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.”

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.

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.

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 20^th and 21^st 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.

Responses to Rose

From Colleagues:

Naomi:
Your performance tonight was stunning. Congratulations. Mazel Tov. The play is fantastic and your work in it truly brilliant. You are an inspiration. Thanks for the great work, your perseverance, your style and strength and depth and humor.
Much love,
Nina (Nina Wise, improviser, writer, teacher and performance artist)

Naomi:
Hope you are able to catch your breath and get some rest after all the excitement last night. What a lovely evening and what a glorious performance! The whole theatre was spellbound...everyone was with you and I heard at least three people say that they felt like they were the only one in the room with you...it felt that intimate. You have created such a wonderful character...thank goodness you found her or she found you...whichever. I hope the rest of the run is as exhilarating. I know it is a lot of work and ton of energy...really, I don't know how you do it. But I can't wait to come and see it again. As it can only grower richer and deeper. All my love to you and a blessing on your long run,
Jeri Lynn (TJT Associate Artist)

From the Community:

Hi Devra:
My friends and I loved Rose on Saturday night. I don't know how Naomi Newman does it, but she was riveting and inhabits her character. This should have a great run...
Rose Katz
Program Coordinator
BJE Jewish Community Library

Dear Devra:
Naomi was amazing. I will spread the word about "Rose" and please pass along my warmest compliments on Ms. Newman's amazing work!
David Rachleff, MSW

Hi Devra
My husband and I saw Rose last weekend up in San Francisco and we loved it!
I am teaching an upper-division class -- writing about the Holocaust -- and I am hoping I can organize a trip to see the show. We would need 12-15 tickets. Is that possible? Let me know.
Thanks so much!!
Jill

From the Critics

J the Jewish news weekly:

It may be old hat to Newman to hold a rapt audience in the palm of her hand, but it never gets old for theatergoers, including the appreciative ones that packed the house on opening night Sunday, Jan. 7…

Sherman saves several juicy surprises for the final minutes, tying together various threads and lending to the play –– and Rose –– a fitting coda to a life well lived. credit Sherman with giving Rose a great sense of humor. Recalling her idyllic shtetl girlhood, at one point she wonders aloud if she’s really remembering it, or just thinking of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Rose is a cut-up, but a mortally wounded one. She sits shiva for good reasons… Joan Mankin’s direction is appropriately understated, with subtle touches of light and sound evoking far away memories. She wisely leaves the heavy lifting to Newman, who pulls it off with aplomb… Newman may have remained seated for two hours, but it was the audience that stood, cheering, at the end.

SF Chronicle:

Newman invests [Rose] with grace notes of sly humor, wry self-consciousness and touching warmth.

Please post your response using the "comment" option below.

TJT's ROSE blossoms

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.

Report from Our Trip East

This is Corey writing again. In the previous post, we told you, among other things, about the origin of the Prayer Project, our collaboration with Liz Lerman (that’s her on the left) and her company, the Dance Exchange (D.E.). On November 12, Aaron, Naomi and I traveled to Washington D.C. to spend a week with Liz and members of her company learning more about the ways each group worked and planning the future development of the piece.

Our visit coincided with an “Institute” that the D. E. was conducting. We would participate in parts of it, joining the dozen or so other participants and three D.E. members Cassie Meador, Elizabeth Johnson and Matt Mahaney who were co-leading with Liz. The rest of the time we’d work in another studio with one or more of the leaders developing some material we had brought with us.

The Institute was close to what we might call a workshop. It combined instruction, research, improvisation and group process. For the D.E., institutes are an opportunity to begin exploring a new area – like prayer – and to teach the very special compositional tools they have developed as well as to bring in some needed income. The participants came from D.C. and elsewhere and included a couple of experienced young dancers, a retired school teacher who used a wheelchair, one of D.C.’s most respected actresses, an African-American museum curator, several students, an academic, a writer and a woman who created and taught Kabalistic chants. All of them had worked with Liz or her company members before and had a deep appreciation for Liz’s values and processes and for the D.E.’s performance work.

Someday I would love to sit at Liz’s feet and hear the story of how she came to know what she knows. In the meantime, I refer you to the Dance Exchange website where you’ll find one of several thought-provoking essays. (You'll need to register once you get there.)

