The Yiddish King Lear

Through March 10 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Directed by Whitney Dibo. “Adapted, assembled and created” with Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski. Set: Brian Dudkiewicz. Lights: Chris Ash. CostumesL Elivia Bovenzi. Music Director: Dana Astmann. Sound: Ken Goodwin. Assistant Sound Designer: Jacob Riley. Producer: DeDe Jacobs0Komisar. DramaturgL Lauren Dubowski. Stage ManagerL: Rob Chikar. Musicians: Gazlanim Fun Klezmer (Tess Isaac, Martha Kaufman and Elizabeth Kim). Performed by Bill DeMeritt (Reb Dovidl), Khane Leah (DeDe Jacobs-Komisar for Thursday and Saturday performances, Lauren Dubowski on Friday), Alex Trow (Tabele), Chris Bannow (Yaffe), Prema Cruz (Etele), Benjamin Fainswtein (Avrom Harif), Mamoudou Athie (Moyshe Hasid), Tanya Dan (Gitele) and Matt McCollum (Trytel).

Here’s how Stefan Kanfer’s book Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (Knopf, 2006) describes the original production of Jacob Gordin’s The Yiddish King Lear, and how in rehearsals the great Yiddish theater actor Jacob  Adler had to overcome the skepticism from other cast members about the merits of Gordin’s newfangled ideas.

Adler’s faith was justified. From the first reading he moved the cast away from cheap laughs and overstated melodrama. Gordin had told him all abou the naturalism of the new European drama, and Jacob strove for that kind of intense effect. …

The Yiddish Theater would never be the same. Gordin’s Lear had reached the public in a way that no spectacle, no operetta or facile melodrama could possibly have done.

The Yale Cabaret has now taken the daring step of restoring the cheap laughs and overstated melodrama. They play Gordin’s script broadly and cut it so that the plot into something approaching Grand Guignol. They keep all the action to one dining-room set, excising some famous scenes set on the mean streets and in a synagogue. They enlist a live three-piece Klezmer band for a lively soundtrack and sound effects. They’ve added plants in the audience to act as aggressively involved groundlings, commenting excitedly on the action as it occurs and punching the laughs prompted by the many insult jokes in the production (“At least I can grow a beard!”). There is a Purim Play-within-a-play, and that is even more overacted.

By doing so, they suggest that this is what the Yiddish theater in late 19^th century New York must have been like.

I have my doubts about that, but I can also appreciate the risks and experimental assaults involved here.

Mocking the old-fashioned dynamics of an old-fashioned script may not seem daring, but I say it is because of how easily this style parody could slip into an area which also makes fun of the ethnic culture associated with the drama.

Yet the Cabaret cast is largely able to stick with theatrical stereotypes—the Jon Lovitz “Master Thespian” school of overacting—without overdoing the ethnic stereotypes at the same time. It’s a fine line, and a funny one.

Still, Jacob Gordin’s 1892 script does not fare well in this production. It’s done as a heavy handed imitation of the naturalist and modernist styles then sweeping Europe, and the merriment, by extension, mocks Gordin’s audiences by suggesting that it would have been hard for anyone to ever have taken this drama seriously. In fact, the original script is no more ridiculous than many earnest adaptations of Shakespearean themes. Not technically an update or a modern revision, it’s a contemporary drama in which the patriarch of a Jewish family does a series of stubborn and foolish things, enduring the consequences and finally earning a happy ending. Gordin even has one of the characters tell the lead character that he’s been behaving exactly like King Lear, which is sort of a leap for this sort of thing: nobody told Steve Martin in Roxanne that he was acting just like Cyrano de Bergerac.

In the role originated by Jacob Adler (father of Luther Adler and Stella Adler, who as actors and teachers themselves carried some of Jacob’s acting techniques straight through the 20^th century), Bill DeMeritt is less inclined than some of his castmates to fall into style parody and easy laughs. He plays the tragedy straight, which in this largely comical context becomes parodic in a self-serious way. The rest of the cast shorthand their characters to drunken useless husbands (Mamoudou Athie, nursing bottle after bottle), shrewish wives (Prema Cruz, as Etele, who’s both Regan and Goneril at once) and spotlessly pure young lovers (Alex Trow, in the Cordelia mold).

