Saturday, September 22, 2007

a look at what's cooking

a hand made poster from our first production in 1979

(Left: a hand made poster from our first production in 1979)


Hi. It's Corey posting again. I want to give you an inside look at several projects that we’re currently developing. But first, I want to tell you about an event that Sara Schwartz, our executive director, and I participated in just a few days ago. Along with several other colleagues, we were invited to make a presentation about ensemble theatre to the Arts Loan Fund. ALF is a consortium of the major arts funders in the area including the Irvine Foundation, the Haas Fund and the City’s Grants for the Arts program. This invitation is a clear signal that the work we’ve been doing with our sister companies in the Network of Ensemble Theatres to raise the profile of companies like TJT and the other 73 member theatres of the NET (TJT was one of the seven original founding companies in 1995) is working! The fact that some of the largest arts funders in California wanted to know about the history, the creative processes and the special challenges of ensemble theatre is a very significant development.

While the definition of ensemble theatre is naturally fluid, it almost always embraces the idea that primary decision-making power rests in the hands of the artists who, ideally, have been working together over extended periods of time in some version of a collaborative process. That’s what TJT has been doing, in ever-evolving ways, for nearly three decades.

Right now we have four projects that are all still in very early stages of development. We’re a long way from announcing any of these publicly. It’s certainly possible that not all of them will end up as mainstage productions.

First, we’ve commissioned the unusually gifted young playwright Marcus Gardley to write a play based on the story of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney who were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in 1964 in Mississippi. The names of these two young Jews and one young African-American have become emblems of the civil rights movement itself. We feel that theirs is the kind of story that needs to be told if our country is ever going to heal its wounded racial history. [see the works of the brilliant historian and activist, Manning Marable for more; as well as the latest from China Galland (yes, my wife) Love Cemetery]

In the early nineties, co-founder Naomi Newman collaborated on a piece with African-American actor/writer/director John O’Neal, from New Orleans, that examined African-American/Jewish relations (Crossing the Broken Bridge). It took nearly three years to complete but went on to tour, for several years, back and forth across America, often bringing black and Jewish communities together, sometimes for the first time.

Marcus Gardley collaborated with TJT artistic director, Aaron Davidman, on last year’s award-winning Happiness is a Dreamhouse in Lorin for Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Together they created a piece of heart-rending, yet ultimately hopeful theatre that galvanized an entire, largely African-American, community who had never had a chance to see themselves and their place represented on stage before.

Aaron had dreamed of working with the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney story for years. When he first mentioned it to me, I marveled that someone who hadn’t yet been born when the tragic events took place understood the necessity of not allowing the story to be forgotten. I was nineteen, acting in a college drama festival when I heard that news and wondered why I wasn’t in Mississippi myself.

A few years after Aaron first mentioned the idea, he met and worked with Marcus. Last November we both saw a reading of one of Marcus’s plays at the Public Theatre in New York. I recognized in this young black writer who’d grown up in Oakland a kindred spirit. Though he often uses history as a source, he’s anything but dry or didactic. He has a kind of x-ray vision that lets him see through the shell of the historical record into the pulsing heart of myth and story that we can all recognize.

For the record, Marcus received his MFA from Yale, and has received commissions from the Yale Repertory Theatre, Playwright’s Horizon, South Coast Repertory among others.

As a member of the TJT ensemble, I’m very excited about the idea of Marcus being in residence with us to develop this project even though, at this point, I have no idea what my role will be in it. In an ensemble, anyone’s experience winds up influencing and affecting everyone’s. I love how porous our boundaries have become. In the early days we did everything in-house, but somewhere in the mid-eighties we started working with directors, actors, writers, designers from outside TJT and discovered that our center was strong and flexible and, more often than not, our sense of the ensemble stretched to include the so-called “guest-artists.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a break from performing this fall in order to complete the “architecture” of a new, original TJT piece inspired by the history of The Group Theatre (1931-1941). In their ten years of life, this hugely influential company can be said to have invented the American theatre. Much of what we take for granted about theatre and the work of the actor and much of what still seems experimental and risky was first attempted, in this country, by the Group. Interestingly the most famous, eloquent and controversial of its founding members happened to be Jewish. These included Stella Adler and her brother Luther Adler, whose father Jacob Adler was the reigning star of the New York Yiddish theatre for most of its existence; Harold Clurman, the Sorbonne-educated visionary whose mesmerizing discourses galvanized the dozens of actors who formed the first Group Theatre acting ensemble; Lee Strasberg, passionate iconoclast who wound up creating the approach to acting known as “The Method.” I think there’s more than an arbitrary relationship between the Group’s commitment to a vision of a permanent community of actors creating a theatre that would enliven and astonish Americans from all walks of life and mirror back their deepest struggles, dreams and shadows and the Jewish identity of its leaders. In any place besides America, any time before the 30s, Jews like Clurman, the Adlers, Strasberg, Morris Carnovsky and Clifford Odets, would have been rabbis or scholars, scribes or cantors. Eastern European Jews had only emerged from the isolation of shtetl and ghetto a few decades earlier. The generation these people belonged to was still infused with all the pent-up energy that was finally being allowed to run free in the larger, American, secular world. At the same time, they had access to a long and rich tradition of study, of the sanctity and power of language, of the necessity to speak truth to power. So I’m developing characters – both contemporary and historical – and exercises on which to base improvisations. I’m compiling collections of quotes from the Group Theatre members, scenes and fragments from plays by Odets and others that were premiered by the Group and questions that contemporary ensemble theatre makers might ask of our artistic ancestors. All of this material will be explored by a group of TJT and guest actors in a workshop in early summer 2008 that will be sponsored by Theatreworks (the South Bay’s largest resident theatre) New Play Program.


