A Traveling Jewish Theatre Creating A Drama That Is All Of Us
Griffin, Susan
A TRAVELING JEWISH THEATRE: CREATING A DRAMA THAT IS All Of US SUSAN GRIFFIN Combining the spontaneity of improvisation with the dazzling language of the mystics, this exciting young group, about...
...The two actors unmask...
...December 2, Jacksonville, AL: Jacksonville State University...
...the Taubman Family Foundation and the Doughnut Network...
...For A Dance of Exile, a play in which the Shechinah is banished from Judaism, Naomi guided Corey and Albeit into becoming women...
...Or as in Lawrence Kushner's midrash, it is in the darkness of the cave that Abraham can see because there he becomes aware of another source of light...
...Or, for more information, contact: ATraveling Jewish Theatre, PO Box 421985, San Francisco, CA 941421985,(415)441-1199...
...This collaboration goes on, not only with Naomi, Corey and Albert and with their lighting designer, Jim Quinn, but also with the texts of others, living and dead...
...To be flying and home, the celestial on earth...
...A TRAVELING JEWISH THEATRE: CREATING A DRAMA THAT IS All Of US SUSAN GRIFFIN Combining the spontaneity of improvisation with the dazzling language of the mystics, this exciting young group, about to embark on a national tour, fires the sparks of self-revelation I write here on this page that I am not Jewish...
...I fall into the shadow between the two...
...Or where the sound is bigger than we can hear...
...October 29...
...There is yet another lesson from the improvisational process that the Theatre uses and then takes to a larger dimension...
...The one poet who is everyone...
...November 4-27, New York City: Dance Theatre Workshop, Fridays and Saturdays at II p.m...
...Corey Fischer and Albert Green-berg stand on the stage, with a lectern, a briefcase and very little else...
...Corey's mask, an extraordinary and awe-inspiring, heart-piercing mask of loss and exile, became the mask for the shaman woman of Endor...
...This happened, this moment of enthusiasm, or of revelation, on the first afternoon that I sat among the audience and allowed myself to be swept into the experience they call The Last Yiddish Poet...
...At 15 I was adopted by and lived with a Jewish family...
...I have friends whose parents spoke to one another in this language, but the children did not learn...
...This is the faith in the gradual growth of the work itself, a loss of conscious control, the discovery of unconscious selves that lead, as Naomi says, to "a self that transcends the self...
...Corey whispers urgently to Albert, and Albert grudgingly leaves the stage, murmuring and gesturing that he has been asked to do something he cannot do...
...And so she gave them Yiddish—a new language, a golden language of the heart—disguised like her, in rags...
...Would I be given a list of all the Yiddish poets and how they perished, a documentary...
...When I talk to God, I try not to ask for anything because I don't want to embarrass him...
...Stop...
...The play was called The Last Yiddish Poet...
...I learned some Yiddish, became different than I was before or, perhaps, more evidently myself...
...Corey didn't...
...There is a knowledge that can only exjst in blindness...
...Albert becomes the poet...
...And so, in the third play, A Dance of Exile, the exploration is of separation, of the yes and the no, of the light and the dark, of masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious...
...They collaborate, improvise, reflect, reach out for old sources, weave in contemporary poetry, together with reportage, and passages from the Bible, and midrash of their own—or from others across time...
...Two men who are performers and are disguised as themselves tell us what is true for them and for their audience...
...Now Naomi, too, will act as well as direct...
...It is precisely this experience that I had as a member of the audience...
...They are wearing noses, red clown noses...
...What is meaning...
...Each work discovers the stories within stories—not only the tales of the Baal Shem Tov but how life now is taken up into those tales and emanates from them...
...A reviewer has written of the Theatre that it is unlike the old theatre where "each actor is imprisoned in the same character...
...The actor I moved with 20 years ago, he and I had to trust to another way of seeing than the one to which we had been accustomed...
...In the shadow between my Jewish self and my gentile self there is someone who knows we are not always who we think we are...
...You're all wrong...
...As the story of the death of Yiddish poetry is told, we start to think and to listen like poets, like Yiddish poets...
...Naomi Newman has said that "only by going deeply into the particular does one reach the universal...