I’m going to wrestle with this one for a while. I’ve never thought it fair to poke fun at older theater conventions simply because they engaged the audience so viscerally.

Yes, audiences yelled back at theater actors a century ago, and shouted out the plot points in advance. Do we not scream the same way at our televisions now?

There is an undercurrent of sympathy in this production—the supporting cast of those not playing the actors but the audience members and backstage staff of the Yiddish theater relate personal stories of how much going to the theater meant to them in that age of sweatshops and segregation. The statements are drawn from interviews done by Nahma Sandrow at the Workmen’s Circle Home for the Aged.

But the sensitivity, strangely, doesn’t extend to The Yiddish King Lear itself, a play that had a hearty life in community theaters for decades after Gordin wrote it and which is considered a milestone of the Yiddish theater movement. Ultimately, it’s no harder to do a cheesy, overacted, funny-on-purpose production of The Yiddish King Lear than it would be to do one of Shakespeare’s King Lear itself. I like a good laugh as much as the next guy, and there are plenty to be had here, but I guess I’m still groping for the point.

…from the invaluable syndicated-strip sites Daily Ink (http://dailyink.com/) and Go Comics (http://www.gocomics.com). The pair at the end are from Tom Gammill’s The Doozies, one of my fave new strips of the past decade.

Brian Willetts, waiting for Lefty along with the rest of the New Haven Theatre Company through March 3.

Waiting for Lefty
Presented by New Haven Theater Company through March 3 at 118 Court St., New Haven. http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/show/waiting-for-lefty
By Clifford Odets. Directed by Steve Scarpa.Performed by Rick Bean, Hilary Brown, Megan Keith Chenot, Peter Chenot, Jeremy Funke, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Hallie Martenson, Jeannette McDunnah, Ben Michalak, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith and Brian Willetts.

Waiting for Lefty is underestimated. It’s shorthanded as agitprop and propaganda, but it’s more complex and realistic and, well, dramatic than that. It’s direct, sure, but it’s intended for audiences distrustful of highflown rhetoric. Heck, it’s about seeing through the corruption and stalling tactics of leaders who wrongly insist we can trust them.

Waiting for Lefty wears its union label on its sleeve, but the drama here is not about forming a union, it’s about reforming one. A union meeting is held among New York cabbies in the early 1930s. Their well-heeled leaders urging the membership not to strike, to accept their low wages and mistreatment. One of them is named Fatt, straight out of a political cartoon; the slender actor George Kulp here doesn’t match Odets’ description of Fatt as “a fat man of porcine appearance” but he conveys insufferable greed and smugness in other ways.

The other characters in this morality play come off as more contrived than stereotyped. But that’s the joy of the exercise. Clifford Odets—in the piece that cut short his career as a struggling actor and made him an overnight success as a playwright for the American method-acting pioneers at the Group Theatre—lays it on pretty thick. In one of the vignettes in this ingeniously structured show—the meeting dissolves dreamlike into scenes of tense homelife and desperation brought on by the cabbies’ poverty and uncertainty—we meet a scientist who’s being asked, by evil corporate overlords, not just to spy on his colleagues but help them develop a poison gas for warfare—plus his brother was killed in the last war! In another set piece, an impoverished man has nothing left to stand on, including his dignity—and his wife reminds him that there’s nothing to sit on either, as their furniture has just been repossessed. A guy doesn’t just need a job—he’s a newlywed with a baby on the way.

Indignity upon indignity upon indignity is dramatized. It’s undeniably rousing when the characters finally accept that they’ve lost enough. We don’t see the fight back, just experience the epiphany. It’s more than enough.