At the same time, our artistic director Aaron Davidman has been researching, writing and workshopping a solo piece on the Middle-East based on a series of shattering interviews he conducted in the U.S., the U.K., Israel and the occupied territories last summer, often with “people on the ground” who are less concerned with ideology than survival. The initial workshop performances of this piece happened at Theatre J in D.C. with artistic director Ari Roth acting as Aaron’s dramaturg. Aaron will continue to develop this piece in front of audiences in periodic in-progress showings. There may well be some other workshop performances and readings as well, so keep watching this blog or sign up for email updates on our website.

I've already written about the Prayer Project, our long-term collaboration with Liz Lerman and the Dance Exchange and there's nothing more to say about it right now.


Monday, August 20, 2007

2 X Malamud is a hit in Mountain View

We’re about to begin our last week of Malamud in Mountain View. The rave from the Mercury News is appended below. It’s been just as satisfying as I’d hoped to put together The Magic Barrel with The Jewbird., though some of my earlier assumptions have been challenged. See, I’d always seen Saltzman the Marriage Broker and Schwartz the Jewbird as essentially the same character – or at least the same archetype – the trickster/clown/holy fool that pops up in Jewish writing in the legends about the prophet Elijah, Hasidic tales, Jewish jokes and stand-up comedy (think Lenny Bruce). Now there may be some truth in that, but Aaron Davidman said, after seeing an early rehearsal that he saw an even stronger connection between the characters of Leo Finkle in Barrel and Schwartz in Jewbird. Both longing for love and acceptance. Thoughts?

Stay tuned for announcement of new Season!

`2 x Malamud' takes a magical journey

JEWISH COMPANY'S STAGINGS OF WORK NEAR PERFECTION

By Karen D'Souza
Mercury News

Article Launched: 08/16/2007 01:50:19 AM PDT

To mark its 29th anniversary, San Francisco's Traveling Jewish Theatre has reclaimed its nomadic roots and launched its new season on the road.

The acclaimed troupe opened its homage to Bernard Malamud, "2 x Malamud," over the past weekend at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The company has staged "The Magic Barrel" and "The Jewbird" before, and its depth of commitment to the material has paid off handsomely. Both these one-acts have been burnished to the point of perfection, from their dreamlike tone to their whimsical props. Directed by Joel Mullennix and Sheila Balter, the exquisitely etched revivals show off the artistry of the acting company, as well as the richness of writer's palette.

Staged in the style of the Word for Word company, "2 x Malamud" transposes these short stories verbatim from page to stage. The cast embodies every element in the text, from protagonists to passing clouds, as if each word, each pause, each punctuation were central to the theme. The technique forges an intimacy between the actors and the text, a magical sense of ritual incantation that casts a spell over the audience.

Jeri Lynn Cohen, Max Gordon Moore and Traveling Jewish Theatre founder Corey Fischer etch the key characters in each story. Watching them metamorphose from piece to piece is part of the evening's theatrical alchemy. The scope and depth of the acting gives us a glimpse into the breadth of Malamud's art.

In "The Magic Barrel," Moore plays the twitchy rabbinical student Leo Finkle, desperately searching for a wife but scared to death of women. Enter the marriage broker, Pinye Salzman (the sublimely funny Fischer), who's eager to make any match that will put a few pennies in his threadbare pockets. They eye each other warily across a dank New York hovel, bargaining over potential brides like so many baseball trading cards.

The rapport of the actors with their characters cuts so deep that the play bristles with life and breathtaking eccentricity. The physical specificity of the performances is as acute as the cadence of the language.

Finkle cowers under the covers of his bed, terrified of life. Salzman sucks the flesh off a tiny white fish like a starving alley cat. As the lonely Lily Hirschorn, Cohen radiates the brittle enthusiasm of a woman out to snatch a husband, driven by the fear that life is passing her by.

It comes as a revelation to see these actors so utterly transformed in "The Jewbird," a dark little parable about assimilation. If the characters in "The Magic Barrel" are steeped in the past, the figures in "The Jewbird" are hellbent on casting off the old ways.

Respect for tradition is not in Harry Cohen's (Moore) genes. A frozen-food salesman who pairs long black socks with khaki shorts and a fat cigar, Harry has an ego as large as his belly. Moore puffs himself up with the bluster and pomposity of a man who would deny someone else their right to their ethnicity.

In this instance, Harry takes on the black crow who flies into his Bronx apartment on threadbare wings. His name is Schwartz (Fischer), and he's a herring-eating, prayer-chanting black bird seeking asylum for a world with no refuge for those who want to keep the old customs.

The bird says he's on the run from anti-Semites, which earns him the pity and kindness of Harry's wife, Edie (a graceful turn by Cohen), and their son, Morrie (Tamar Cohn). But not Harry. He responds to Schwartz's neediness with, first, disdain and, then, brutality.

Huddled in the corner, fearful of both Harry and the ravenous family cat, Fischer's bird is as ornery as he is wretched. The actor turns him into a tragicomic figure, a cross between an old vaudeville ham and a latter-day Lear, yearning for shelter from the storm but unwilling to sacrifice his integrity until the end. The gravitas the actor brings to this role elevates the fantastical fable into a melancholy meditation on identity.

The upshot: A Traveling Jewish Theater cast a literary spell on its audience with a magical evening of Malamud.

Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St.

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays

Through: Aug. 26

Tickets: $15-$44; (650) 903-6000, www.atjt.com


Contact Karen D'Souza at kdsouza@mercurynews.com or (408) 271-3772. See her theater blog at blogs.mercextra.com/aei.