...Naomi tells a story about the creation of their third work, A Dance of Exile...
...They became women—and then they became the experience of Exile...
...I have experienced a communion in this theatre that is now part of the rhythm of my thought, of this self who at the edge of her largest boundaries now suspects that boundaries do not exist, that in some way beyond common understanding, theatre, audience, men and women of legend, the living, the dead, the unborn, we are each other...
...He reappears in an overcoat too large for him, with a crumpled-up piece of paper in his hand, and we know that he will impersonate the missing Yiddish poet...
...A feeling...
...Near the end of the play, the two actors read lines from a poem by Jacob Glatstein, in Yiddish and then English, in English and then Yiddish, so that the two languages are like two musical instruments, echoing...
...None of the books really say...
...C: And trying to tell us what it means to have a death...
...Naomi and Albert liked the piece and wanted to use it...
...Until now Naomi Newman has been the director...
...They created their first play, Coming From a Great Distance, before they knew for certain where or when it would be performed, before they knew they would become a company with a repertoire, a company that would one day take its work from New York to San Francisco to Israel to Belgium to Denmark...
...It continues to be a major part of their repertory...
...A: It's calling to us...
...This is the way of the Jewish mystical tradition...
...stage...
...For in one instant I would be flying and in the next I would be home...
...In an interview with Michael Ventura, Corey has spoken of that part of the process in which suddenly you are "in the valley of the dark night...
...I presented an enthusiastic report to my history class about the struggle to make Israel a nation...
...There are, for example, Corey's masks and body puppets...
...Naomi and Corey each spent five years doing improvi-sational theatre...
...In the work of A Traveling Jewish Theatre this mysterious aspect of collaboration moves even farther towards faith...
...The following year, the actors/writers/designers/collaborators' exploration developed into Coming From a Great Distance, a "theatrical mid-rash* that wove together stories, music, masks and puppets...
...A: Foistly...
...ATraveling Jewish Theatre is funded through performance revenues, public foundations (the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council), private foundations and individual contributors...
...They are visually stunning, and, like the paintings of the old masters, they include an iconography...
...But looking back, would ruin this entire work, so near/completion...
...More real than realism...
...And The Last Yiddish Poet begins with the myth of the birth of Yiddish, the story of the Queen of the Jewish people: "As she wandered, and as she traveled, she saw she would have to find a new way for the people to remember themselves...
...it was all of us...
...It was not just the one actor on the stage who became the poet...
...Ignorant...
...there is another, more intuitive process, that includes within itself risk, the abandonment of one's formal idea of self, surrender to the wishes of others while still holding to one's own truth...
...Albert the actor does, and we who are the audience do...
...The Theatre's newest project...
...Another reviewer has likened these plays to dreams in which the one becomes many, and time and space collapse so that New York is inches away from Romania or Berlin and the 18th century is happening now...
...to mend, and they used it to weave and they wove it into songs and poems and dreams and they made themselves a home in this language...
...They have all come together in my mind now, irrevocably connected— the Baal Shem Tov, mystic founder of Chassidism, the path with the heart, Peretz Markish, one of the many Yiddish poets put to death in the Soviet Union in the massacre of 19S2, Nachman of Bratzlav, with his admonition, "Do not despair...
...They do not really know whom they are introducing...
...In the course of the evening we have perished, as we have come to wish, with those slaughtered at Lublin, at Babi Yar, at Auschwitz, and we have returned with a poetry belonging to the whole people, the gantzn folk...
...And it is not realism...
...At the next rehearsal, Albeit brought in a piece on the witches of Endor from the book of Samuel, something he'd read in Rothenberg's Big Jewish Book...
...Or would this be a realistic play, a story, perhaps, of one poet, recreated on the Susan Griffin is author of Pornography and Silence, Woman and Nature and, most recently, an anthology of her writings...
...He's fallen on hard times...
...They are speaking in a comical version of an Eastern European accent...
...in blindness, one can see something new...
...The company is about to embark on tour, visiting a number of cities on the East coast...
...From memory to heart to death...
...Boston...
...But he went along with the passionate intent of the others, which is the way of the Theatre...