Waiting for Lefty was being called dated as early as 1939, in Harold Clurman’s introduction to an anthology of Odet’s first six plays. Well, it may be more “dated” than Rocket to the Moon, which got an inspired production at the Long Wharf Theatre a few years ago, but is doubtless less dated than Till the Day I Die, the play which Odets wrote as a companion piece to Waiting for Lefty when a move to Broadway beckoned and a longer evening was required.

By that time (June of 1935), Waiting for Lefty was already a community theater phenomenon, and that’s where its legacy lies. All the triumphant ovations came with the play’s small-stage manifestations; Broadway audiences treated it as a curiosity.

The last time I saw it in New Haven, around the time of a Yale strike in the early ‘90s, it was done with a cast of punks at the Tune Inn rock club. Local productions of Waiting for Lefty date back to the show’s very beginnings, when its premiere (as part of a benefit for the League of Workers Theatres in New York) had such an immediate impact that Odets released the performance rights so that community theaters could do it around the country, months before received a full New York production. As Wendy Smith writes in Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940:

It was the most widely performed play in America—and the most widely banned … Although the John Reed Club’s Unity Players won first prize with it at Yale, the production was banned gfrom a New Haven high school auditorium by the School Building Committee of the Board of Education, which found it unfit to be seen in public schools. The New Haven police then turned around an allowed the use of another local school building for a fascist meeting.

I’ve seen Waiting for Lefty three different times in my life, always by itself. It’s a short evening but a full one. New Haven Theatre Company lengthens theirs somewhat by restoring a scene cut from the original show, in which an actor begs a distracted producer for the chance to play a soldier in a new Broadway show. It’s a scene at odds with most of the other pieces in the play because it introduces elements of frivolity and vanity which are at odds with the desperation and distress elsewhere. There’s humor and pathos and suspense and romance and all that good theatrical stuff, but it’s the earthy urgency which provides the momentum, and when the surroundings get slicker that momentum is lost.

Steve Scarpa directs the show—appropriately enough, in a unrented storefront at 118 Court Street, environment of a depressed economy—with a sure organizer’s hand. The cast performs on two distinct platforms—including the audience in the union meeting rabble-rousing, then leaping into a pit behind that stage for the flashbacks. It’s a hardy, sweaty cast, quick with the improvisations while they stand around waiting for somebody to do something. Jeremy Funke and Peter Chenot are particularly good at adding “beleaguered” and “weary” to the general busted-and-downtrodden palette. There are some great fiery roles for women as longsuffering wives and girlfriends (Hallie Martenson gives the most believably indignant performance in the whole cast), though the cross-gender casting of Megan Chenot in the role of a Jewish doctor seems overmuch in this 1930s milieu; too much being discriminated against, even for Odets.

J. Kevin Smith (right) pressures Jeremy Funke in the New Haven Theatre Company's production of Waiting for Lefty.

Scarpa smooths the transitions from stage to stage by having a bowler-hatted troubadour, Ben Michalak, strum union songs such as “Joe Hill” and “I’m Stickin’ With the Union” on banjo.

Scarpa also gives himself the plum role of Agate Kelly (a part originated by the unsung Group Theatre stalwart Joe Bromberg), who sums up the show with a call to action.

It rouses, all right. This show only doesn’t work if you overthink it. Just like you shouldn’t overthink doing the right thing, or helping out your fellow workers, or standing up against the greedy and tyrannical and underhanded. The struggling workers wait for Lefty throughout this show. You don’t have to.

Chamber Music

Through March 3 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org.

Directed by Katie McGerr. Set Designer: Chris Ash. Lighting Designer: Oliver Watson. Sound Designer: Matt Otto. Costume Designer: Carmen Martinez. Dramaturg: Elliot B. Quick. Fight Choreographer: Fisher Neal. Producers: Jenny Lagundino and Carmen Zilles. Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan. Cast: Sophie von Haselberg (Woman Who Plays Records), Michelle McGregor (Woman With Notebook), Mariko Nakasone (Woman in Gossamer Dress), Monique Barbee (Woman in Aviatrix’s Outfit), Ceci Fernandez (Woman in Queenly Spanish Garb), Marissa Neitling (Woman in Armor), Ashton Heyl (Woman With Gavel), Fisher Neal (Man in White), Mitchell Winter (Man in White’s Assistant).