RePrintPrint Email

Sunday, July 29, 2007

TJT's 29th Season Begins

We’re about to begin our 29th season with an experimental three-week summer run in Mountain View in which we’re bringing together parts of two previous “hits.” From 2000, Malamud’s The Jewbird and from last year, his The Magic Barrel will be paired in 2 X Malamud. These two masterful short-stories will be performed in the verbatim style pioneeered and developed by San Francisco’s Word for Word Performing Arts Company. Below, you’ll find the history of our collaboration followed by reviews of Barrel and Jewbird and, at the end of this post, quotes from other writers about Bernard Malamud. Read on. (For more info on the August 9 – 26 run in Mt. View, click away)

Founded in 1993 by Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter, Word for Word is a professional theatre company that stages short stories, performing every word the author has written. Their goals are to excite people about the written word, to inspire them to read more, to create new audiences for the theatre, and to share the world's diverse cultures and stories.

"Their brilliant inventiveness in performance, choreography, and staging, has created a new art form, and a deeply affecting experience."
-- Tobias Wolff

The collaboration between Traveling Jewish Theatre and the Word for Word Performing Arts Company (a project of the Z Space Studio) began in 2000 as a natural outgrowth of the many values the two companies share.

Since TJT’s own esthetic has always drawn on the vital tradition of Jewish storytelling and places the act of “telling” at the heart of the theatrical experience, it seemed bashert (Yiddish; adj: destined, fated) that the two companies would work together. Add the attraction of the short-story for Jewish – and especially American Jewish – writers, several of whom are considered masters of the form, and the partnership becomes irresistible.

Our collaboration started with two of those American masters, Grace Paley and Bernard Malamud,Goodbye and Good luck and The Jewbird directed by Word for Word Charter Group member Wendy Radford and long-time W4W collaborator, David Dower (the former artistic director of the Z Space Studio and current artistic associate at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage). The response from audience and critics was so thoroughly positive that the two companies continued to look for more opportunities to work together.

That opportunity came three years later. This time, the unabashedly post-modern celebration of narrative, Finkelstein’s Fingers, by the stunning gen-x German Jewish writer, Maxim Biller (directed by David Dower) was balanced by two mordant and moving stories by Paley, Wants and Conversations with my Father, and one of Malamud’s earliest stories, Spring Rain (all directed by Joanne Winter, co-founder of W4W). Windows and Mirrors, as the evening was titled, was another unqualified success.

In 2006, the companies returned to Paley (Mother and The Story Hearer) and Malamud (The Magic Barrel). Directed by Joel Mullennix, a frequent W4W collaborator, the evening was titled Family Alchemy and once again both companies’ audiences showed their enthusiasm for the continuing collaboration and once again The Chronicle’s “Little Man” was airborne.

Realizing that The Jewbird could be read as a set of variations on the themes of The Magic Barrel, we decided to bring the two stories together in an all-Malamud evening for our growing Mountain View community. In spring, 2008, 2 X Malamud will travel to Toronto for a three-week residency.

The Word for Word Perfuming Arts Company and Traveling Jewish Theatre plan to continue their productive and mutually satisfying collaboration in years to come. Stay tuned. In the meantime, be sure to see Word for Word’s latest offering: Cornell Woolrich’s Noir thriller, Angel Face, opening in San Francisco August 10.

Reviews of last year’s The Magic Barrel

"The evening's best match of text and mise-en-scène comes with Malamud's 1956 piece The Magic Barrel, the title story from his National Book Award–winning collection. The clever comic story of a lonely young yeshiva student (Max Gordon Moore) who reluctantly employs the services of a threadbare matchmaker (Fischer) to find him a bride, Malamud's sly narrative has unexpected turns and depths that give full rein to the agility and imagination of performers and director alike (as well as some cunning work by props master Adriane Sherburn-Zimmer), and is pretty well a hoot from start to finish. Every gesture of Fischer's marriage broker seems both larger-than-life and inescapably human, while newcomer Moore delivers a priceless performance as the easily exasperated, spiritually doubting protagonist, thus holding his own in the midst of an expert ensemble, which includes more fine work from Cohen and Newman in a variety of supporting roles. Moreover, The Magic Barrel excels in the Word for Word style, a form bound to — but also independent of — the page, where the strong and inventive staging becomes its own (albeit integral) delight, a kind of harmonic line appearing above the principal voice, offering audiences the thrill of following simultaneously the written word and the theatrical invention illuminating and responding to it."

-Robert Avila, SF Bay Guardian

"The Magic Barrel introduces San Francisco newcomer Max Gordon Moore, burning with joyous intensity as Leo, a young rabbi in training who hires a marriage broker (a transformed and hollow-faced Fischer) to find him a wife, and in the hilarious process finds his faith. Short story as theater is a risky endeavor, but TJT never drops the ball, and the result is pure storytelling -- simplified, thrilling, and vigorously reinvented, a slap in the face to anyone who has ever said theater is dead.”

-Nathaniel Eaton, SF Weekly

“Played with magnetic youthful seriousness by [Max G.] Moore, Finkle is a scholarly recluse who's decided that a wife will help him land a better congregation when he becomes a rabbi.

"Not knowing any other way to go about it, Finkle contacts a matchmaker -- who turns out to be the terribly down-on-his-luck, infirm, clumsily but slyly manipulative Pinye Salzman (a brilliantly comic but lovingly conceived portrait by Fischer as what's left of the old shtetl profession in 1940s New York).

"[Jeri-Lynn] Cohen adds luminous grace notes as two of Salzman's hopeful clients. Fischer is a continual delight in his shabby suit, peeling and consuming sardines with consummate care. Moore embodies Finkle's pursuit with carefully calibrated degrees of frustration, resignation, determination and growing self-knowledge.

"The barrel of the title -- Salzman's claimed repository of marital prospects -- doesn't really exist. Malamud and the company leave it somewhat open to doubt whether Finkle succeeds in his romantic quest. But he, and we, are enriched by the pursuit."

-Rob Hurwitt, SF Chronicle


Reviews of The Jewbird, 2000

“Fischer brilliantly reaffirms his standing as one of the Bay Area's acting treasures.

