Subscribe to The Jewish Standard free weekly newsletter

 
font size: +
 

‘Gimpel’ graces Folksbiene stage

Classic Singer story now a play

 
 
 
image
Gimpel’s selfish wife, Elke (played by Daniella Rabbani), is brought to trial. The village elders questioning her are, from left, the actors Harry Peerce, Ethan Sher, and Jonathan Brody — under the eyes of the rebbe, played by Itzy Firestone, seated.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the most famous writer in Yiddish and the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize, is a natural source of material for the Folksbiene, the nation’s last remaining Yiddish theater company. Several years ago, the Folksbiene presented a fine production of Singer’s short story “Yentl,” and now it is doing perhaps his best-known story, “Gimpel Tam.” The original appeared in the Forvertz in 1945, but everyone agrees that Saul Bellow’s masterly translation titled “Gimpel the Fool” and published in the Partisan Review in 1953 introduced the Yiddish writer to the American literary world. While there’s little debate that Bellow’s translation set in motion Singer’s climb to fame and literary glory, there’s some quibbling about his paraphrase of “tam” as fool. To avoid getting into the fray, the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene has returned to the original title, added some songs, and is presenting the confusing, mysterious, and quite wonderful story as its main production at the JCC of Manhattan.

Review

In front of an elegantly austere set designed by Roger Hanna, the inhabitants of Frampol go about their village lives. But Frampol is not the cozy, rosy-hued shtetl embraced by Jewish nostalgia. It’s peopled by gossiping, scheming, cheating, thieving, and whoring Jews, most of whom spend an inordinate amount of time playing tricks on poor Gimpel. These townsfolk fulfill the role of a mischievous Greek chorus, commenting on the action and foreshadowing events. Gimpel, played with great sympathy by Adam Shapiro, is an orphan, a simple, gullible man who can’t bring himself to doubt the far-fetched stories his neighbors come up with. Although he recognizes that he’s been tricked many times, Gimpel retains the capacity to believe — because, after all, he explains, if he begins to doubt the human beings around him, isn’t he in danger of eventually doubting the Holy One above?

image
Adam Shapiro as Gimpel the Fool

Probably the dirtiest trick the town plays on Gimpel is to marry him off to Elke, the village slut. Elke waddles to the chuppah clearly pregnant, and the two are wed, much to the amusement of their neighbors. Daniella Rabbani does a great job as the coarse and sensual Elke. She’s happy to have Gimpel the baker support her and her growing brood of children, and Gimpel, overlooking her abuse and betrayals, is a loving husband and father, bringing her fresh challah and choice dishes from his ovens. Even when he catches Elke en flagrante, and the rabbi orders him not to return to his home, Gimpel convinces himself that he hallucinated the sight of his wife in bed with another.

Innocence, corruption, faith, reason, forgiveness and guilt — all these big issues inherent to the story have resulted in reams of literary criticism and discussion. Is Gimpel a holy innocent, or is he a passive and complicit victim? Is the world irredeemably evil, and what is man’s role in such a world? What is the significance of Gimpel’s forgiveness of his tormentors? Is Gimpel a Christ figure in a Yiddish setting? Rather than diving into these depths, writer/director Moshe Yassur approaches the story’s many complexities with a light hand. He’s faithful to the tale, but he leaves it to the viewer to unearth the darker subtext. The music played by the onstage Folksbiene Band helps keep things cheerful, of course, and Shapiro’s warm performance prevents Gimpel from seeming a pathetic boob. Yassur emphasizes the story’s plentiful humor, a trademark of Singer’s work. Even when the stories are filled with despair, there are always good jokes to enjoy.

A native of Romania, Yassur directed the world premiere of this show in Bucharest at the Jewish State Theatre in 2007. Interestingly, Romania, where Abraham Goldfadden produced his shows in the 1870s, is considered the birthplace of Yiddish theater. It’s certainly a pleasure to have the production come to New York, a place where Yiddish theater is alive and thriving. There are easy-to-read supertitles for the Yiddishly challenged. For ticket information, go to http://www.folksbiene.org.

 
 
 
 
Add a Comment

Name:

Email:

Location:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:


Auto-login on future visits

Show my name in the online users list

Forgot your password?

 

Just be glad they’re not your mishpocha

The “fourth wall” in theater describes the invisible barrier between the actors and the audience. In “The Boychick Affair — The Bar Mitzvah of Harry Boychick,” writer Amy Lord takes the fourth wall and drives a truck through it.

“The Boychick Affair” is the latest offering from Lord, who starred in the interactive play “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” before creating “Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral” in 1994. This time, Grandma Sylvia’s great-grandson Harry is becoming a bar mitzvah. After a successful two-year run in Los Angeles and a stint in Florida, Lord has brought her madcap creation to New York and everyone — well, almost everyone, according to the program — is invited.

Going to see “The Producers” is fun. Going to “The Boychick Affair” is an experience like no other on Broadway.

 

Vaudeville lives — in Yiddish, yet

Maybe there’s something to all this talk about a resurgence of Yiddish. It seems that there are now two Yiddish theater companies in New York. A scrappy new outfit, the New Yiddish Rep, joins the National Yiddish Theatre—Folksbiene in bringing Yiddish entertainment to the masses. And while there were hardly masses at 45 E. 33rd St. for “The Big Bupkis,” the New Yiddish Rep’s newest production, there was a surprising amount of entertainment.

The star of “The Big Bupkis,” Shane Bertram Baker, may be the new incarnation of Yiddish theater — he’s relatively young, not Jewish, and learned his Yiddish as an adult. A child magician and a participant in the current burlesque revival (what, you didn’t know burlesque was reviving?) Baker is perfectly comfortable on stage and has great comic timing.

 

One-man show celebrates Sholom Aleichem and the Folksbiene

To celebrate its 95th consecutive season, the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene is presenting “Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears,” a one-man commemoration of the 150th birthday of the beloved Yiddish humorist and writer. That one man — Theodore Bikel, a renowned actor and folksinger long associated with Sholom Aleichem through his portrayal of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” — is 85 years old. Watching Bikel stride across the stage for almost two hours, speaking continuously, breaking his monologue only to launch into numerous songs, all these birthdays and milestones are much on the viewer’s mind. How could they not be? It’s an amazing accomplishment for anyone (How do actors remember all those lines?), but it would be dishonest (if a bit ageist) to deny that it’s even more amazing for someone his age. Bikel’s bulk and full white beard make for a commanding stage presence; the words flow easily and he never seems fatigued.

 

RECENTLYADDED

Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza is subject of play by Times’ ‘Ethicist’

image

In the talkback after a performance of his play “The Punishing Blow,” Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine, acknowledged that it was only after Mel Gibson had his infamous anti-Semitic meltdown that Cohen conceived of a dramatic way to tell a story that fascinated him — the history of 18th-century Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza. That history is still the most vital part of “The Punishing Blow,” a one-man production by the York Shakespeare Company at the Clurman in New York’s Theatre Row, but the frame that Cohen has contrived adds dimension to the issue of anti-Semitism and its manifestations in the 21st century.

 

“The Boychick Affair” in New York City

 

Yiddish Show in Manhattan

 
 
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30