.  The characters, for one, are all clichés—and not in the breaking-the-stereotype vein, either.  The Jewish characters . . . er, caricatures . . . are so stereotypical as to be almost cartoons.  The four bickering (and cackling) bubbies are not only predictable but embarrassing.  (That not one of them had an actual good marriage—they settled—makes it all the harder to see why Nadya’d listen to them anyway.) 

The academics at the (ahem) University of Northern Southeast Missouri (aside from Nadya, there is her department chairman and the grad student/suitor) are of an identical stamp, only from a different storage bin.  They can’t speak a word unless it’s hyper-academese (the silly, exaggerated kind: “I was interested in applying poststructural theory to narrative phenomena created by nearly illiterate folk art writers who exemplify the otherness typified by those who had, not of any of their own accord, become victim to the hegemony of the white, male, European gaze and who were thus marginalized in odd and poignant ways,” says Nadya at one point). 

Then there are the occasional digs at Missouri/Mid-Western provincialism (that is, non-Jewishness, Republicanism, and more).  The university town is called Wretched Grace, Mo. (a stand-in for Columbia?); there’s at least one reference to that great Missouri statesman, John Ashcroft; and the last act is set in Branson, Mo., home to “five unique festivals, 60 craft shops, 50 daily shows, 15 rides, and dozens of delicious, unique dining opportunities guaranteed to bring the fun of the past to life!” 

(Crespy once confessed to me that he gets “pretty bummed when I’m stuck out here in Missouri.”  The Jewish Dating Cycle was presented on campus: it’s something of a wonder that Crespy still has a job at Mizzou!)

Then there are the gimmicks. 

The bubbies arrive to haunt Nadya in the furniture of her deceased grandmother, and it hops and bangs around as the spirits assert themselves.  Nadya becomes her own brother from time to time (please don’t ask me to explain this!) and at one point (and I can’t explain this) the characters of Nadya’s former husband and her new suitor become her mother and herself as a child. 

Nadya’s Cousin Sol speaks to her from a moose head in the hotel room in Branson and her mother appears (while Nadya and Avi are having sex) as a 12-year-old child.  It became awfully hard to keep all this straight—I had given up trying to figure out why it was happening, however. 

Other gimmicks: Avi, who is a student of child parapsychology (huh?), uses a sock puppet to represent his “inner child”; in one scene “Izzy” (the sock puppet) has a dialogue with a ballerina doll named Maribell, Nadya’s “inner child.” 

Then there are the extended scenes that are travesties of old movie romances, Laura, Now Voyager, and Rebecca, in which the actors/characters play the movie roles as a way to learn about “romance” in the days before . . . well, sex ruined it all.  (These are the movies that instructed mom and the bubbies back in the day.) 

In the second act, when Avi knocks on Nadya’s door for their first real date, time stops as Nadya has visions of all her disastrous relationships—-and a couple of imaginary ones.  Each one is acted out, with the characters of her ex-husband, her department chairman, and so on, taking on the roles of the other halves of these relationships. 

I assume there would be costume changes or something to help distinguish the “real” character from the “visionary” one, but it was hard to keep them all sorted out in the reading, and I wasn’t terribly motivated to work too hard at it anyway.  I can’t even begin to remember all the little gimmicks and stunts Crespy employs; after a while, MEGO! 

Then there’s the writing itself.  Crespy’s characters don’t talk in phrases or words—they speak in paragraphs.  The text is over-written. 

Furthermore, there’s far too much narration.  Mostly it’s Nadya, but someone or other often has long monologues explaining some character history or backstory or philosophical or psychological point Crespy would have been better to find a way to express in acted scenes.  (This, of course, was attenuated in the reading by the verbalizing of the stage directions, but that only exacerbated a situation that would still have been a detriment.) 

Maybe Crespy saw that there was too much talk and that’s why he inserted all that phony theatrical gimmickry.  If so, he’d be better off cutting down on the language and obviating the need for some (all?) of the stunts.  The man needs a dramaturg!

Finally, all these contrivances don’t seem to add up to anything.  The whole play is directed at giving Nadya permission to date Avi.  Not only has she just ended a bad marriage, but Avi is 11 years her junior.  (I’d have been more concerned that he’s a student and she’s a professor, but that doesn’t really come up.) 