"In Jewbird, he's Schwartz, the bird itself, a magnificently bedraggled old specimen with the comic gravity of a raven, wheedling tone of a sly old beggar and Yiddish inflections and sentence construction of a first-generation immigrant. His tattered scarf alone is a thing of wonder, a prayer shawl one moment, a bird hand puppet the next -- more often, spread over his fluttering hands above his shoulders, it's a pair of remarkably expressive wings. It's a performance to savor and store in the memory.”

-Rob Hurwitt, SF Examiner

“Like all Word for Word productions, this one renders every line of the text. Dower makes the most of it, turning the frozen food salesman Cohen (Albert Greenberg), his pneumatic '50s wife Edie (Jeri Lynn Cohen) and their dim adenoidal son Maurie (Sheila Balter) into a yammering chorus at the top of the narrative.

“Fischer's delicate, ``dissipated crow'' cuts through with his strangled squawks, gawky slow flights around the room and patient gaze framed by wire- rim spectacles. Edie takes pity and feeds him herring and rye bread. Maurie takes him on as a tutor and sees his grades and even his screechy violin-playing improve. Even the skeptical Cohen softens a little. The bird reveals his name: Schwartz.

“Peace is short-lived. A cat (the twitchy, self-possessed Balter) arrives. Cohen picks a fight. Schwartz, with his vibrant prayer shawl, exacts some blood. But the Jewbird is expelled. The story ends with an eerie final image, of Fischer holding his own crumpled life in his hands. Some people smell because they don't bathe or because of what they eat, we remem ber Schwartz saying. Others smell because of what they think.”

-Steven Winn, SF Chronicle

Writers on Malamud

Richard Gilman, writing in The New Republic:

“[Malamud was] a storyteller in an era when most of our best writers have been suspicious of straightforward narrative. He was both a realist and a fantasist. I don’t mean he alternated between reality and fantasy, but that at his best the line between the two was obliterated. Observation gave way to imagining…a story like the Jewbird (to my mind perhaps his finest), a piece that appears all whimsy and allegorical effort, is anchored in pebbly actuality.”

Cynthia Ozick: “Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh placticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations…He wrote about suffering Jews, about poor Jews, about grocers and fixers and birds and horses and angels in Harlem and matchmakers and salesmen and rabbis and landlords and tenants and egg candlers and writers and chimpanzees; he wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world.”

Daniel Stern: “[Malamud] came as close to making a religion of art as is possible; a religion of suffering and comedy, taking the Jew as his starting point for what was most human in humankind. All men are Jews – perhaps his most famous and most mysterious line.”

From Saul Bellow's eulogy, given at a memorial tribute to Malamud, 1986:

“Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables.”

Walter Goodman, reviewing The Complete Stories in The New York Times, September 28, 1997:

“He burst fully into allegory in the 1950's with ''The Magic Barrel,'' probably the most famous of his shorter works and the title story of his first collection, which brought him the first of two National Book Awards. Here Malamud's strengths came together: the feelings for the outsider Jews; the joy in Second Avenue vaudeville shticks; the direct, unadorned yet flavorsome storytelling; the skeptic's fascination with Hasidic mysteries; the ruminations on the meaning of love. If you're looking for influences, try Isaac Bashevis Singer.

“This fable about the business doings between Leo Finkle, a lonely rabbinical student, and Pinye Salzman, a matchmaker, is still as funny and sad and searching as it was at first reading… The story's final, unsettled lines remain powerfully unsettling. As another Malamud character, in ''The Girl of My Dreams,'' says of a piece of fiction he happens across, 'The story socked in the belly.’''

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Last Two Performances of Salesman!

As we prepare for the last two shows of this ten-week run, we wanted to post some additional responses. Here’s a letter from Michael Addison to director Aaron Davidman. In his long and impressive career, Michael has been chairman of the theatre department at U.C. San Diego and artistic director of the Berkeley/California Shakespeare Festival and has followed TJT since he brought our very first piece of work to La Jolla nearly thirty years ago!


I want to tell you how profoundly moved we were by the production.


The play, of course, but even more richly wrought than I had remembered, including the elements that evoke the structure of Greek tragedy, though cast in a modern frame. One can't call "Salesman" realism, in spite of its intense reality: the mythic struggle of the aging hero is central to an action that reverberates through family to the whole social entity.


And the work of you and the cast (particularly Corey) realized this and more. The actors showed that sort of forceful subtlety in their work that you dream of, with ease and economy that created characters that were at one and the same time haunting archetypes of the family as well as singular mirrors of our present reality.


Your work was definitive. Creation of yet another example of the work of one of America's few true ensemble theaters, orchestrating voices, gesture, movement, and all with spare but rich visual statement that revealed meaning. And the final choice of the ritual funeral, men wearing yamulkas as they poured the earth, was breathtaking: it stripped away the thin veneer of assimilation and revealed the heritage of yearning, effort, and pain that makes the play so truly universal, American, and – yes – Jewish.


Thanks, Aaron, to you and the cast for an evening rare and beautiful.



And here are excerpts from a review from the Berkeley Daily Planet


Full Review


By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet (06-05-07)


There’s been much talk of Traveling Jewish’s intention to make this a Jewish show with a Jewish Willy Loman. The notes in the program recall the Yiddish theater translation and production of 1951, with a review speaking of that show “bringing the play ‘home’ ... [catching] Miller [son of immigrant Jews], as it were, in the act of changing his name.”


True to their principle of being inspired by Jewish experience, Traveling Jewish has fashioned less a tragic look back at the Jewish diaspora in America than a true, multifaceted revelation of American experience through a Jewish perspective. “I still feel kind of temporary about myself,” says Willy.


Because this production’s accents, inflexions and mannerisms give this monumental play a different and fascinating texture, a new syncopation of street and domestic rhythms, it is a truly New York City Death of a Salesman—Manhattan-born Arthur Miller brought home…


Willy is beyond both sadness and happiness, rapt in his passion, oblivious as he walks the line down the road that runs downstage through the middle of Giulio Perrone’s splendid, spare set...