Funny that there’d be a small theater production of Waiting for Lefty (by New Haven Theatre Company, ending tonight at 118 Court Street) the same weekend as a staging of Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music. Both shows have an old civil-rights appeal to them, an eternal relevance coupled with the presumption that things have gotten better and that maybe we shouldn’t need these plays anymore.

Chamber Music calls a meeting among a group of women outfitted as iconic historical characters of several centuries: Amelia Earhart, Queen Isabella of Spain, Joan of Arc, Gertrude Stein, silent-movie cliffhangress Pearl White, et cetera. Caryl Churchill pulled a similar trick 20 years later with Top Girls, which like Chamber Music is an allegory for how societies and governments discriminate against women. Chamber Music is the shallower of the two plays, with the more obvious message: women aren’t taken seriously. They’re left alone, and when they excel, they’re misunderstood. The celebrities on view here are shown to be inmates in a mental health clinic, scheming to break out. One of them, the Amelia Earhart (played with glaring grace by Monique Barbee, who portrayed the fallen film star in another ‘60s project at the Cabaret recently, Bergman’s Persona), insists she is not insane. The others are more complacent, as long as they get to interact with each other. The dialogue is full of justifications and quiet exasperations: “It is a difficult era, this one in which we live.”

The theme of Kopit’s one-act still works fine. The play is hampered, however, by plot devices which were still novel in the early ‘60s but come off as clichéd now, the most prominent being the crutch of tying up the plot with an outrageous act of violence (a la Zoo Story and countless other one-acts of the turbulent mid-20^th century). At the Cabaret, director Katie McGerr sidesteps this obviousness beautifully by creating a moment of David Lynchian poetic madness: “Look at the snow.”

The feel for frantic fantasy here gives the play new life, but McGerr’s already nailed it by staging Chamber Music in the round, with the audience surrounding the central meeting table. There’s a sense of these exceptional women being on show, or in an observation hall, or a zoo.

Then there are the animated performances. Much of the humor lies in the juxtaposition of these famous women and their attitudes—Pearl White (Mariko Nakasone, exuding wide-eyed wonder) genuflecting to Queen Isabella, Gertrude Stein(Michelle McGregor, finding the gravity) stammering out the minutes of the last minutes repetitively to the others’ dismay, Constanze Mozart (muse of Amadeus, portrayed with touching shyness by Sophie von Haselberg) wanting to romanticize the meeting with music and light.

I’ve seen Chamber Music done as talky and withdrawn, and I’ve seen it done as sheer chaos with a profusion of comic props. There can be a middle ground, and McGerr and her cast find it. Marissa Neitling’s Woman in Armor (aka St. Joan) tramps around with a huge wooden crucifix, an inspired post-modern comedy gag of Kopit’s, but the other characters are distinguished mostly by elaborate costumes and a stately, settled nonchalance.

This show can get shouty very quickly in the wrong hands. Here, it has the clipped articulation of another large-cast female ensemble work, Clare Booth Luce’s The Women. There are stand-outs among the cast, but the piece is best appreciated for how well the company works together, and what a useful introduction it is to several of the fresher faces in the Yale School of Drama acting corps, whose first year ranks are just getting their first chances to be in Cabaret shows.

I’ve seen some very youthful casts take on Chamber Music—it was done a few years ago by New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts magnet high school, for instance (with the esteemed Kopit actually visiting the school to lend his insights). Young actors invariably conjure a sense of dress-up and pretend. This cast, while collegiate, strives for a maturity and balance and wisdom befitting the play’s title—even if the playwright doesn’t permit them to find harmony.