On the other hand, as Nadya’s bubbies keep reminding her, Avi’s an NJB, her beshert.  You know what?  Who cares!  All this sound and fury was focused on freeing Nadya from her self-imposed constraints, but for what?  So she can get a date?  We never see her fall in love with Avi—she says, in the end, that she loves him, but we never see it happen; it’s just words.  (In fact, given the way the script emphasizes Nadya’s neuroses and psychoses, you have to wonder why Avi would pursue her.  She’d scare the shit out of me!)  

The play is so busy being clever that it never gets around to being human.  There’s a lot of dramaturgy assembled here, all for little purpose, it seems to me.  All Crespy’s theatricality needs a bigger reward, a bigger bang.  Permission to go on a date?  Bushwa!  The freedom to fall in love, to take a chance, to risk—that’s an ending worth getting to! 

What it looks like to me, no playwright to be sure, is that Crespy indulged his urge to take every idea he had for a playwriting trick—do movie scenes, do puppets, do haunted objects, do transmogrification!—and dropped them into one script without worrying about whether they serve a purpose or not. 

Diana thought it was characteristic of a grad student playwright—and she’s right.  It’s a beginner’s lack of restraint—and Crespy’s not supposed to be a beginner.  (He has other plays, according to his bio, but I don’t know any of them or their production histories.  [I later saw  a reading of The Sudden Glide, another of Crespy’s plays from 2010, and didn’t much care for it, either.  But that’s a tale for another time.]  It’s certainly possible that Crespy’s an exemplar of the old bromide that those who can’t do, teach.)

I won’t critique the acting except to say that the performers who read were adequate.  I’m sure they didn’t have a lot of rehearsal, as few readings do, so the work on display was necessarily superficial.  (The actor who read Cousin Sol did seem to be channeling Fyvush Finkel.  Maybe that’s the only way he knew to do a Jewish man of a certain age.) 

The program says that Crespy “staged” the reading (it was a sit-down reading!), but I take that to mean he “supervised” the actors.  Though he has a BA in acting (from my own MFA alma mater, the Mason Gross School at Rutgers), his résumé doesn’t list any directing credits.  My experience with playwrights who direct their own work is that they stress the words over acting or staging, so I don’t imagine the cast got much substantive direction.

I don’t know what the purpose of the reading was.  No one attending looked to me like a backer, producer, director, or theater operator.  And it didn’t seem like a reading for the playwright’s benefit, to hear the script read (since it’s been read or performed several times already).  Why would you come all the way to New York for that anyway when you can do it just as well in Missouri?  

The Theater Hall of Fame

The Theater Hall of Fame, housed at the Gershwin (originally the Uris) Theatre on Broadway, was established in 1970 by Earl Blackwell (1909-95), founder of Celebrity Service; producer and theater-owner James M. Nederlander (1922-2016); real-estate developer and producer Gerard Oestreicher (1916-87); and L. Arnold Weissberger (1907-81), a theatrical lawyer, to honor Lifetime Achievement in the American theater. 

Nederlander and Oestreicher, who were the long-time lessees of the Uris Theatre at 222 West 51st Street in the Paramount Plaza building (renamed the Gershwin Theatre in 1983 and now part of the Nederlander Organization), donated the space for the Hall of Fame and the cost of maintaining it.  The rotunda of the Uris Theatre, still under construction when the first honorees were announced—it opened in November 1972—was designed and built by architect and set designer Ralph Alswang expressly to showcase the names and photographs of Broadway’s own Theater Hall of Fame.

The New York Times announced the formation of the Hall of Fame on 7 March 1972, reporting:

A theater Hall of Fame, honoring personalities who have made outstanding contributions to the American theater since its beginnings in the mid‐19th century, will be housed in the Uris Theater, now under construction on Broadway between 50th and 51st Streets.

The official announcement had been made the day before at the monthly lunch meeting of the Drama Desk, the organization of New York City drama critics and theater writers, at Sardi’s, the historic Times Square hangout for theater folk

The Hall of Fame’s mission is to preserve theater history, honor present theater professionals, and encourage emerging artists of the American Theater.  The only nationally recognized Hall of Fame honoring lifetime achievement in the American theater, it’s a non-profit organization and U.S. registered trademark.  (Interestingly, though the Hall of Fame’s beat is specifically American theater, many inductees are not only foreign born, but not U.S. citizens at all.  The governing criterion is significant contribution to theater in the United States.  National origin is irrelevant.)

Nominees are drawn from all theater disciplines including actors, playwrights, composers, lyricists, designers, directors, producers, and critics and theater journalists, among others, who’ve had careers in American theater for at least 25 years and at least five major production credits on Broadway.  In recent decades, the last criterion has been expanded to include theater professionals who are leading pioneers of Off-Broadway or regional theater.  Some requirements may be suspended in special circumstances. 