...Of the fear and knowledge inside dreams...
...MA: Jewish Community Center in Newton...
...C: But ve can't...
...That is what it means for a language to die...
...U vudn't understand uz...
...We want to perish with our whole people/ Mir viln mitshtarbn mitn gantzn folk...
...The question is still there, both in the form and content of the address: Is God human, or is the human like God...
...and Sundays at 8 p.m...
...And the questions—"Can there be a God...
...And in fact, such fluidity of identity is both content and method for A Traveling Jewish Theatre...
...There I had the first experience that confounded my sense of ordinary reality, that made me wonder...
...A longing to understand the longing...
...A: And ve'd like to say it/in Yiddish...
...A: Trying to tell us what it means to With a collaborative exploration of the tales of the Baal Shem Tov—the "radiant f(x>l" and founder of Chassidism—Corey Fischer...
...Likut nitzotzot—the ingathering of dispersed sparks...
...What is magical in the work of the Theatre is that ordinary and elevated language are mixed freely, and the elevated phrase is used to describe the ordinary experience and the ordinary language is used to describe revelation, so that the words we finally hear are suffused with new In A Dance of Exile, the itinerant wanderer, Max, speaks of prayer: "Sometimes I talk to God, I say, 'Hello God.' But he doesn't answer...
...They are like music...
...In A Dance of Exile, speaking of the Shechinah, God's feminine presence, the mystic says, "We surround her with syllables that mean nothing merely to reveal her shape...
...A: Fur two reasons...
...This is not documentary...
...C: Two sad reasons...
...We are more...
...They have the surprising development of poetry...
...Wasn't this the secret told at Eleusis: We are all one, and out of death comes life...
...C: And secondly, ve vudn't understand uz...
...And behind this "subject" was the despair we know as the Holocaust, which has seemed more and more to exist like a trouble and a question at the center of my thought...
...At the end of the first play, Coming From a Great Distance, Corey and Albert speak these lines: C: The Voice is trying to tell us what it means to have a face...
...Realism" that is intent on creating reality ignores what is real that is at hand...
...Coming From a Great Distance centers around the stories and the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, and in many ways, the spirit of those teachings has shaped the life of the Theatre itself...
...MD: Jewish Community Center, sponsored by the Baltimore Theatre Project, no Friday performances, matinees on Sundays, October 9 and 23...
...Because, of course, what is really happening on the stage is that a performer is pretending to be the last Yiddish poet...
...And this language was like a golden thread, pulled from the Queen's garment, and it bound the people closer together...
...He used to talk a lot in the Bible...
...As I know that the question of Jewish identity is at the heart of our shared culture, for just as there is a severance between light and dark, male and female, yes and no, good and bad, so, too, in the Western consciousness, the split between the Jew and the Gentile has been a split of self in which anti-Semitism has come to represent the deepest denial of self-knowledge...
...its relevance here is simply that I am not definitively the one or the other, neither Gentile nor Jew...
...How was it, for example, that when an actor and I who worked exceptionally well together turned our backs to each other we could duplicate each other's movements and move in unison almost more perfectly than when we were facing and "seeing" each other...
...As Albert changes himself before our eyes from a clown to the last Yiddish poet, or Corey comes out of the darkness veiled, half-spirit, half-creature impersonating and being the witch of Endor, we travel to the heart of the mystery of theatre, the ritual through which we are transformed...
...One of the sources for their work has been the theatrical process known as improvisation...
...these questions that inevitably arise for me at the thought of the Holocaust...
...Through ihe company, they seek to give theatrical form to the various streams of visionary experience they sense in Jewish history and imagination...
...They enter the body with a rhythm and a melody, and the moving, beautiful songs that Albert has composed or reshaped, and that Corey and Albeit perform, seem to express the inner music of the work itself, suddenly made manifest, a music inside the audience that had been resonating with the dream unfolding before them...
...In 1979-80...
...More than curiosity, call it a longing to know, a longing that has drawn me to certain remembered stories, certain poets, a longing not satisfied by strict definitions...
...There are no three walls, no domestic sets, no simple narrative line of suspense and denouement...
...October 27...