From an interview with Ian McCulloch of British post-punk ‘80s hitmakers Echo & The Bunnymen, in the current issue (#220) of MOJO magazine:

And those European tours in 1980-81—that was the real Bunnymen—in bars after the gig, where it was open all night, with some narky barman, where you started learning really how to drink properly, and be who you are properly. Just the sound of it, the life, the accents, especially the French language—that was the perfume to me, the drug of choice. And that’s where I got stuff like The Killing Moon from. I woke up with that lyric, “Fate up against your will,” as if God had given it to me in my sleep. Recently, I realized what it is—it’s that soliloquoy, ‘To be or not to be’—but it’s even better, because I’m fuckin’ singing it.

Late-night runs. Openly experimental rehearsal periods. Testing their limits and working outside the disciplines where they’re most comfortable. Piling projects upon projects.

That’s how Becca Wolff and Jacob Padron behaved when they were running the Yale Cabaret a few seasons ago as students at the Yale School of Drama. And that’s how they still operate.

Despite working in different cities—Padron is the Associate Producer of the famed Steppenwolf company in Chicago (where he is in charge of the company’s Garage space) and Wolff is the Artistic Director of the IAMA Theatre Company in Los Angeles, where she also works with the Rubicon Group—the erstwhile classmates have formed a new theater company, Tilted Field, involving a number of other recent Yale alums. Tilted Field Productions has a workshop up in L.A. right now, three other shows is development, and countless others in the works.

The Yale Cabaret is now over 40 years old, with regular periods of change, growth, new traditions and strongly-felt influences. For the last few years the Cabaret (which changes its artistic and managerial leadership every school year) has exhibited a particularly strong interest in new works, new presentational formats and new methods of developing and rehearsing shows. A lot of that can be traced back to Becca Wolff and Jacob Padron’s year at the helm. Padron, who was Managing Director to Wolff’s Artistic Director, remembers it well. “Something happened midyear—we knew we were encountering something very special. We knew we wanted to be committed to new work, and we decided we also wanted to encourage students to work outside their discipline.” At Wolff and Padron’s Cabaret, acting students became directors, directors could be designers, designers could act. “It was an exciting and very special season,” Padron says. “One night, sitting on the floor at the Cabaret, we said ‘Let’s continue this’”

That was the unofficial start of what is now Tilted Field Productions. “It was a slow burn,” the story continues. Padron graduated from Yale in 2007, Wolff a year later. He went off to work for three years at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, while she finished school (her senior thesis was a production of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers), did some shows in New York, then headed back to her California homeland.

The pair continued to talk about their goals, and in 2010 finally established Tilted Field. “We wanted to always point back to the Cabaret, and use the same collaborators. It’s an ensemble based company. What we decided,” Wolff says, was that the most important thing was to find ways to continue working with these people we’d developed a real relationship with. It’s a testament to where we come from, whether the [Drama] school or the Cabaret.”

Tilted Field now has four projects in active development, in several different cities. Furthest along is The Last Days of Mary Stuart. A workshop production of the “Romantic epic” royal rock opera began in mid-February at the Son of Semele space on Beverly Blvd. in L.A. The three-weekend workshop has three final performances this weekend: Friday and Saturday at 11 p.m. and Sunday at 8 p.m.

The script is original, with dialogue and lyrics by Wolff and music by Byron Kahr and John Nixon, whose band TONY plays live alongside the three-person cast of Charlotta Mohlin (as Mary), Meagan Prahl (Elizabeth) and Alex Knox, the Yale alum who created the mime-like show EYE, as Paulet. But The Last Days of Mary Stuart was inspired by a play by the same controversial 18th century playwright/philosopher/provocateur who’d penned The Robbers, Friedrich Schiller.

“There’s something Jacobean-tragedy about it,” Wolff says of the Schiller play. “The arguments are very beautifully worded. Great onstage conflicts.