There are now 10 categories and over 50 nominees on the ballot each year.  Almost all Hall of Fame members have earned their fame on Broadway; however, especially in recent decades, Off-Broadway and regional theater pros have been elected as well.  Inductees are elected by drama critics, editors, theater historians, and educators and their names are embossed in gold lettering on the entry walls of the theater, flanking its grand staircase and escalator.  As of the induction of 2019, the total membership of the Theater Hall of Fame is 488.

The original voting body for membership in the Hall was the Drama Desk but is now the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA), a national group, plus members of the Hall of Fame.  Selections are made by some 300 voting members of the Theater Hall of Fame and ATCA.  Induction takes place at a ceremony at the Gershwin Theatre in New York City, where the plaques containing the names of the inductees are hung.  In the Hall of Fame’s early years, the induction was held in January—for inductees elected the year before—but since 2015, it’s been scheduled in November.

The annual ballot, which is mailed out in August, is voted upon by members of the Theater Hall of Fame and American drama critics.  (In the interest of full disclosure, let me acknowledge that I am an associate member of ATCA—I used to be a full member, but I no longer publish reviews except for the performance reports I post on Rick On Theater—and used to be a member of the Drama Desk.  I receive a ballot for the Theater Hall of Fame, but I don’t vote.)  Initially, the Hall of Fame enrolled large annual classes of honorees in order to catch up on theater history, but that has changed in recent seasons.  Now, only the final eight nominees receiving the most votes are ratified for the annual honor. 

Following the induction ceremony at the Gershwin, the Hall of Fame traditionally hosted a dinner at Sardi’s; later, the meal was moved to the Friars Club and then to The Palm in Midtown on the East Side.  Attendance at the Gershwin ceremony and the dinner afterwards is by invitation only and the event benefits the Theater Hall of Fame Fellowship Fund, which supports the Hall’s other activities and programs.

The first group of inductees to be elected, 23 in all, was announced in October 1972.  The field of nominees was 166 strong and the voters were drawn from a selection of prominent New York City drama critics, editors, theater historians, and theater educators. 

The first class of Hall of Fame members included actor Walter Huston; composer Rudolph Friml; producers and theater-owners Lee and J. J. Shubert; set designer Norman Bel Geddes; actor Jeanne Eagels; playwright Ferenc Molnar; playwright P. G. Wodehouse; playwright Clyde Fitch; actor and singer Lillian Russell; director and producer Arthur Hopkins; actor Marie Dressler; playwright, director, and producer George S. Kaufman; critic Brooks Atkinson, producer, director, and playwright George Abbott; playwright Thornton Wilder; actor and singer Ethel Merman; actor and vaudevillian Bert Lahr; playwright and director Moss Hart; playwright Robert E. Sherwood; actor, director, writer, and producer Orson Welles; playwright and lyricist Maxwell Anderson; and playwright and director Clifford Odets.

In order to honor the early history to American theater, the Hall of Fame’s advisory council and executive committee had already selected 95 people from the period of 1860 to 1930 for posthumous membership.  This practice continues today, even as the number of new inductees has been reduced; deceased members of the theater professions are accorded membership in the Hall to honor their memories and past contributions.

The theater pros thus honored included actor Maude Adams; actor Judith Anderson; brother-and-sister dancer-actor-singers Fred and Adele Astaire; actor Tallulah Bankhead; producer, impresario, director, and playwright David Belasco; composer and lyricist Irving Berlin; playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer, and producer George M. Cohan; actor, writer, theater owner, and producer Katharine Cornell; comedian, actor, vaudevillian, and writer W. C. Fields; actor Lynn Fontanne; brothers composer George and lyricist Ira Gershwin; actor and playwright Ruth Gordon; actor Helen Hayes; lyricist Lorenz Hart (song-writing partner of Richard Rodgers); director and actor Alfred Lunt (husband and stage partner of Lynn Fontanne); lyricist, librettist, producer, and director Oscar Hammerstein II (song-writing partner of Richard Rodgers); composer Richard Rodgers (song-writing partner of Hammerstein and Hart); dramatist Eugene O'Neill; and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.

The 49th annual Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater induction was held on 18 November 2019 at the Gershwin, honoring actor André De Shields, actor-dancer Donna McKechnie, actor-choreographer Ann Reinking, Goodspeed Musicals founder Michael Price, director-playwright Emily Mann, lighting designer Natasha Katz, theatre critic Michael Feingold, and posthumously, playwright Thomas Meehan. 