In our first work session we showed a movement score that we had developed during the past two weeks of work back home. It was derived from the shapes of the Hebrew letters that make up the Sh’ma, one of Judaism’s central prayers, which says: “Listen, people of Israel (lit. those who struggle with God), God, your God is One.” The Sh’ma can be translated to emphasize either the monotheistic aspect of Judaism – “Listen, Israel, the Lord alone is our God” or the non-dual nature of divinity: “God is one.”

After running through our score, in unison, Elizabeth, Cassie and Matt began work with us to find ways of partnering each other and a greater dynamic range of movement. We were immediately stuck by the ease in which these three young artists were able to share the role of director, effortlessly passing the leadership between themselves, building on each other’s ideas with no sense of ownership of those ideas, no ego and no attachment. In the D.E.’s process, the work “belongs” to no one or to everyone. The creative space is a commons. After working for three hours or so we had evolved a much more complex and fugue-like score that included lifts and carries, surprising shifts in tempo and movements that were different from any we had ever done. Cassie, Elizabeth and Matt were able to work with each of us in ways that both supported our strengths and challenged us to stretch our individual, often self-imposed, limits.

The next day we worked with Liz on personal stories each of us had begun to develop in SF as short, solo hybrids of language, narrative and movement. Liz was incredibly quick to grasp the heart of each story and to build on what we had done. One of her principles became very clear: let the movement and the language each do something different; verbal and movement languages can each give different information and thus create a kind of tension that can open up a third space in the consciousness of the audience. For example, working with my story of the open-heart surgery I had two and on half years ago, she had me unhook my voice from any attempt to carry the emotion. Working with opposites: using a casual, unemotional voice while the movement became increasingly charged. (All this, of course, is much harder to “get” from a verbal description than it is from seeing it. For that, you’ll have to wait until spring, 2008, or until we have time to upload some video.)

Aaron and Naomi and I also had various experiences outside the studio that informed our work. At an exhibit at the Smithsonian, Aaron was deeply moved by a photograph of the Cambridge scholar of Judaica, Solomon Shechter, in the process of sorting through hundreds of thousands of scraps of damaged, flawed or superannuated Hebrew scriptures that had been acquired from the Cairo Genizah, the repository for sacred texts waiting to be buried in a special ritual for that purpose. He took that image of the bearded old man intensely absorbed by fragments of the sacred into the studio where Liz guided him into ways of connecting with the image in movement.

I had begun trying out a prayer practice suggested by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav in the late eighteenth century. Simply talk directly to “God” (my strongly secular upbringing still has me putting that word in quotes) pour your heart out to him/her/it. This did not come easily to me, but when I really allowed myself to do it, I was invariably brought to tears. More from relief and release than from sadness. So I began to wonder if that phenomenon had something to do with a “God”-given faculty, perhaps a faculty of imagination, that allows us to create an inner space from which its possible to pray. When I related this to Liz, she asked me to imagine a beam of light emerging from the crown of my head and then moving that light to different spots of the walls and ceiling. Immediately, I felt my neck lengthen and soften. I experienced, in my body, that same sense of space I had been talking about.

Naomi had been concerned that as the oldest in the company, she might not be up to the physical demands of the work. She was perhaps a little reassured that, she could easily outlast me, stamina-wise even though I may be fourteen years younger. But she was still troubled by the issues of moving down to and up from the floor, of giving and taking a partner’s weight. After working with Matt, though, who is a master at helping people work with lifting, carrying and sharing each other’s weight, and the others, she gained a new confidence and ease in all those areas which we all celebrated. That’s how it was. Every time anyone made a discovery or moved someplace new the joy of it came to all of us.

During the times we participated in the larger Institute, we made duets and solos, told stories, improvised and explored exercises all somehow connected to the idea of prayer and, particularly in this Institute, prayer as radical action. Another of Liz’s core ideas emerged: “Turn discomfort in inquiry.” We began to learn to ask the questions that would help the work move where it needed to, Again, we were – it’s not too strong a word – awestruck by the profound attitude of service, the whole-hearted generosity that Liz, the D.E. members, and the work itself came from. I felt that I was part of an expedition to a remote territory where the weather was completely unpredictable. Its success depended on the ability to fully experience the other: to listen and sense, to respond and support.