“Over the years, this was a project developed on the back burner. Then I met a band, and thought of it as a rock musical.” Co-composer Kahr was actually at Yale Law School while Wolff was attending the School of Drama, while drummer Nixon, Wolff says, “as a kid, was a musical theater fiend.”

Grand foundations on which to build a new work. “The band did the score,” Wolff says, “I would bring in the lyrics, and they would tailor them to be more of a rock song. We originally tried to set a scene from the Schiller play, but it was not fun to sing. So we took the central theme from the scene and built a chorus around it. It’s down to ‘inspired by’ about the Schiller. It’s gone pretty far from that text at this point.

One of Wolff’s key projects at the Yale Cabaret also happened to be a musical—Bicycling for Ladies, a historical piece set in New Haven which examined some freedom and dangers which grew out of turn-of-the-century urban industrialization. The show, which featured a radical female Elm City bicyclist, was also given a staged reading atop New Haven’s East Rock during a city biking festival. Wolff’s collaborator on Bicycling for Ladies, playwright Dorothy Fortenberry, is providing dramaturgical help on Tilted Field projects. Another Yale School of Drama grad, Michael Locher, designed the set for Mary Stuart.

The workshop will be recorded, which certainly helps when other Tilted Field company members are living several states away. “Becca sent me mp3s of the songs as they were being done,” says Jacob Padron. “That was my entry into this work. I’m very focused on the marketing part of it.”

Other Tilted Field projects currently in development include a modern California-based adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, titled Species Native to California; The Orange Project, set designer Locher’s “visual adaptation of a novel by a celebrated Mexican author”; and Baby Loves Robot by Terea Avia Lim, who graduated in 2009 from the Yale School of Drama acting program (having blown a few minds as The Caretaker’s Wife in Ghost Sonata, Wang in Man = Man and Agave in The Bacchae).
The long-distance relationships at the core of Tilted Field don’t faze Wolff and Padron. “We want to become a national company, with a national presence. We’re L.A.-based, but the ensemble’s just spread out all over. We’re dedicated to the slow burn, committed to our structure.”

Considering that they’re modeling their company on one of the longest-running, versatile and consistently experimental small theaters in America, the Yale Cabaret, that commitment’s worthwhile.

Long may they tilt.

Najla Said in her one-woman show Palestine, being presented this Saturday at 2 p.m. in Engleman Hall on the SCSU campus in New Haven. Photo by the show's director, Sturgis Warner.

Palestine is an autobiographical solo theater piece, written and performed by Najla Said with the directorial and dramaturgical input of Sturgis Warner. On the road, where it’s been a hit at liberal colleges, it’s become something of a rallying point, a place to share insights about modern Middle Eastern culture.

“I wrote it as a play,” Said explains, “and did it as a production at New York Theatre Workshop in 2010, for an eight-week run. I had wanted to continue doing a run, but even before I went into rehearsals I had been approached by colleges about doing it.”

“It’s about discovering my identity—me as a little girl until now, in my 30s, coming to terms with being Arab-American. So it has a strong connection with that [college student] age group. One college after another picked up on it, and it became like a second job. I travel a lot. Luckily, it’s a very portable show.”

Palestine comes to New Haven March 3 when Said gives a 2 p.m. afternoon presentation at Engleman Hall Room C112 on the Southern Connecticut State University campus, 501 Crescent St., New Haven. The event is co-sponsored by the Middle East Crisis Committee and the SCSU Women’s Studies Program. Tickets are $25, $10 for students. Advance tickets are on sale at http://mecc.thestruggle.org/NSPALESTINE

Saturday’s performance is the play’s Connecticut premiere. Throughout March, Said is “doing Palestine in like 20 different places,” mostly colleges.

The single-performance college gigs aren’t quite the same as Palestine’s original New York run, she explained in a phone chat Tuesday night. But the changes have more to do with time, place and audience than with her performance. “The shows are different, but very very similar. It’s intense to do, physically intense. When I was performing it every night, it was exhausting. Now, it’s a little more like a staged reading. I have the book [script] with me, on a music stand.”

