Rose opened last night to one of the longest standing ovations I’ve ever seen in our theatre. I’ve been working with Naomi since 1968. Forty years this summer. I’m happy to say this is the best work I’ve ever seen her do. I wasn’t personally involved with this production and didn’t see any rehearsals until the last one before previews began. I loved what I saw but on Sunday night, I witnessed the play, the character and the performance fusing into an incandescent whole.
As Aaron Davidman said afterwards, it was a triumph of storytelling. Theatre as storytelling. Storytelling as theatre. Naomi, alone on stage for over two hours (which go by with a fluidity we rarely get to experience in the jangle of our days), illuminates Rose’s personal history as it intersects the wounded landscape of modern Jewish, European, Middle-Eastern and American history.
Together with our associate artist, Joan Mankin, who directed the production, Naomi has shaped a performance in which artifice disappears, effort vanishes and craft is subsumed into an act of witnessing as generous as it is courageous.
I was reminded of Antonin Artaud’s call for a theatre in which the stakes were so high, it would be as if the actor were “signaling through the flames.”
Sherman, the playwright, subverts almost all our expectations of what an 80 year-old Jewish woman might have to say about the life in a Ukrainian shtetl, the Warsaw Ghetto, Israel and Palestine, love and sex and grief, tumbleweeds and motion pictures.
Neuroscientists have been saying a lot about “mirror neurons” lately. When you see someone drink a glass of water and find yourself salivating, that’s your neurons firing in a pattern that mirrors the activity of the drinker’s neurons. Same thing when we see someone smile or frown or weep or laugh. Experiencing Rose, my neurons got quite a work out, as they mirrored Rose’s/Naomi’s sudden, unexpected shifts between exhilaration and irony, joy and fear, shock and regret, heartbreak and helpless laughter.
-Corey Fischer, founding member
For tickets, go to our website.
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