Review: Enacting Our Texts

...Joel Rosenberg's most recent work in moment ("The First Wedding in Israel") appeared in June 1979...

...The result of these flaws is a program which, for all of its freshness and sharpness of cadence, falls just a bit short of comprehending the Jewish world it represents...

...Each era of interpretation puts forth its voices, and the plain sense of the Biblical text gradually recedes behind the mysteries and quandaries woven by new interpreters...

...A similarly jab-berwocking lightning rendition of "Had Gadya" ("An Only Kid") is poured out in the mnemonic tones of a Polish yeshiva student, but with a startlingly effective manic fury...

...The Ten Plagues are howled, buzzed, chattered and ribbeted from behind a somewhat unsteady, if still visually impressive, light and color-silhouette show, beamed through the gauze panels behind the audience halves (each side's panel visible only to those across the room...

...Part of its pleasures are linguistic...

...The Passover seder commemorates the Exodus by straining the simple lines of the Biblical confession...

...The song "Dayenu" is recited at breakneck speed in a Hebrew wonderfully disguised by one actress's thick Yemenite accent...

...REVIEW: ENACTING OUR TEXTS JOEL ROSENBERG The Haggadah: a Passover Cantata by Elizabeth Swados For a long time now, I have thought that the Babylonian Talmud would make a wonderful musical, and that certain other Jewish classics (which ones, I shall not say—as the old joke says, am I not on the way to Minsk to sell wheat...

...We neither know how to light the fire nor say the words of prayer, but...

...Swados pays her respects to a number of the major Jewish languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, and, of course, English—and manages the improbable feat of conveying large segments of Jewish text in their original exotic tongues through carefully-paced English glosses, as if by auditory subtitles...

...One is still left wondering what made this slave religion a text of interest to the nations of the three continents that surrounded it...

...We indeed do know how...

...Either way, Swados's Haggadah is an important contribution to a lyrical Jewish theater, which we can even call a Jewish textual theater...

...And now, Elizabeth Swados, wunderkind director of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival performers, has given Jewish sacred writings a crisp and stunning three-dimensional life, in her production The Haggadah: a Passover Cantata...

...meanwhile, the gaunt, spectral Moses wears a crown of thorns ostensibly representing a burning bush, but you and I know better...

...My father was a wandering Aramean," etc., Deut...

...through the rich cross-weave of post-Biblical embellishment...

...Swados manages to carry off swift, baroque switches of theme and pace through her cast's vocal sound effects, a kind of verbal macram?, backed by her zippy, though not always all-that-jazzy score (more about the music later...

...Several children lend to the cantata both a hokey adorableness and a valuable vocal and visual balance to a generally competent and pleasingly multiracial adult cast...

...By a clever twist of stage architecture, Ms...

...There are still folks there who remember the Old Ways, enough to kvell over a Yiddish line, and a greener type of second-generation audience, as well, hungry for instruction...

...Early in the cantata, an actor reads Elie Wiesel's well-known rendition of the Chassidic story that portrays the Jews' fading knowledge, over generations, of their tradition's occult wisdom...

...generating commentary and supercommentary, and creating an audience that becomes quite literally a part of the page...

...The guests around a table at a Passover Seder are again strikingly reminiscent of the form of the Talmud page: text followed by commentaries...

...Swados and her stage designer-Julie Taymor have also made the audience into Rashi and Tosafos—that is, into commentators flanking a text, as in the traditional yeshiva editions of Torah and Talmud (except that I, attempting to supply a Rabbenu Tarn to one of my companions, was shushed by the punctuation in the next row—an innovation on the traditionally periodless Jewish page...

...One should say that Swados has not been uniformly successful...

...The people Israel, called into being in the midst of a complicated political, economic and spiritual struggle (and here correctly represented by Swados as an ethnic patchwork, ranging from Nordic to African), is still made to seem an irrational and obstreperous bunch, at once carnal and other-worldly, regarded by the surrounding nations as something of an exotic nuisance, as, indeed, it is made to seem today in the pages of Time and Newsweek...

...Occasionally, she succumbs to the tempting clich?s that often arise in the representation of Judaism to a cosmopolitan audience: self-conscious Biblicism (Hebrew slaves ?G-Man-River it in minors and modals through the mud of Pithom and Raamses), strains of gospel and reggae (pleasant to hear, but not always appropriate), a smattering of Harry Goldenisms and self-deprecating shrugs (the otherwise praiseworthy puppet show manages to convey some outworn stereotypes in this manner), and a kind of closet Christianity (the child Moses, leading Israel across the sea, splits the sea by walking on the water...

...The possibilities of this genre are endless, and the audience is eager...

...And when one hears Afro-Americans, Wasps, Hispanics and Orientals pronouncing Hebrew in the Jewish dialects, one is led to ask that curiously and delightfully double-edged question: have the nations become Jews or the Jews become nations...

...One of the cantata's most successful scenes is an interlude called "The Puppet Rebbe...

...This experience of being inside a Talmud page is the cantata's main magic, and it represents a correct understanding of the traditional Haggadah's special type of discourse...

...Rarely does the neophyte feel left behind, and when sense fails (as, for the neophyte, it sometimes must), the listener is still swept up into the piece's rhythmic wizardry...

...It makes Fiddler into fiddlesticks...

...The show, which opened on March 31, has run into the season of the Omer (the 49 days between Passover day-two and Shavuot), and this provincial, for one, would welcome a second chance to see it on exodus to the northern hinterlands...

...Certain moments stand out...

...Without conveying either approval or disapproval, the scene manages to make gentle fun of the rift between the sexes in traditional Judaism, while ominously reminding us marginal commentators that we are reading as our text a bygone, and now unrepeatable, era...

...Periodically, one or another of the disputants leans outward to the audience for advice or assent, and occasionally the men and women find their respective conversations uncomfortably intertwined...

...No ground is more fruitful for such a theater than All-That-Jazzland itself, the Big Apple...

...The total interplay of verbal and musical textures, as well as the cleverly minimal (if often appropriately grotesque) use of costume and prop, are lush and satisfying...

...Shall we say, like commentators around a column of Talmud...

...The decision to portray Moses simultaneously as a small child and as a hoary, thornbush-headed spectre awakened in me certain reservations (see below), but the initial emergence of this double character is timed just right and is as such quite moving...

...Swados's Israel is not quite "our Israel" (i.e., the world's), but it is true enough to the nuances of the Jewish Israel ("Our Israel" in a narrower sense) that one is willing to forgive it its lapses from more universal applicability...

...The puppets sit at two tables, one for the men and pne for the women—the men repair to their holy books, the women to their cookbooks, and each table contra-puntally worries out its lore, the men in Talmudic disputation over the laws of Pesach, the women arguing over how to chop the ingredients for haroset...

...If you're in New York on a visit, go see Haggadah...

...We have long needed a type of dramatic art that portrays not merely stories "based on" texts, but the texts themselves, unfolding as a reader's reading experience (with questions, interruptions, digressions, quotations, quotation marks, etc...

...The performers retreat under chairs and supply the voices to a troop of shtetl puppets, some of whom seem like Ashkenaziated versions of "The Muppets' " Waldorf and Statler...

...would make a marvelous text for a lyrical Jewish theater...

...yet its use here is a bit of a fib, belied by Swados's own new fires kindled around the old stories...

...The Haggadah (or, as one is tempted to call it, "the Haggadah Cantata") seems well-researched and sensitively crafted...

...26.5ff...

...Text fits into text like a manifold set of Chinese boxes, and those in the audience who are reading contemporary preoccupations into the words and actions of their great-grandparents must wonder what columns of commentary will form around their own lives...