...The work of the Theatre goes beyond improvisation to the creation of legend...
...And I know that from my own work...
...A: U see, bein two yenkeez, ve sort of melted in the pot...
...November 29, Atlanta, GA: Emery University...
...What is consistently astonishing in the work of this theatre is how the old elevated language is retrieved whole into the cadence of the 20th century, made fresh, made believable...
...We are all children of the Diaspora...
...Albert Greenberg and Naomi Newman joined together in 1978 to found A Traveling Jewish Theatre...
...In Rilke's poem, "Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes," there is a passage about the ascent of Orpheus with Eurydice that also speaks to the path of the artist with the work...
...But the words have been reworked by the Theatre into something new, a chant...
...But it is real, more real than realism...
...The plays are, after all, written down—and they are written in a language rarely dared in modern theatre, rich, dazzling, celebratory, enfolding the largest meanings...
...They possess the structure of an integral whole...
...In The Last Yiddish Poet, MamaLoshen tells us, "I've been sitting here for a thousand years and I've seen the words change and die...
...And in the plays the Theatre has created there is much commentary on the meaning—or meaninglessness— of words, the dimensions and limitations of language...
...There is no last Yiddish poet...
...What is the meaning at the end of this play...
...How else but by this process can one discover the unknown...
...Always more...
...But the truth is more complex...
...All their work is created in the same way...
...MA: Bran-deis University, Spingold Theatre...
...Enthusiasm: the word used by worshipers of the Greek mysteries for revelation...
...It was the language of the ordinary that the Baal Shem Tov treasured...
...of the woman who is not in the story...
...Its title drew me...
...And perhaps this line explains why so many of us go back to see this and the other plays again and again...
...The Last Yiddish Poet is the second of three plays the people of A Traveling Jewish Theatre have created...
...Then she gave them the experience of maturation, of a woman's self grown to full power, and just as they were moving to the full expression of this power in great joy, she shouted at them, "Stop...
...That is yet to be discovered—perhaps something about identity, about what it means to be a Jew...
...In The Last Yiddish Poet, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav repeats his description of a dream "that I was flying...
...Naomi was the director of The Committee's Experimental Wing in Los Angeles...
...And now another thing that is real today, here, is expressed on the stage...
...And they used it...
...Do you ever have the feeling that you are not one but many, dispersed across space and generations of time, that unremembered selves are nestled back in history, or in strange places that when you first see them seem vaguely familiar...
...The Last Yiddish Poet, which opened in New York in June 1980, grew out of the company's interest in the rhythms of the Yiddish language and the world of the Yiddish poets...
...When I was 14 years old I wanted to be Jewish...
...Corey and Albert, having become two clowns, talk to us about their dialogue, the one we are all hearing together at this moment: C: Ve've gut a whole lpt to say...
...And part of the finding is the getting lost, and when you're lost, you really start to look around and listen...
...I was expectant, but I did not know what to expect...
...But that is another story...
...I knew the meaning of those words as clearly as if I were Nachman, a man, a Jew, or not Jewish, a woman, born of this century...
...The first play I saw was performed at the Intersection, an old church converted into a community meeting house and theatre, a place with a history for me, for I have many times read my poetry there...
...Indeed, as in all great tales, the opening lines of the play reflect the very process of its own creation: "Listen, stories go in circles, they don't go in straight lines...
...they performed this tapestry before audiences from Berkeley to Baltimore, from Salt Lake City to Detroit, New York and Toronto...
...December 7, Whitesburg, KY: Appal shop...
...But what comes from it is a kind of miracle, the kind of miracle the Baal Shem Tov valued, a miracle of friendship...
...And then, does the feeling ever come to you with certainty that this is connected to that, that all history rests here, in one moment, and you are close to wholeness again...
...And there is another way in which the plays are like dreams...
...The audience is beside itself with laughter, not yet certain why we are laughing...
...Now, here, we are to watch the real death of Yiddish poetry take place...
...But something keeps going into nowhere . . . Maybe nowhere is where the breath starts...
...Made Prom This Earth (Harper and Row, 1983...
...It is rare now to hear a whole sentence spoken, and even rarer to hear a dialogue...