So you see how intensely. we had all bonded by the end of our time in D.C. The planning session – which we had not exactly been looking forward to – went smoothly and gracefully. Peter Di Muro, the Producing Artistic Director of D.E. who quietly took care of us all week, and Jane Hirschberg, their Managing Director, joined the rest of us in mapping out the next year and a half of work. Liz, Cassie, Elizabeth and Matt will be making several trips to San Francisco starting in September 2007 and culminating with the work’s premiere in April, 2008. In one sense, we’ve hardly begun: we have no idea what form the finished work will take, what it will look like, we have only a few elements that might actually wind up in it, From another angle though, we’ve found new ways of working, of relating to language and movement and, most importantly I think, to each other. We have questions.

We took the train to New York, feeling very satisfied and very sore.

In New York, the highlights were our meetings with Isaiah Sheffer, (R) artistic director of Symphony Space (and producer of NPR’s Selected Shorts) and with Elise Bernhardt, the first new executive director in many years of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Isaiah regaled us with a number of stories from his unusual and colorful life. I was particularly knocked out by the one about his having been an understudy for the role of Happy in the legendary Yiddish translation of Death of a Salesman that I refer to extensively in the previous post (Why a Jewish Death of a Salesman?). He went on for several performances. Isaiah and his team have transformed the Symphony Space on Broadway and 96th from a derelict barn of a building into a beautiful and inviting performance space with two theatres and a café that is both a national and a community resource. We’re hoping that Isaiah will be able to present TJT’s Family Alchemy there in sometime in 2007.

Our meeting with Elise Bernhardt made us feel very hopeful about the future of the NFJC. She wants the foundation to focus less on producing conferences and other events and more on creating a meaningful source of financial support for Jewish artists. She also has a great sense of humor and a strong background in the performing arts.

Please post your “comments” using the link below.

For my personal account of the New York portion of the trip, visit my blog at www.fromcorey.blogspot.com

Welcome to TJT’s blog. We hope that this new experiment will allow our community a closer look at our life as a theatre. In it, we’ll tell you about the current goings-on and about new ideas as they emerge. We’ll invite your responses to questions that arise and try to answer questions that you might pose. We’ll point you toward the materials that inspire us and ask you to do the same. When we’re in rehearsal, we might try posting logs of the process; when we’re in production, the blog can be a place to continue and deepen the post-show discussions we often hold in the theatre.

Different members of TJT will post at different times. I (Corey Fischer) am starting things off with, first, an overview of the three major projects we’ll be developing over the next three years and, next, some thoughts about our production of Death of a Salesman which will open at the beginning of April, 2007. We’ve also just updated our website (www.atjt.com) and restored some pages that had gotten lost in a redesign a while back (history of TJT, ensemble biographies, etc.).

Your participation will contribute to the direction the blog takes and will, when all is said and done, determine the success of the experiment.

To start, let me locate you in TJT’s day-to-day. Last night, we finished the second of two workshop/readings of co-founder Naomi Newman’s new play Torn Ribbons. TJT Associate Artist, Jeri Lynn Cohen and I joined six guest actors under Jayne Wenger’s direction and spent three half-days sketching out a simple, script-in-hand presentation of Naomi’s intense and surprising new work. This was the first time in our 28 years that Naomi worked only as a playwright, neither acting nor directing. Those of you who were able to see the readings in San Francisco or Berkeley know how moving the play is. After another reading (at the Actors Studio in New York, directed by Ellen Burstyn), Naomi will continue developing it. Since there is nothing overtly “Jewish” about the play, we’re asking ourselves (Naomi most vocally) whether it’s something TJT should ultimately produce. We’ll keep you posted. If you have any thoughts on the subject, post a response.

Tomorrow, we begin preparing another new play, Who by Fire (formerly, Moving), by TJT Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman and Israeli playwright, Ro’I Rashkes, for a workshop/reading next weekend in Mountain View and SF (the details on our website). These workshops have been supported by the Magic Theatre and the Z Space’s initiative for new play development.

Three mainstage projects over the next three years

What follows are brief descriptions of the three main projects that will be occupying us through 2009. What’s not mentioned here is this year’s production of Rose by Martin Sherman, featuring Naomi Newman and directed by Joan Mankin. You can find out more about it on out website

Death of a Salesman (Opens April, 2007)

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 will be directed by our Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman. Corey Fischer and TJT Associate Artist Jeri Lynn Cohen will play Willy and Linda. Scenic design will be done 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 20^th and 21^st 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.