Don’t worry, Said isn’t phoning it in. “I wrote it, so I’ve basically been off book the whole time,” she says. Plus, Palestine never really had sets or props in the first place. “The difference is that I don’t use the whiole stage space. This version is the same thing as the [NYTW] version, except that the [playing area] is 4 feet by 4 feet by instead of 12 feet by 12 feet.”

Najla Said in Palestine. Photo by Sturgis Warner.

“There’s less lighting. And the Q&A sessions afterward make it very different. College audiences ask certain questions that other audiences don’t.

“Since it’s about growing up in New York, specifically about a Lebanese-American growing up in Brooklyn, audiences in other places react differently to it. I recently performed at a boy’s school in Boston, and they didn’t get the references at all. I think they were a little afraid to laugh, or react strongly. But they seemed to enjoy it.

“I originally did want to do it as a regular theater piece, but now I want to do it this way, at colleges.”

Najla Said has been acting for 15 years, and continues to field a variety of other roles while continuing to tour Palestine.

In 2006, she starred in Heather Raffo’s one-woman tour-de-force about Iraqi women, 9 Parts of Desire, at Seattle Repertory Theatre, which felt “very different, but I felt I knew these Middle Eastern women and wanted to give them a voice. It inspired and encouraged me to tell more stories myself.”

Said does a lot of playreadings, not just in New York but in Boston and elsewhere. She’s debuting a new one-act in New York this spring. In May, she’ll be at the Brighton Festival, appearing opposite Vanessa Redgrave in Redgrave’s adaptation of A World I Loved: Story of an Arab Woman, a memoir written by Najla Said’s grandmother Wadad Makdisi Cortas.

Said’s fortunes as an actor, improved, she says, “since 9/11, when there started being a lot of opportunities to play Arabs. It became a more prominent part of what Middle Eastern actors were asked to do. It becomes limiting, and makes you want to develop your own show.

… and develop it further. “From doing this play, I got a book contract from Riverhead Books for a memoir. So I’m turning it into an actual book.”

The subject matter of Palestine is provocative, even with Said’s careful, personalized touch. Have there been any outbursts or confrontations at performances? “No! No strong reactions like that. I’m sure there are people who’ve hated it, because of my style or whatever, but much less for any political reasons. Which kind of shocks me. I spent my whole life being apolitical, not even wanting to go into this.”

Some of that reticence was due to not wanting to be in the shadow of her late father Edward W. Said—critic, author of Orientalism, Columbia Professor and one of the world’s foremost advocates for Palestinian rights.

Najla Said eased into doing the show by “just being completely honest with myself, just talking about the Middle East. I approached the writing as if I were just talking to people. I’m a New Yorker who talks a lot, neurotically babbles, a child of Woody Allen. Someone said to me, ‘This is a very Jewish play.’”

“I was raised as a humanist. I approach everything as that. I acknowledge Jewish suffering.”

And she takes questions following the performance.

Najla Said's Palestine. Photo by Sturgis Warner.

Last Thursday’s presentation by the Play in a Day ensemble at Never Ending Books was Karel Capek’s The Insect Play. As is the case with all Play in a Day project, the script is not picked until I get a gander at the potential cast. Then we adapt and stage the thing in three hours.

Faced with a large all-female cast, I couldn’t come up with anything involving fairies, so settled for Capek’s butterflies. We deliberately softened all the bloodthirstier material—the beheadings, the battles…

Above is an outtake of the final scene. Complete show (and many other Play in a Day productions) can be found on this site’s designated Play in a Day page.

Lucky Bruce—A Literary Memoir

By Bruce Jay Friedman (Biblioasis, 2011)

I’m more excited by Bruce Jay Friedman writing a memoir than I am by him writing another play or novel. The guy’s in his 80s now, and he no longer radiates bleakness and self-defeat. Perversely, he’s into acknowledging accomplishments, honoring friends (Terry Southern, Mario Puzo) and memorializing fallen institutions. Friedman was a regular at Elaine’s restaurant from the time when it was a haven for struggling writers right through the time that it was an internationally known celebrity hotspot; his own rise as a writer mirrored the rise of his favorite hang-out and watering hole.

