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Feuding Psychoanalysts, I.B. Singer And A Few Clowns
Edward Einhorn organized The Festival of Jewish Theater and Ideas, which began this week and runs through June 14. by Eric Herschthal “What’s the connection?” Einhorn asked, sitting at a café before a rehearsal for a play of his that will also be performed. “I’m not really sure I have an answer, pre-festival,” but maybe it had something to do with the Talmud, he said. “Discussion and questioning is so important to Jewish heritage.” That might 
Still, Einhorn insists some bigger picture will emerge. That’s what happened when his theater company, Untitled Theater Company #61, which is hosting the new festival, staged the Vaclav Havel Festival three years ago: “Each play sort of built off each other and they were meshing,” he said. “In the end, you had a portrait of something” — freedom, revolution, steely resolve — the tenets of the Velvet Revolution, he said. Einhorn has also staged festivals about neuroscience, Eugene Ionesco and a sort of guerrilla theater riff where people write, rehearse and perform plays in less than 24 hours. Like this new festival, Einhorn’s play “Doctors Jane and Alexander” will combine many of these interests. The play is inspired by his mother’s recollections of her father, the famous scientist Alexander S. Wiener, who discovered the Rh factor in blood. The discovery led to a new type of blood transfusion that prevented the deaths of innumerable infants. But it also created in Wiener’s descendants a constant sense of failure, feeling as though they could never match what he had done. Edward’s mother Jane earned her doctorate in psychology, but nevertheless always felt inferior. “It’s really about how one’s parents’ and grandparents’ achievements shape their children’s expectations,” he said. “It’s about dealing with not achieving that success.” In the play, Jane recounts her story to a fictionalized version of Einhorn, whose play is an explicit retelling of his own family tale. After his mother suffered from a recent stroke, Einhorn began recording interviews about her life. “It was hard for her to talk about the present, but the past was a way to connect,” he said. Those interviews form the backbone of the play, with many of the lines taken directly from the transcribed recordings. The play also required Einhorn to delve deeper into his grandfather’s life, dredging through boxes of journals, memoirs, scores — Wiener was an amateur composer, too — and newspaper clippings written about him. In a recent visit to a rehearsal, actors could be seen practicing an operetta interlude based on a comic strip written about Wiener, while musicians practiced the live music arranged from his scores. “You find a ways to use it,” Einhorn said later, explaining how he managed to pull together all his archival material into a play. Stephen Ringold is another playwright — and professional clown — included in the festival. His performances of three I.B. Singer stories, “A Village of Fools,” uses his own company The Grand Falloons, made up by several Big Apple Circus-trained clowns who will double as puppeteers. (They’ll be dressed in shtetl costumes, not as clowns.) Ringold said he had been working on his script for a few years, and had only staged it once previously, when Einhorn accepted his submission. Despite its comic antics, Ringold’s trilogy is actually quite serious. “Zlateh the Goat,” (the story is the title one in one of Singer’s most popular children’s books) tells the story of a destitute shtetl family whose father asks his son to kill his pet goat in order to feed the family. Warm weather has destroyed the father’s furrier business, but after he orders his son to go to the goat’s stable, a violent snowstorm leaves the boy stranded. The father thinks his child is dead, and that he’s responsible for it. “It’s near Tolstoy proportions,” Ringold said. “That’s the worst tragedy in the world — not only the death of a child but the responsibility of that death.” (Spoiler alert: The child actually survives by drinking the goat’s milk, which also provides enough to feed the entire family. The goat lives, too.) What attracted Ringold to “Zlateh” (the book, published in 1966, is illustrated by Maurice Sendak) were paintings by Chaim Soutine, which he was looking at for an art exhibit his company was commissioned to stage a performance for. “Immediately, I thought, let’s do some Singer fairy tales with a real Soutine sensibility.” The earthen colors and elongated figures, a hallmark of Soutine’s work, reminded him of the gothic undertones of Singer’s stories, he said. And in the plays, the near-life-size puppets show an uncanny resemblance to Soutine’s art. Though 75 plays were submitted for the festival, and only 15 made the cut, puppet theater set to Singer stories might seem a more obvious choice than others. After all, selling tickets to a play about Freud might not be as easy. But that’s what Henry Akona’s play “Scenes from a Misunderstanding” is about; or, more specifically, Freud’s disagreement with Carl Jung, a student of his who later became another leader in psychoanalytic thought. When asked if there might be some difficulty writing a play about heady ideas — a question no doubt raised for all the festival’s plays — Akona said not at all. “Freud was a tremendous character,” he said. Plus, the dispute between the two focus as much on Jung’s sexual advances on another Freud student as it did on the differences between their interpretations of dreams. “People think, ‘Freud, Jung, it’s gonna be this dense intellectual play.’ But it’s not, it’s funny,” Akona said, though he conceded there were some challenges getting his actors to hit the right comic notes: “I compare it to a Viennese pastry; sometimes it’s very possible to have beautiful pastry taste like lead.” (He assured theater-goers his play wouldn’t.) Conspicuously absent from the festival are plays about the Holocaust. Only one of the 15 shows, Carolyn Dorfman’s “The Legacy Project: Echoes,” deals with it, and even then, it’s just one part in an evening of dance performances. Einhorn said it was not the result of any particular bias, but that “there was nothing deep enough in the realm of thought” from what was submitted. While Jewish shows on New York’s most high-profile stages sometimes seem dominated by the Holocaust — “Irena’s Vow” on Broadway, “The Singing Forest” at The Public — the festival’s choice of plays may actually provide a wider view of Jewish life today. “We didn’t have a discussion about it,” said David Chack, president of the Association for Jewish Theatre, which is sponsoring the festival, when asked about the lack of Holocaust shows. “We just chose the best plays,” he said, adding that all the plays seem to get at “what it means to be Jewish in a multicultural world.” That’s not to say the festival will shy away from controversy. When “Hard Love,” by the noted Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, gets staged, audiences will get a tough look at the divide between secular and Orthodox Israelis. Lerner wrote the play in Hebrew in 2001, and after recently translating it has been having it performed around the United States. Using a broken marriage as a metaphor for Israeli society, it focuses on a husband who loses faith and divorces his religious wife. When the play was performed in Israel in 2003, Lerner said he invited a group of Orthodox Jews to see it, but they refused. He said they took issue with a nude painting hanging in one set, and after he agreed to take it down, they wanted him to avoid having men and women touch each other. Though he makes his personal views clear — “I’m atheist,” he said, and he feels religion’s flaw is “its claims to have so many certainties” — he does not intend to demean the religious. “It’s a call for the audience to try to create coexistence,” he said, noting that in the play the couple must learn to share the same space, even if it’s not in a marriage. The Festival of Jewish Theater and Ideas runs from May 20 to June 14, with performances held at theaters throughout the city. For a complete list of shows, dates and prices visit www.untitledtheater.com, or call (212) 352-3101.
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