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[Theater reviews]

Staging Singer
Boston Theatre Works takes on Meshugah


BY STEVE VINEBERG

Meshugah
By Emily Mann. Adapted from the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Directed by Jason Slavick. Set design by Susan Zeeman Rogers. Lighting by Yael Lubetzky. Costumes by Charlotte Burgess. With Ned Eisenberg, Eileen Nugent, Ted Kazanoff, Rena Baskin, and Jason Schuchman. Presented by Boston Theatre Works at Boston University’s Studio 210, Thursday through Sunday through July 1.

“Meshugah” is Yiddish for “crazy.” Isaac Bashevis Singer used it only once in a title — for the novel that forms the basis for Emily Mann’s 1999 play, which has been newly revised for its current production at Boston Theatre Works — but it would be just as apt for any of his novels or short stories. Singer draws on the fanciful voice of folk fable to present a view of the world as both anguished and preposterously funny, one that’s been upended by the continual collisions of those two unpredictable forces, fate and human behavior. In Meshugah, as in Enemies, a Love Story, which has most of the same themes, the craziness of existence is both heightened and somehow symbolized by the fact of the Holocaust, the ultimate insanity, the ultimate destabilizer. Singer’s characters, Polish Jews transplanted to America who are either survivors or mourners (or both), are defined by the experience of Hitler. Of course, since we don’t meet them until the war is over, we can’t know to what extent the Holocaust has altered them and to what extent it exacerbated elements in their personalities that were already there.

In Meshugah, which is set in 1952, a Yiddish novelist and journalist named Aaron Greidinger (Ned Eisenberg), the only living member of his family, feels numb, empty, a citizen of a vanished world. Then his soul is reawakened when he meets Miriam (Eileen Nugent), the vibrant mistress of a rediscovered friend from Warsaw, Max (Ted Kazanoff). They begin an affair that’s disrupted by the sudden appearance of Miriam’s estranged and unbalanced husband, Stanley (Jason Schuchman). Stanley tells Aaron that Miriam survived the Nazis by prostituting herself to them, and this throws Aaron into an emotional and philosophical quandary. Can he love a woman who allied herself with the murderers of his people? Yet how can he judge the actions of one of Hitler’s victims?

I gather that Mann’s original version, which I didn’t see, was even more heavily narrative in style. The play still has bulks of undigested story — characters relating events in insufficiently dramatized speeches. Singer is a playwright’s best friend, however: his plots are so dramatic that they drive everything before them. The major difficulties with the Boston Theatre Works Meshugah are in tone and style. And though it’s difficult to apportion responsibility for these flaws between the script and Jason Slavick’s direction, my experience with Emily Mann, who tends toward didactic theater, suggests that playwright and director share the blame for the tonal problems, whereas I’d guess the style is mostly Slavick’s choice.

Singer is a wild-man Jewish Chekhov, but in this somber production little of his trademark humor comes through, and without the complicated layering of tones that you always get in a Singer narrative, the choices of the characters come across as less surprising and therefore far less interesting. And the rather clumsy theatricality of the show undermines both its power and its intimacy. Slavick encourages the actors to play big, broad emotions, but the emotional canvas of the play is already so immense that it cries out to be grounded by a more naturalistic approach. Much of the acting is generalized and unconvincing, and in the confines of the playing space — which seems perfect for drama of this size — it seems to bounce off the walls.

For example, Eileen Nugent is obviously very talented, and she has a radiant presence. But in most scenes it’s Miriam’s charisma she seems to be playing, not a specific set of actions. When Max introduces her to Aaron, she hurls a smoldering look at him that would be melodramatic in a theater twice the size. Ned Eisenberg, on the other hand, gives a solid, believable performance as Greidinger, except on two occasions when Slavick directs him to whirl around the stage to convey moral confusion. Eisenberg is a fine actor; he doesn’t require emblematic staging to tell us what he’s feeling. Slavick’s outbursts of expressionism always work against the actors. The emotions of the terrific story come through anyway, but they don’t require so much pushing.

Issue Date: June 14-21, 2001