The book is full of backhanded compliments, but at least he grants himself them. He feels bad about his first marriage, a long loveless chapter of his life, but notes that his sons have said he was a good dad nevertheless.

Friedman has a way of downplaying his talents. Two of his most famous works he describes as stuff he just tossed off—he wrote the short story which became the film The Heartbreak Kid in a half hour as an exercise, he says, and dashed off the script for Stir Crazy because he’d forgotten he’d been contracted to write it until the film was about to be shot.

Yet he’s proud when others acknowledge his literary gifts. He glories in Neil Simon, when asked why he didn’t do more literary adaptations, responding “I only adapt Friedman.” (Simon did the screenplays for The Heartbreak Kid and The Lonely Guy, both based on Friedman stories.)

I like Friedman’s style, and always have. When I was a teenager and reading anything that seemed counterculture, the Anthology of Black Humor which Friedman compiled was a godsend. I discovered his fiction when I was a camp counselor in Maine; a paperback collection of his short stories couldn’t stand it on the camp library shelf with all that Sidney Sheldon anymore and leapt out at me.

I probably like his plays the most, and am pleased Friedman identifies as a playwright as readily as he does as a novelist. Scuba Duba and Steambath are both layered, deep actor-magnets that reward a variety of interpretations, but they’re also clear and focused and direct and threatrical and nice to average audiences. Likewise, his backstage stories in Lucky Bruce aren’t forced or starstruck. They’re earnest and eager. He enjoys the playmaking process, all of it.

The title of this book could be seen as a twist on the name “Lenny Bruce,” and indeed Friedman expresses a great admiration of that singular stand-up philosopher. He recounts getting paid a large sum of money to “think about” writing the screenplay for a film about Lenny Bruce, admitting that he had no intention of actually writing such a thing, out of respect and awe.

Some of this material has been uttered elsewhere—in the essay “My Life Among the Stars” from Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos: Best Non-Fiction, for example. But it’s fully rethought and reconstituted here. Individual chapters go off in their own directions, and central characters disappear for long stretches, but there’s nonetheless a flow, and a glow. Friedman’s in a good mood about his long, adventurous life with a pen. He’s feeling lucky, and sharing his good fortune for once rather than his neurotic trepidations.

Mark Nelson as he appeared in the Long Wharf production of Underneath the Lintel. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

We know one member of the cast of the season-ending production of My Name is Asher Lev at the Long Wharf Theatre. This is the show which replaced Sophie’s Choice on the Long Wharf schedule. It runs May 2-27 on the theater’s mainstage.

Mark Nelson is doing the “father” and “artist” roles in Aaron Posner’s three-actor, multi-character, 90-minute adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel about art, fame and faith. The production will be directed by Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein.

If Long Wharf had a Hall of Fame, Nelson would be in it for his yeoman’s work in productions as diverse as Theresa Rebeck’s Abstract Expression (directed by Greg Leaming in 1998), Shaw’s Arms and the Man (directed by Leaming in 2001), and Edelstein’s rethought modern A Doll’s House in 2010. The photo above is of Mark Nelson in Glen Berger’s one-man religious odyssey Underneath the Lintel, directed by Eric Ting on Long Wharf Stage II in 2006.

Nelson’s New York resume is just as broad, from Neil Simon and Steve Martin comedies to Ibsen, Chekhov and the tour-de-force I Am My Own Wife. (I also have fond memories of a production of Kaufman & Lardner’s June Moon that Nelson directed Off Broadway in 1997.)

Long Wharf has always utilized Mark Nelson well. He’s a consummate ensemble player, and always makes a role his own. This name in the cast for My Name is Asher bodes very well for the show as a whole.