The mood swings of Willy and his family are the pivot, in Aaron Davidman’s excellent directorial conception, for the true theatrics of the play, reflecting Miller’s innovations as a former radio playwright adapting the multiplex style of the medium to the live stage. Jim Cave’s spot-on timing with lights and sound design by Rex Camphuis (also production manager) and cellist Jessica Ivry’s original music help deliver the goods to this audience, which is on three sides of the action, up on stage left and right as well as in the orchestra section in front. Few productions ever get the humor, the lyricism (which Miller would hauntingly refer to), the synthesis of approaches that catches up the social, the psychological, the moral, the sheerly pathetic content up into a vortex that sways back and forth until, as Antonin Artaud said of Euripides’ tragedies, “the floodgates are open ... and we don’t know any more just where we are.”


Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Last Two Weeks for "Salesman"

First, some of Ken Friedman's production photos:

Above, from left: Biff (Michael Navarra), Willy (Corey Fischer), Linda (Jeri Lynn Cohen) and
Happy (John Sousa)

Ben (Julian Lopez-Morillas), Biff, Happy, Willy, Linda

Bernard (Zac Jaffe) and Willy

Linda

Biff, Linda, Willy and Happy

Willy and Charley (Louis Parnell)

Biff, Happy, Willy

Letta (Meghan Doyle), Happy and Miss Forsythe (Juliet Strong)

Willy and Jenny (Juliet Strong)

Here’s the latest sampling of reviews and responses that continue to appear. Remember, only ten more performances. Go to www.atjt.com for tickets and schedule.

From Stephanie Hunt, actor, director, teacher and charter member of Word for Word

At the end of the year wrap-up class for our theater going class, [Stephanie teaches at Sonoma State] we ask the students what stayed with them – what images, productions, performances stayed with them. Many students chose Death of a Salesman.

Below is Maria's [Maria Magdalena Giordano, a student] impassioned letter for me to pass on (not her formal paper for class).

“I have never seen a Linda Loman like that before. She was a powerhouse, so real, and deeply moving. Everyone did a truly amazing job. Biff was heartbreaking and perfect, really captured the ruined glory of the American Boy. Happy, a role that can frequently fade into the background of the play, stood out as a truly sleazy character, who was always the second favorite son, and who turned to vengeful immorality to get his own back. I never realized what a "bum" Happy really is, until I saw this production. It's always a greater challenge to play a character that is irredeemable, but this actor excelled at it. Kudos. Every member of the cast was excellent. And Willie was brilliant. His fate, his hope, his disappointments, I was hanging on every word, totally connected to his psyche. I started to cry even before the culminating moment. The tragedy was like an inescapable hell hound, that would not let me go. The moment of Willy's death, when Linda screamed, it was like I was finally grabbed by the neck and shaken by the dog. I began to weep, sob, and I kept crying uncontrollably for the rest of the play, through the curtain call and half of the drive home. I have never been so moved in a theater, in my life. I may cry, I am a sympathetic/empathetic person, far from made of stone, but this was an experience I have never had before. Just thinking about it again, I have water all over my face. I am supremely grateful to these performers. It is an excellent play, but they brought it to life in a way I would never have imagined possible. I will never forget this show. I've been marked on my soul. Bravo & Brava. I'm an actor myself and this production only confirms why theatre is my religion. Catharsis doesn't even begin to cover it.”

'Death' offers fresh wisdom By Pat Craig, CONTRA COSTA TIMES

Article Launched: 05/22/2007 03:03:52 AM PDT

It shouldn't be surprising a lot can change in 40 years.

The first time I saw Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," 40-some years ago, I was a son in my mid-teens.

When I saw it a few weeks ago, at A Traveling Jewish Theatre's stunning revival, my eyes were those of the father of a grown son.

A lot of water had churned beneath the bridge during those four decades, bringing new perspective and considerably more appreciation of Willy Loman's futile battle against the invincible foes, time and change.

That sort of personal perspective on Miller's 1949 classic is probably nothing unique. The play has wisdom and poignancy by the case-full. But you tend to forget that.

That is one of a number of things making A Traveling Jewish Theatre's revival such a treat. There simply hasn't been a first-rate new production of the play in some time, which leaves it recalled in only the most vague terms.

But, to steal a line from Willy, attention must be paid -- the work is far too important, far too well-written and far too meaningful to be slipped into the deep pocket where old plays are hidden.

Enriching the TJT production, too, is the exploring of the play's "Jewishness," something that is certainly there, if you look for it. And in this production there are dozens of tiny details that make the Jewish side of the play quite evident and visible.

Yet it remains a universal story about the son of immigrants, Willy (in a stunning, tenderly nuanced performance by Corey Fischer) assimilating into America and the American way. He is a salesman, after all, and there's nothing more American than a drummer out on the territory looking for business.

But the orders haven't been coming for Willy for some time now. He's even been borrowing money to get by until the dry spell blows over. He hasn't told his wife, Linda (Jeri Lynn Cohen, breathing intensity into a memorable character), just like he hasn't told her about, you know, the other gal (Meghan Doyle) on the road whom he's been seeing for a while now.

And the boys, Happy (John Sousa) and Biff (Michael Navarra) -- they haven't worked out the way Willy dreamed they would. Of course, the old man has disappointed them about as much as they've disappointed him.

In fact, the air is thick with disappointment and shattered dreams, including the American Dream, which has somehow eluded the entire Loman family.

The story and the acting, and Aaron Davidman's direction, however, are golden, filled with beautiful flourishes and details that make the play breathlessly alive and remarkably meaningful for anyone who has been bruised or disillusioned, even ever so slightly, by life.

What makes the production even more impressive is a tone that flits between dark and light, holding out hope, then snatching it away in the most brutal way. This story of Willy Loman is not a pretty thing, but it is impossible to believe there are not countless Willys out there, silently waiting to die, yet dreaming of somehow pulling off a big finish.