The tradition is that each new Hall of Fame member is presented by a past honoree, giving rise to  a mix of humor, nostalgia, and sentiment.  (The evening has a host as well, a celebrity who’s not necessarily a member of a theatrical profession.)  The date for the 50th Annual Theater Hall of Fame ceremony has not been set—but it will be in November.  (A list of all members of the Theater Hall of Fame is on the Hall’s website: http://www.theaterhalloffame.org/members.html.)

The Theater Hall of Fame is entirely separate from ATCA, which only staffs the nominating committee and whose members are voters for the final honors, and is funded by individual contributions, private foundations, and event ticket and journal sales.  The Hall’s Executive Producer since 1989 is Terry Hodge Taylor (b. 1947), a theatrical and event producer. 

An annual Theater Hall of Fame Founders Award, established in 1993 in honor of the Hall’s three founders, recognizes an individual’s outstanding contribution to the theater.  The first award went to founder James M. Nederlander; the last award was given in 2009 to Shirley Herz, a Broadway production press representative.  

Since 2004, the Hall has held an annual Theater Hall of Fame Fellowship Luncheon to salute a member “who continues to work on Broadway and also presents grants to emerging theatre artists.”  The 16th annual luncheon will salute actor and singer Patti LuPone on 1 May 2020 at Sardi’s.  (The 2019 Theater Hall of Fame Fellowship Luncheon recognized Phil Smith, chairman of the Shubert Organization.)

The Hall of Fame also maintains several theater-oriented programs in support of the theater community.  The annual induction ceremony is videotaped and digitally reproduced, and copies are given to each inductee for their archives.  The Hall’s also established the Theater Hall of Fame Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center where the last 15 years of ceremony tapes are on reposit.  (The recordings can only be viewed at the Library for the Performing Arts.  Prior arrangements for viewing can be made by contacting the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive [TOFT] by calling 212-870-1642 or e-mailing toft@nypl.org.)

The Dorothy Strelsin Theater Hall of Fame Collection of theater memorabilia, made possible by contributions from the Dorothy Strelsin Foundation/Enid Nemy and Dame Celia Lipton Farris, is displayed on the second-floor lobby of the Gershwin Theatre. Twenty-two exhibit cases contain items donated by 60 Hall of Fame inductees.  

The Theater Hall of Fame Fellowship Program for Emerging Theater Artists provides $1000 grants to emerging theater artists. The grants are presented every June to selected artists during a luncheon at the New York Friars Club.  Theater Hall of Fame members select the grant recipients and since 2005, $25,000 in grants have been awarded..

The Theater Hall of Fame is the only national organization that honors the professionals of the American theater, as I noted.  It’s also the only commemoration of theater that’s in the New York City Theatre District itself.  (Museums like the Museum of the City of New York and repositories like the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts have large collections of theater memorabilia, which they periodically display, but they’re all located in areas of the city that are far from Times Square.) 

Few theatergoers probably even know that that the Theater Hall of Fame exists, much less that it’s at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway.  Furthermore, the only would-be visitors who could even see the plaques of honor or the memorabilia exhibits the Hall of Fame mounts, even if they did know that they’re there, are ticket-holders for whatever show is playing at the Gershwin (Wicked since 2003).  The general public doesn’t have access to the Theater Hall of Fame.  It’s like a show without an audience!

[A brief note of clarification: the Theater Hall of Fame is sometimes called the American Theater Hall of Fame (the Wikipedia page uses that as its head word, for example), but the correct, official title is simply Theater Hall of Fame. 

[Also note that the organization spells its name with the American form of  theater, though you will find the name written with the British spelling (theatre) both in print and on the ‘Net; that’s actually incorrect, as shown by the Hall’s own website (http://www.theaterhalloffame.org). 

[(The name of the Gershwin Theatre—and before that, the Uris Theatre—is correctly spelled the British way, as are the names of most Broadway houses.  The same is so of the Theatre District itself as well as Theatre Row, the strip of Off-Broadway houses along 42nd Street west of 9th Avenue.)

[Readers might also note that there are other organizations with similar names, such as the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, but they aren’t related.  There are also local and regional halls of fame, and some theaters compile their own lists of honor (the Apollo Theater Hall of Fame, for instance); some colleges and even high schools have theater halls of fame that will come up on Internet searches because of the similarity in names.  There remains, however, only one official Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the American theater.]