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Diamonds in the Dark. By various authors. Directed by Helen Stoltzfus. Starring Albert Greenberg, Naomi Newman, and Corey Fischer. At A Traveling Jewish Theater, 470 Florida (at 17th Street), through Dec. 27. Call 399-1809. Members of A Traveling Jewish Theater say their dream of having a home stage is precisely as old as their dream of bringing unknown Yiddish poems to life in some kind of live production. They’ve had a home stage now for about six years, and as of last week they also have their own entrance, their own box office, their own elevator, and their own cut-glass marquee. They are, by now, An Established Jewish Theater, so it’s fitting that their new season should open with a long-deserved spotlight turned on some of the more obscure gems in the yiddisher canon. Diamonds in the Dark translates 24 poems into music, English, and movement. Three performers trade lines in two languages while acting out the poem’s story, if it has one, or pretending to play its rhythms on (for example) jazz instruments. It’s the kind of show that only performers long skilled in movement can pull off without seeming self-indulgent. They play “The Joy of Yiddish Words (Dos Freyd Fun Yiddishen Vort)” as a scat-singing hipster’s ode, and “Sheenie Mike (Shini Mayk)” as a tale set in a hard-boiled Mickey Spillane milieu, with howling dogs and a discordant violin. “Text (Tekst),” about the mysteries of the word of God, alternates Corey Fischer’s very American Yiddish with an affected, ferociously prim reading in English by Albert Greenberg -- he sounds, on purpose or not, like the critic Harold Bloom -- and collapses entertainingly into mock existentialist panic. “It’s Night,” another poem about God, is set to music and sung by Naomi Newman as a languid, Streisand-esque torch song. Newman has a marvelously tough reciting voice, and Greenberg is an excellent mimic, especially as one of the grandmothers in “The Cat Is Washing Herself.” (He also composed most of the music, which is haunting, melancholy, and spare.) Fischer plays good comic Jews like “Crazy Levi,” though his American accent sometimes flattens the pickled Yiddish tones. The company has done the proper work of letting each poem suggest its own form, and the variety of the poems leads to a nicely varied show, with flecks of pleasure for everyone. But variety is also the show’s worst problem, since nothing but language holds the pieces together. Twenty-four poems may be too many at once. Staging a jumbled anthology with almost no forward motion is a sin of overindulgence, but I suppose it’s forgivable just this once, as the only flaw in a showcase of undiscovered light. — Michael Scott Moore |
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