From a high school student’s English class report:

…King Lear made me feel that he is still a child and Willy made me feel the same. The woman who played Linda was great because she made me feel the hardships of being a mother.

I agree that the theme is universal because any family can relate to the play… It seemed like the family as a whole were all at fault. Willy for having too much hubris, Linda for being too lenient, and the two sons for being selfish. The sons really reminded me of my Dad’s side of the family, blaming everything on living in Vietnam and not even trying to make a living….

From author William Poy Lee

I have not seen "Death" since I use to usher for ACT in the 1960's. This version was brilliantly performed and portraying Willy as Jewish explained so much. Truly Miller had created a crypto-Jewish character. I don't know if you've been able to read much of The Eighth Promise, but the themes of assimilation at the cost of one's old roots, wisdom tradition, and ethnic identity resonate strongly in my book too, only openly. I mean roots also in the sense of being connected to soil that grows and sustains you, that "smells" like you and is in your nutritional system and into which you deposit nitrogen fertilizer in return.

Interesting, that my father who wanted so badly to assimilate completely and be successful in the way that Willy hungered for also wanted to plant vegetables after his major heart attack. He was able to do so in my back yard while recuperating here. And every day, he went out and watered the plants and veggies and my lawn until he was well enough to return to Chinatown. Unlike my mother, my father had turned his back on our old ways -- and here he was, reaching out to soil and its cycles of flowering when death came visiting.

With deep gratitude, William Poy Lee
For information on William's new book about gtrowing about Chinese-American in San Francisco, visit www.theeighthpromise.com

From friend and fan, Elaine Starkman (a writer and editor)

What an absolutely stunning play and stunning performance. You must be utterly
exhausted when you finish & twice in one day? Wow! was reminded of my beloved father, but he was less ambitious for his two daughters and by the time he hit 60, he learned to relax, a kindly soul.


By Richard Connema on the Talkin’ Broadway website

I have seen many actors play Willy Loman, including Lee J. Cobb who originated the wonderful character. Since then I have seen George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Quinn and Brian Dennehy in the role. Willy Loman and his family were anonymous, and those actors offered a generalization of a kind of American everyman. The character was stripped of a particular milieu and culture.

Corey Fischer is superb playing a salesman with a New York Jewish accent. He plays the role as a character with one foot in Brooklyn and the other in the shtetl. There is a Jewish quality about Miller's masterful dialogue in the conversations between Willy and his wife Linda. Willy's schizophrenic conversations between real people and his dream people are engaging. The conversations with Uncle Ben, played strongly by Julian Lopez-Morillas, are striking.

Jeri Lynn Cohen is perfect as Willy's wife Linda. She is crucially passionate and affectingly as Linda preserves the magnitude and self-esteem of her husband.

Michael Navarra gives an outstanding performance as the salesman Biff. His changing from a high school football star to a man in his thirties who can't find himself is first rate. John Sousa is fascinating in his portrayal of Happy, the younger brother, an over-anxious man/child who wants desperately to be loved by his father.

Louis Parnell gives a good performance as the smug Charley who is defiant in his ignorance of things American, especially sports, but is still sympathetic to Willy's problems, even when he is being insulted by the salesman. Zac Jaffee gives a fine performance as Bernard.

Meghan Doyle, Juliet Strong and Danny Webber give sharp performances in supporting roles. Aaron Davidman's direction is excellent as the scenes between fantasy and reality flow smoothly. Giulio Perrone's set is sparse which allows the audience to concentrate on the great performances of the cast. The production is enhanced by a live performance of a lovely, sorrowful score by cellist Jessica Ivry throughout the drama.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Responses to "Salesman"

Death of a Salesman opened Sunday, April 8 to an audience of 200+ at the Project Artaud Theatre. We're about to begin our second week in Mountain View. Here’s an updated mix of responses from audience members and critics. Please add your comments after you see the play. For tickets, call (415) 522-0786 or go to www.atjt.com


From: audience member Mark Schlesinger

I wanted to let both of you know how much we enjoyed ATJT’s production of Death of a Salesman. I’ve seen the play a few times over the years (including the production starring Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich on Broadway) but none of them, in my opinion, came close to this version. Please extend my thanks and congratulations to Aaron, as well as to Corey Fischer, Jerri Lynn Cohen, Michael Navarra, John Sousa and the rest of the excellent cast for providing such a wonderful, poignant, and thought-provoking experience. Needless to say, it made Christine and me very proud to be supporters of ATJT.

From www.goldstarevents.com:

Goldstar gives TJT's production of "Death of a Salesman," its "Roar of the Crowd award." Here's a sampling of what their patrons have said: Marc Mayer raves, "Fantastically acted and directed. A real treat. Poignant, insightful, polemical, masterful, and overarchingly enjoyable." Debora Simcovich calls this production "first-rate theatre." Maxine Einhorn lauds, "Brilliant performances. I loved it." Judith Guerriero tells us, "Incredible acting, a deep and wonderful rendering of this classic Miller play." Steven Foerder calls Death of a Salesman "A very powerful and enjoyable tour de force by all cast members." Kenneth Hempel simply states, "Very worthwhile." And finally, Ira Okun says the play "still has important meaning for this generation."

From Sam Hurwitt’s review in the East Bay Express www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-04-11/culture/pay-attention/

Most astonishing is the performance of TJT cofounder Corey Fischer as Willy Loman. It's all there in his body, all the stubborn pride and insistent insecurities, his tall frame slumped and getting only more painfully hunched in on itself as the play goes on. You can hear it in his incessant, animated ramblings, whether talking to people actually in the room or those in his head. Seemingly without taking a breath, he slides from sputtering anger to swellings of garrulous pride that crumple as easily as they come. When he stoops to pick up his boss' lighter, you can hear the air going out of not just him, but the entire room.

