Moon Madness and the Messiah

...Puzzles abound and meanings multiply...

...Miss Bovasso's great dramatic strength lies in her ability to scramble patterns and create new orders of sense and feeling...

...Seven Days of Mourning is far more involved with probing the metaphysical and the supernatural than proving the social and political...

...Seven Days of Mourning is a very good play, perhaps a great one, but we will have to wait for another production to render fuller judgment...

...Yet, the rough brick walls cry out for a more Brechtian fury...

...Rarely before has the nostalgia and sentiment implicit in pop music been used with such dramatic power...

...At the same time, though, some of the acting is excellent, especially the many beautiful and moving aspects of the performances given by Tony Schwab, Stefan Gierasch, David Margulies, and Shimen Ruskin...

...There is something of a plot that tries to sustain the action: In a very slight way, we are asked to believe that a man has just told his wife he wants a divorce, at which point his mistress falls into a trance, and the action builds from there...

...It is my suspicion that Barish killed her in a fit of frustration at the hopelessness of his incestuous love...

...Nevertheless, they cannot lament Bracha's death because they are too trapped in perpetual, self-pitying grief...

...Only in the plays of Pirandello can one find a similar group of people, so totally alienated from the life-giving roots of family and culture that insanity, as it were, becomes their source of nourishment...

...A scratchy old record playing march music augments the mood, and the huge, disparate cast becomes an assemblage of burnt-out lives...

...Gleich...

...a thin, flat-chested daughter married to a hairlip who can barely speak and hardly hear...

...Still, let the spectator beware: This is a play that drops depth charges in the soul...

...Summoned by an overly concerned widow neighbor, but making his entrance just after the crippled son, Barish, blows the ram's horn, Vossen Gleich first insists that everyone open his mouth and reveal all his secrets...

...When the music inexplicably changes to some pop tune of the '30s, the anomalous gathering becomes a clumsy chorus moving in a numb, lame fashion...

...Seven Days of Mourning is so thick with meaning that both a symbol-hunting mystic and a symptom-hunting psychiatrist could have a field day without ever crossing paths...

...It's a risky business...

...and a bitter, scornful mother who locks herself up in a room so her presence will be better appreciated when she comes out...

...Although many are in uniform, hobbling along on crutches, there is no coherent pattern to the variety of costume and dress...

...Ironically, however, the guilt resulting from their violation of the traditional Jewish mourning laws heightens their anxiety, causing them to raise self-accusation to a fever pitch...

...The evening ends with the arrival of a grotesquely tall astronaut being followed by people carrying signs that read "the moon is ours" and "to the moon and more...

...Miss Bovasso has directed her own play—also a risky business—and directed it to perfection...

...Brilliantly performed by Shimen Ruskin, this curious little man—his Yiddish name means "there is none like him"—has a spooky, comic confidence in his ability to resolve the family's problems...

...That revelation is just what Miss Bovasso's play is about, but so subtly—one might even say nonchalantly—that you don't have to notice if you don't feel like it...

...Pitched too high at the beginning, it takes off so fast that it may leave some members of the audience far behind...

...Quoting a holy text that deals with such forbidden feelings, the Song of Songs, he cries out in despair: "'Comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love.'" In the context of the play, this suggests the impotence of God, which may have turned the Deity into a demonic force...

...On the other hand, what are we to make of the ending, when Vossen Gleich asks Barish to replace his dead sister by putting on her dress...

...The set is so convincing you can almost smell the garbage...

...Since farce defies anything but the most elaborate description, suffice it to say that a miniscule French dwarf who plays the police inspector dressed like Napoleon has one of the funniest scenes I have seen on the stage...

...It is a brooding, difficult work about a Jewish family living in Clifford Odets country: a timeless bleak tenement in the cramped slums of New York...

...What is lacking in Mann's production is a deep fear and holy respect for the dark powers of religious mystery...

...Simckes' characters are waiting for the Messiah, and it is very doubtful that they even know who Lefty is...