An interesting side note to the 1951 Yiddish production by Joseph Buloff can be found at: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=331. Chloe Veltman interviewed Luba Kadison, Buloff’s widow and an important yiddish theatre performer in her own right. Veltman says:

“Arthur Miller was delighted with her portrayal of Linda in a Yiddish version of Death of a Salesman at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn in 1951, as was the scholar Harold Bloom, who wrote to Kadison just a few weeks before her death, saying her Salesman was the most moving he'd ever seen.”

The Prayer Project (Title TBD) (Opens April, 2008)

Since we first met nearly twenty years ago, at a theatre festival in Stockholm, TJT and Liz Lerman have been drawn to the possibility of collaborating together. In 2005, Liz proposed that by “using personal story, or by placing unusual events side by side, or by retrieving rituals from our past, or by listening to our young people recount their futures,” we create a work “that lets our bodies be the healing landscape for some of our divisions.” Together, we agreed to build a work that would explore the meaning of prayer in human experience with Liz directing and co-creating the piece and TJT core ensemble artists, Aaron Davidman, Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman co-creating and performing it. The notion of working with prayer comes from our shared sense that we urgently need an alternative to the dangerously polarized and contentious relationships that exist between different communities of belief (or unbelief) in our post 9/11 world. As Rabbi Michael Lerner writes in his new book, The Left Hand of God:

It is the search for meaning in a despiritualized world that leads many people to right-wing religious communities because these groups seem to be in touch with the sacred dimension of life. Many secularists imagine that people drawn to the Right are there solely because of some ethical or psychological malfunction. What they miss is that there are many very decent Americans who get attracted to the Religious Right because it is the only voice that they encounter that is willing to challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and spiritual loneliness.

Theatre can mount a powerful challenge to “the despiritualization of daily life,” not in any sectarian or doctrinaire way, but by inviting audience members to become part of an— albeit temporary—community of imagination and possibility, by offering metaphor as a balance to an overly literal understanding of life. TJT has always sought to fulfill this potential, often exploring the “sacred dimension of life” in unconventional ways that speak to Jews and non-Jews who may have no affiliation with any particular religious institution, but whose values, nevertheless, cannot be dismissed as merely materialistic.

In the proposed collaboration, Liz Lerman and TJT seek to create a context in which non-threatening interaction between people of various religious and secular orientations can happen; in which people who identify with a particular religion and people who do not will both be able to recognize the impulse to find a connection to the sacred—the primal human impulse to pray.

We perceive an unmet need among people who are not affiliated with any particular religious institution to still be able to speak about prayer, about God, about soul and spirit, for, as Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum writes, “…the American religious right has totally hijacked the language of religion and spirituality to promote the values of its reactionary political agenda.” And without a language in which to express a spiritual dimension of one’s life, the experience itself becomes less possible, less real.

Corey, Aaron and Naomi have been learning some of Liz’s tools for devising choreography from various sources that she introduced to us last May and with which we’re continuing to work in September and November. Also in November we’ll be spending another week with Liz (in D.C. this time) to continue work. We’ll have to put the project on ice for the rest of this season and will pick it up in the summer of 07 and again in January ’08 until it opens in April ’08. We have no idea what the piece will be like other than very physical. We’ll be using texts from various sources – extant writing, original writing, interviews with people – In various ways and will most likely work with a sound design that uses recorded sound and music, found and original.

Odets/Group Theatre (Opens in 2009)

TJT, in collaboration with the South Bay’s resident theatre, Theatreworks (at least for some of the early development), will create an original theatre-piece that explores the creation of the Group Theatre’s two most explosive and influential works—which premiered within weeks of each other in 1935—Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing. As scholar Nahma Sandrow has written: “[Odets’ plays] translate the Yiddish theatre’s leftist passion for social reform into an English with Yiddish inflections.” The story of how this historical moment came to be has the potential to illuminate the ways in which the energy, ideals and rhythms of Eastern-European Jewish immigrant life suffused a nascent American culture as the country struggled with a broken economy and the new threats to democracy posed by fascism. For the first time in nearly three decades of theatre-making, TJT will use its innovative ensemble processes to explore a cluster of deeply American themes. By bringing theatrical life to specific characters, landscapes and events: the minute particulars that form a narrative fabric, the new work will investigate American culture as a culture of immigrants; the relationship of democracy, art and social change; the ongoing relevance and resonance of this early experiment in visionary, non-commercial theatre by a largely Jewish group of artists. Corey will be lead writer on this one.

This is more than enough for one post. We look forward to your responses.