Willy's moments of good cheer increasingly become more heartrending than those of overt bitterness or desperation. There's a haunting, childlike innocence in the way he tells his neighbor, "Charley, you're the only friend I got. Isn't that a remarkable thing?" It hits harder than if Willy weren't trying so hard to put the best face on it. As he shuffles off with his shoulders hunched high and his arms gesticulating, it's hard not to get a little teary. Somehow it's so much worse when he smiles.

Also absolutely devastating is son Biff's big face-off against a father with whom he is always at odds. Michael Navarra gives Biff's resentment and outsize physicality just the right amount of underlying solicitude, guilt, and longing for approval. John Sousa is a wonderfully twitchy bundle of nerves, lusts, and aspirations as younger son Happy; the brothers are all manic energy and starry-eyed adulation as boys whenever Willy's mind drifts into the past.

Robert Avila writing in the SF Bay Guardian

When Arthur Miller — through the character of Linda Loman (Jeri Lynn Cohen), model of the devoted, long-suffering wife and mother — implores the audience to notice the "terrible thing" happening to her husband, Willy, the United States was in the throes of an unprecedented postwar boom. Miller's observation of the tragic dimensions of a nation of small and hollow men and women, of dreamers, of sellers fooled by their own pitches, came as a revelation. Nearly 60 downwardly mobile years on, the Traveling Jewish Theater's not-to-be-missed staging brings fresh attention and fine skill to the Jewish inflection in Miller's American story, whose sheer ordinariness — its pitiful material distress, class shame, and wrenchingly anonymous sadness — still burns with indignation and rebuke. Indeed, for all its period charm (with Project Artaud's capacious stage, under Jim Cave's mood-laden lighting, turned into a blend of home and highway by scenic designer Giulio Cesare Perrone), the desperation feels utterly contemporary. TJT cofounder Corey Fischer leads director Aaron Davidman's excellent cast with a stirring and memorable turn as Loman — a simultaneously hunched and towering figure of a man whose daydreams and memories (augmented here by composer-cellist Jessica Ivry's wistful score) invade the action, dramatically dissolving the broken line between fiction and reality attendant on the American dream and an unraveling ego.

From Evan Specter, long-time TJT audience/community member

Death of Salesman is for me quintessential TJT: an economy- a bare quorum of props and set, allowing the lightscape and soundscape (egad, a live cellist!?) to amplify the effect of the ensemble’s deep rapport with each other and the material. Each production element selflessly serves its purpose, just as each scene of the script takes Willy inexorably towards his complete dissolution, and us with him.

I am a father and a son and the pangs radiated from onstage of inadequacy and expectation resonate deeply without manipulation. And yet the play doesn’t make it easy to pass judgment on Biff or Willy – and so it keeps me on the edge of my seat, unable to simply condemn or redeem myself along with them. Somehow by not making an obvious parable, it touches more deeply.

On a subtler level, in the depiction of a man’s exquisite disintegration, I see an aspect of my own scattered consciousness pretty fairly represented. For example, in the scene with present-day Bernard, “the anemic”, Willy progresses from a puffing, blustery "Biff is working on something really big” to an entreating ask about the secret to success, and then back to a bluster/fluster about what happened in Boston, I puff and fluster right along with him… and the intensity is building; the rifts in Willy’s coherence are spreading.

The mercurial flip-flops to me feel so familiar and real somehow- and on some level isn’t that how we all are- saying one thing one moment and contradicting it the next in deed or word... so for me it's not just a story of a person's dissolution but it describes a part of us that clings to a way of looking at things, that makes pronouncements about reality but secretly doubts them, that overwrites personal history so many times we don't know what really happened anymore.

I am reminded of my aging grandmother in Palm Beach, alone and bitter with a memory that is giving way to fantasy, and a growing paranoia and litany of regrets. She is so looking forward to my visit, and yet when I arrive she will ask when will I be coming again? Will I be kind as Linda or cruel as Hap? And I observe in my own mind certain voices and characters summoned up by the play: a business venture untaken, imaginings about successful acquaintances, a hidden hosebib of resignation. Great theater does this to me: casts a penetrating light on present relationships and leaves haunting cello tones echoing in my mind.

"Jewish take on Arthur Miller classic succeeds brilliantly"
by dan pine, in J. the Jewish Weekly
(click here for full review)

Fischer, as Willy, contorts himself into a shuffling arthritic, bone weary and failing fast. Yet Willy is capable of a febrile imperiousness that drives his wife and kids nuts. Though his character never heard of “bipolar disease,” Fischer brilliantly navigates Willy’s violent mood swings.

Michael Navarra and John Sousa as Biff and Happy are marvelous together, conveying genuine brotherly love corrupted by Willy’s patriarchal smothering. The Loman brothers’ doomed-to-fail “big deal” gives Willy the cruelest of false hopes, and both actors milk their characters’ ambivalence about it.

Jeri Lynn Cohen balances Linda’s inborn grace with perpetual fear of knocking over her husband’s widening gyre. Miller gives Linda some of the play’s most iconic lines, but Cohen wisely plays them straight. Her performance is a model of tissue-level commitment to a role.

The supporting cast is uniformly superb, especially Louis Parnell, who mines maximum humor out of Willy’s neighbor, Charley, and Meghan Doyle as Willy’s sometime mistress, the ditz who unwittingly triggers the Loman family’s implosion.

Much praise also goes to Jessica Ivry, whose live musical accompaniment, scored for solo cello, provides heartbreakingly apt counterpoint to the drama. Though Miller’s original stage directions called for flute, it’s hard to imagine anything more evocative than Ivry’s ominous pizzicato as Willy’s world crumbles.

