The Jewish Theatre Creating Contemporary Theatre for Over 30 Years

Traversing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Last Yiddish Poet

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

By Robert Avila

The great Langston Hughes titled a volume of his autobiography I Wonder as I Wander, invoking the notion of the poet in terms entirely personal and inevitably representative of a whole people, violently unsettled by history and restlessly searching for meaning, home, dignity — in short, for themselves. In Hughes’ art, this dovetailed with the image of the poet as blues singer and the blues singer as poet. His writing signaled that vernacular music as secular and sacred verse to a population caught up in forces larger than itself, but marked nevertheless by millions of singular experiences given individual voice in song.

The same themes of displacement and song run compellingly throughout the late August Wilson’s magisterial 10-play cycle of the African American 20th century, and rarely as forcefully as in 1988’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, currently receiving director Delroy Lindo’s fine, impressively cast production at the Berkeley Rep. But Hughes’ title applies readily to another great historical population as treated in another revival this month, making the stories evoked in Joe Turner and Traveling Jewish Theatre’s less successful The Last Yiddish Poet touchstones of broadly but pointedly similar significance.

Set in 1911 during the great migration of African Americans northward, Joe Turner’s action unfolds in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The setting is a boardinghouse operated by the basically decent but huffy Seth Holly (Barry Shabaka Henley) and his kindhearted wife, Bertha (Kim Staunton). Into this warm, burnished house comes a small assortment of transient borders, all more or less fresh from the South: the headstrong guitar player and manual laborer Jeremy (Don Guillory), the lovelorn Mattie (Tiffany Michelle Thompson), and the fiercely independent beauty Molly (Erica Peeples).

They join a more permanent lodger, pigeon-catching backyard shaman Bynum Walker (Brent Jennings). The Hollys are descendants of Northern freemen, but the others are a mere generation from slavery — possibly excepting Bynum, old enough to have been born a slave, and not counting the play’s lone white character, merchant Rutherford Selig (Dan Hiatt), who, as a descendant of slave catchers, has adapted unselfconsciously as a “people finder” among rootless African American migrants.

The main plot of Wilson’s evocative, earthy, and humor-laden tale of disunion, reunion, and fractured identities takes hold with the arrival of the grimly forlorn, vaguely menacing Herald Loomis (Teagle F. Bougere). Loomis’ story makes bitter sense of the play’s title, a blues lyric repeated throughout by Bynum and fashioned by Southern women whose men were disappeared and forced into labor by the infamous Joe Turner. Since his release from bondage, the anguished and haunted Loomis, a former deacon, has searched with trancelike focus for the mother of his shy daughter (Inglish Amore Hills, alternating with Nia Reneé Warren). The Hollys’ boardinghouse takes on the baleful aspect of Loomis‘ entombed soul as his violent outbursts of protest and revelation — and the mediating, ministering wisdom of the perspicacious, wondering Bynum — edge the play beyond naturalism toward a mythopoesis of half-submerged history.

The resurrection of history and half-buried tradition, as well as the literal voicing of experience and identity, is also at the center of The Last Yiddish Poet, an otherwise very different kind of play from Joe Turner. Originally produced by Traveling Jewish Theatre in 1980 and now revived to lead off its 30th-anniversary season, the production is aptly peripatetic in structure as well as theme: two actors in vaudevillian comic getup (artistic director Aaron Davidman and TJT cofounder Corey Fischer, also the play’s cocreator and half of the original cast) roam about a limbolike white-on-white set scattered with occasional detritus, most particularly and strikingly a pyramidal display at the far left of the stage on which a mound of books lie in disarray. The actors eventually mount a low stage within the stage, behind a row of modest footlights composed of painted tin cans, and amid knowing cornball lines they announce that they are speaking in “Yiddish” accents, despite not knowing Yiddish, so that the audience will recognize their Yankee selves as Jews.

What follows is a reclamation of the language as a search for identity and authenticity, in several dramatic and musical modes and moods and in struggle with manifold forces of history, from assimilation to persecution to the blunt inconstancy of time itself. Director, cocreator, and TJT cofounder Naomi Newman admits in her program notes that reentering the play after many years was not as easy as expected. Much has changed with respect to the place of Yiddish in Jewish lives. There is a quality of hesitation in the updated staging, which undermines some of its poignancy, although the awkwardness disappears at key moments, including Fischer’s hulking, half-masked portrayal of Nakhman — the rebbe known for contributions spiritual and literary in Yiddish — and second-generation TJT artist Davidman’s channeling of formerly unfamiliar Yiddish verses, in what amounts to an act of possession in at least two senses. *

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Traveling Jewish Theatre’s homage to Yiddish is nothing to kvetch about.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

By Nathaniel Eaton

Yiddish, in the perception of today’s popular culture, often seems to be an odd collection of endearment terms (bubbe, mensch) and, of course, a fun collection of complaints and insults (kvetch, bubkes, schmuck, feh!). Many words have slipped into everyday English vernacular (schlep, schlock, schmaltz, schmooze) and even into TV theme songs (remember the Laverne & Shirley theme, “Schlemiel, schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated”?).

For younger generations, Hebrew is most often considered the language of the Jewish people. Even just recently Aaron Davidman, artistic director of San Francisco’s Traveling Jewish Theatre, believed that “Yiddish was for bubbes in old age homes.” But it should be noted that at the start of the 20th century there were 11 million native speakers worldwide, according to the program notes.

To kick off its 30th season, Traveling Jewish Theatre is revisiting one of its first plays, an original script by co-founders Naomi Newman, Corey Fischer, and Albert Greenberg that Fischer said he wrote to “explore Yiddish without nostalgia, sentimentality, or trivialization.” It focuses on the notion of an archetypal “last” Yiddish poet wandering through an abridged history of the Jewish people, from the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai through the stereotype of the Jewish immigrant to the gassing of the Jews in Lublin, Poland. Even in covering this sometimes somber and troubling history, the play is grounded with a subtle sense of humor and almost-magical whimsy — much like the Yiddish language itself.

Fischer and Davidman spend much of their time onstage playing Jewish comedians with humorously enlarged noses and exaggerated accents, confronting and playing with stereotypes, and pulling out plenty of Marx Brothers physical shtick (hey, there’s a Yiddish word I use all the time). These bits, while a nice respite from the heavier material, feel somewhat forced and reflect a slapstick style from a long-ago era. They elicit smiles, but little laughter. This structure feels more like a Yiddish revue than a structured narrative, though that’s probably the point.

Much of the beauty and resonance of the play, as well as the spoken Yiddish, comes from Davidman’s assured and gentle portrayal of the Poet, and Fischer’s ominous and tired Nakhman (a historical Hasidic rabbi). One standout scene has these two characters at New York’s Cafe Royal, once a favorite hangout for Jewish intellectuals and artists, passionately writing poetry on napkins and hilariously attempting to compose a manifesto expanding the boundaries of Yiddish writing. Their dialogue, a fervent exchange of ideas woven into a tapestry of Yiddish and English, poetry and song, captures the true essence of this play — a beautiful celebration of a dying language’s life and soul.

Posted under Press, Reviews