...Although every one of the many actors in what is essentially an ensemble production is superb, special praise is due the principals: Tom Rosica, Jane Sanford, Zina Jasper, Jean David, Ted Henning, and Herve Villechaize, the littlest but grandest Napoleon to ever strut the American stage...

...It opens with a number of characters wandering casually on stage, in a quiet way confused about why they are there...

...Like a Marx Brothers movie, plot is present only as a spring or lever to release the energy of insanity...

...The message is incongruity...

...But a story line is not the glue that keeps this extraordinary and unpredictable theater piece together...

...Thus, we know nothing about Bracha except what the various members of this possessed family tell us—and we are meant to know nothing...

...in these opening moments, The Moon Dreamers lays bare the dark side of the ridiculous, uncovering a satire so black that you never think to laugh...

...Underlining the irony that runs deep beneath the seemingly superficial farce, and serving as a perfect epigram for the whole play, one character comments: "I'm glad I don't dream...

...Curiously, it is precisely this rich density that is both the virtue and the fault of the play...

...One member of the family, Barish, will not cooperate with Dr...

...The Ellen Stewart Theater is named after the person who has done more for experimental drama in the past few years than anyone else...

...At the outset of the play, we learn that the entire Shimansky family has refused to mourn the apparently suicidal death of an idiot daughter, Bracha...

...From a mystical standpoint, this is a reasonable and certainly possible set of inferences...

...The family consists of a whining son in a wheel chair with murder in his heart...

...This marvelously fake musical extravaganza serves as a last sick hurrah for the "60s—that sad, insane decade when we went out into space and were forced to discover ourselves...

...In the last act, functioning much like the group leader of a psychodrama, he asks the Shimanskys to pretend they are at Bracha's graveside so that they can act out their deeply felt loss and lamentation...

...But Simckes owes nothing to Odets, for the young playwright from a rabbinical family has written an intriguing, even cabalistic work...

...and the play ends with a dynamic struggle between these two characters who represent much more than themselves...

...For instance, the bracha of the family—Hebrew for "blessing"—has mysteriously committed suicide: Have the Jewish people, by virtue of some dark obscure act of self-destruction, lost their blessing, God's protection, perhaps God Himself...

...And as Vossen Gleich and Barish battle it out, we sometimes doubt which is which...

...For this is, finally, a highly charged allegory: a contest pitting life against death, the Messiah against the Devil...

...Theodore Mann has unfortunately miscast and misdirected, turning at least one role into Jewish camp...

...As they lip-synch their way through a recorded song, we realize we are watching a spectral musical drained of its joy and energy...

...Filled with strange rituals and intricate games that are played in deadly earnest, Seven Days of Mourning—like The Sea Gull or The Dybbuk—is a work written in so special an idiom that, in the hands of a more sensitive director, its professions of ecstasy and salvation could help to recover an ancient theater of magic and wonder...

...a cringing, emotionally castrated father who finds his chief pleasure in walking around the apartment in his underpants...

...Another new Off-Broadway play of considerable merit and distinction is Seymour Simckes' Seven Days of Mourning, at the Circle in the Square...

...The ghost of Vietnam is in their eyes as they exhume all those old songs that remind us of a time when we were young enough to believe in America the Beautiful and our own eternal innocence...

...With the largest cast ever assembled for an Off-Broadway production, her play is an intentionally gross spectacle, taking freaky, frantic bits from the Theater of the Ridiculous and presenting them in muted tones...

...Tortured and twisted, the Shimanskys are agonized in both mind and body—their very speech bursts forth in irregular spastic rhythms...

...Performing The Moon Dreamers was a worthy way of consecrating the house...

...The founder of La Mama, Miss Stewart has been la mama to almost every young playwright in New York who has spurned the commercial theater...

...Then someone sings in a beautiful Irish tenor, "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Won't You Die for Us Again"—and everything becomes hysterically funny for the rest of the performance...

...Indeed, it has secrets only a theological exegesis will reveal...

...No one but the Messiah could save the Shimanskys, and this is just who we are led to believe enters their apartment in the person of a Talmud-quoting doctor named Vossen Gleich...