Davidman’s staging augments Miller’s dialogue, especially with such touches as the upright, bird’s-eye-view bed (doubling as the Loman marriage bed and Willy’s out-of-town den of sin). Parading the entire cast, ghostlike, during some of Willy’s hallucinations, Davidman turns “Salesman” into ballet. And having his actors talk over each other in some scenes, he mimics the kind of repartee heard in a Howard Hawks film noir thriller. It, too, works beautifully.

At age 33, Arthur Miller wrote “Salesman” in a short burst of Promethean inspiration. Any production, no matter how modest, will reflect some of that greatness. With Traveling Jewish Theatre’s take, Miller’s fiery spirit has never burned brighter.

Rob Hurwitt writing in the SF Chronicle:
click for full review

Jeri Lynn Cohen is a vital Linda, forcefully, affectingly maintaining the importance and dignity of her husband against the ridicule and hostility of their sons and others. A potent, angry Michael Navarra and amoral John Sousa add riveting depth to the sons' struggles with their father's fatal commitment to a false American dream.

Sharp performances by Zac Jaffee, Meghan Doyle, Julian López-Morillas, Louis Parnell, Danny Webber and Juliet Strong help ground the drama.

Chloe Veltman in the SF Weekly:

One of the most powerful aspects of Davidman's staging is his creation of a psychic space on stage. Crisp lighting changes, from white, denoting "reality," to the warm orange of Willy's fantasy life, draw an efficient line between the play's two states. Jessica Ivry's live cello music, heard every time the action slips into Willy's over-ripe imagination, fluidly accentuates the divide. The barren stage, scattered with a few random pieces of furniture like wallflowers at a cocktail party and scarred with the white markings of the open road, suggests isolation and loneliness. In short, we feel like we are looking at the insides of Willy's head.

And what a head it is. As portrayed by Fischer, Willy is a man clutching desperately to his last vestiges of reason. Rattling around the stage with his beat-up valises, alternately bursting with aggressive ebullience and crippled despair, this Willy is a spluttering light bulb about to spend its fuse. Taking his cues from Ivry's cello, Fischer gives an extremely physical performance. When Ivry plays a sprightly pizzicato, Fischer lightens up. His long frame extends and his whole body seems to fill with air. But when the cello changes its tune to the plodding shuffle of a worn old man, so Fischer's body appears to collapse on itself. The muscles on his face tighten. He walks with an uneven, exhausted gait. The scenes between Willy and his eldest son, Biff (Michael Navarra), bring the actor's physical command of his character to the fore. The greater Biff's frustration grows, the more contorted Willy's body becomes. The full horror and pathos of Miller's tragedy can be seen in the interactions between these two characters.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

death of a salesman


Death of a Salesman starts previews on April 5 and opens on April 8, 2007. The buzz has started. Watch for a cover story in the J Weekly and get your tickets before they sell out.

For schedule and tickets, click here.

Here's what Corey Fischer wrote about the reasons TJT is taking on this formidable challenge:

In February, 2007, TJT begins work on a breakthrough production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman that will reclaim the Jewish context that Miller, writing in 1949, felt constrained to “censor out,” attempting to create an ethnically unmarked family whose struggles would have “universal” appeal.

Our production is directed by our Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman. Corey Fischer and TJT Associate Artist Jeri Lynn Cohen play Willy and Linda. Scenic design is by Giulio Cesare Perrone (designer of our productions Opening to You and Isaac). Jess Ivry, whom TJT audiences will remember from The Bright River, will perform her original, solo cello score live throughout the run.

Why a Jewish Death of a Salesman?

TJT has always held, as a working principle, that universality can only come from specificity. We’re certainly not alone in this view; more and more late 20th and 21st century writers, artists and thinkers have moved beyond the notion that specific ethnic or cultural markers needed to be jettisoned in order to create works of a truly universal value. This mid-century notion may have been a reaction of second generation immigrants to the limitations of the “old world.” What I find fascinating is that, almost in spite of himself, Miller created a character (Willy Loman) who is caught is that very struggle to assimilate, to re-invent himself as an American free of the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the shtetl or the ghetto. But Miller, in 1949, was perhaps – as a writer, anyway – caught in that struggle himself and felt bound to make Willy a generic American.

Willy Loman was recognized as a crypto-Jew as far back as 1951, when one of the most accomplished actors of the Yiddish theatre, Joseph Buloff, translated the play into Yiddish and played the role of Willy. The production was a huge success in New York and on tour. George Ross wrote, in a review of the Yiddish Death of a Salesman:

“The great success of Joseph Buloff's production is that it brings the play "home." The effect is remarkable. Buloff has caught Miller, as it were, in the act of changing his name…”

And just last year, the contemporary Jewish playwright Karen Hartman wrote,

“Death of a Salesman suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling "kind of temporary" about oneself. The play's Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.

I'd suggest that the psychically fluid structure of Salesman tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it's impossible to envision the shifting structure of Angels in America without Death of a Salesman, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail.”
(http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131)

So the intention behind our production is to restore those missing “clues.” Unlike the infamous production of The Crucible by New York’s Wooster Group (it was subject to a cease and desist order initiated by Arthur Miller) TJT will take no liberties with the text, but will, rather, explore it from its own particular perspective and esthetic – that of a contemporary Jewish ensemble theatre.

As Karen Hartman points out, Miller was not entirely successful in purging all yiddishkeit from his play. It reveals itself in the monitory cadence of a line like “Attention must be paid..” Ross, referring to this line, writes: “Here, and in many places, one felt in the English version as if Miller were thinking in Yiddish and unconsciously translating…and sometimes when his English filters through the density of his background, it succeeds in picking up flavor on the way.”

For a company who has based its 28 year-old reputation on the creation of original work and the development of new plays across a variety of forms, engaging with an iconic American play can be seen as a radical new direction. Likewise, realizing that the largest part of its work has looked toward the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora, the Shoah, the Middle-East for inspiration, we want to explore the American Jewish experience of the last few decades; the period in which American Jewish identity went through such surprising transformations.