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
"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
“[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.”
“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.’''
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