...This is not easy, neither in work nor in intimacy...
...As of press time, the following stops were scheduled: October 6-23...
...Major subsidies in its first five years have come from the Emet Foundation (Micah Taubman), the^ Berman Family Foundation, the Goldman Family Foundation (S.F...
...Group sales are available at most locations...
...Twenty years ago, I had studied improvisation with the Committee Theatre in San Francisco...
...I was then at work on a manuscript that is, among other matters, about the dying of original cultures all over the world, including the death of the language and the culture of Yiddish...
...If one has seen all three plays (and perhaps even attended a preview of the fourth, in progress) one begins to feel that these are not separate works but, instead, legends that are connected and develop out of one another, as in all mythology...
...In A Dance of Exile the words belong to Abulafia...
...They fake it...
...Decisions there are not reached by vote...
...What is Yom Kippur...
...I know it is so...
...So it helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside stories and stories between stories and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home...
...The clowns prepare a long introduction...
...Just stories and moments...
...And it was amazing to me...
...Ger-shom Scholem, writing of the importance of the word in that tradition, quotes the Zohar: "In every word shine many lights...
...If Hebrew is the language of the Torah and of philosophical study, Yiddish is the language of ordinary life, and of ordinary people...
...Then, at age 38,1 read about a theatre, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, that had generated great enthusiasm in San Francisco...
...They use their own lives and their feelings, moving on—as the Baal Shem Tov called it—the path with the heart...
...Here, too, music...
...For exact times and ticket information, contact the local sponsors...
...Or the words of a poet are set to the music of an old folk song—and then Albert bends this same melody into the blues...
...And how does a word like "wholeness," "the whole thing," "gantzn" mean what it means except through the knowledge of the Diaspora...
...But I guess when you talk and talk and nobody listens, you stop...
...You're doing everything wrong...
...And the line of a poem by Itzik Manger, a Russian-bom American Jew, "Where do I go in the middle of the night...
...Over hours and hours, she moved them into the experience of having women's bodies, of developing a self in and through these bodies...
...In the memory of [he death of Yiddish poetry, Yiddish poetry comes alive again...
...So I say 'Listen God, it's not your fault...
...Wanting something they cannot even describe, as performers do, they cover...
...And perhaps that is why, wherever it settles for very long, the Theatre becomes a kind of magnet around which a community forms, its performances a centrifugal force...
...This is not the end of the event: there is another surprise...
...I came to feel that I survived because of this adoption...
...And near the end of that play, in which the memories flood, these lines are spoken: "The mind has to come apart in order to contain the full truth of yes and no, of life and death, of the presence and the absence of God all in the same moment...
...And inside that shadow...
...You did everything you could.'" The comedy of this language barely disguises its gravity...
...None of the plays follows a straight line, nor has any evolved so neatly as that...
...Walt ham...
...But one must enter the blindness with the faith that the vision will be there...
...It's calling...
...You doubt, you question, the old grounding gives way, you feel lost— and this becomes the real source...
...Baltimore...
...They are silly...
...his are the permutations of God's name...
...A Dame of Exile, looks at a tale of Nachman of Bratzlav (1772-1810) as a mirror for [he inner journey of the Jew today...
...Having no particular purpose in mind, but only because he wanted to do something with wood, Corey began work on a mask...
...And if I exist in the shadow where definition ends, a shadow that makes others uncomfortable, desiring as we all do neat categories for life, ready explanations, I have come to welcome this place of confusion and knowing...
...Corey Fischer actor and maskmaker, Albert Greenberg actor and musician...
...Is this, then, a question only for a Jew, or only for a woman just turned 40 who cannot say that she is or is not Jewish...
...The poet Roethke has written, "In a dark time the eye begins to see...
...C: Trying to tell us what it means to have a memory...
...And the group's current work-in-progress, created and performed by Naomi Newman, explores the theme have a heart...
...In all three plays a man wears the mask of a woman, or speaks through the hands and face of a woman, and becomes, thereby, a woman...
...We do not speak Yiddish...
...The theme that is taken up again in The Last Yiddish Poet...
Vol. 8 • October 1983 • No. 9
