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Page struck Traveling Jewish Theatre taps into some Family Alchemy By Robert Avila› a&eletters.com Traveling Jewish Theatre's staging of short stories by Grace Paley and Bernard Malamud, Family Alchemy, is a graceful nod to the theater of pop-up literature pioneered by San Francisco's Word for Word (a debt gratefully acknowledged on opening night by TJT artistic director Aaron Davidman). In fact, having twice before collaborated with Word for Word on the verbatim staging of stories by Paley, Malamud, and Maxim Biller (in 2000's The Jewbird and 2003's Windows and Mirrors), TJT considers its first solo Word for Word–style production a "graduation" of sorts for the 28-year-old company. The graduate deserves honorable mention. The W4W style not only continues to provide an excellent form for TJT's expanding repertoire of innovative and cosmopolitan work drawing on a wide range of Jewish experience, but productions like Family Alchemy also further demonstrate the seemingly inexhaustible potential in a style of theater that at first sounds misleadingly ersatz. In truth, there may be limits to the power of verbatim staged literature, but the involving and generous nature of these playlets proves, once again, that the form is far from derivative. Less adaptation than transposition, Family Alchemy is like the written word in a rapturous dance with the rallied resources of the theater. Fidelity to the text as written, including descriptive third-person narration, seems to present only opportunities rather than obstacles to the TJT ensemble and director Joel Mullennix (a Word for Word stalwart). Still, the three stories are not necessarily equally effective as theater. If anything, the consistently fine work of actors, director, and designers suggests the stories' varying degrees of transferability to the stage. Family's alchemy is slightly unsettled, for instance, by the second piece, Paley's celebrated "Story Hearer." It's a meditation on the larger meanings we construct from lived experience packed in a humorous and deceptively simple scenario of a woman (Naomi Newman) telling her husband (Corey Fischer) about her day, and it's staged here with intelligence, insight, and skill. All that affords some interest and pleasure, but the story itself seems less inclined to cooperate with the proceedings; its subtlety on the page never quite comes into focus here. It may be too delicate in its way, too idiosyncratic and elliptical, to benefit as thoroughly from the W4W style. It's a charming piece charmingly delivered, but it feels slighter than intended. "The Story Hearer" is preceded by another, more recent Paley story, "Mother," in which the narrator (Jeri Lynn Cohen) muses on the loss of her beloved parent (Newman). It's only four minutes long, but it sets the tone for the evening by immediately drawing us in to a world of private and public ruminations on the meaning of family life. It has an affecting quality (much of it owed to Newman's fleeting but precise scene-setting and characterization, and some devastatingly restrained work by Cohen, whose voice and eyes alone convey so much of the play's emotional and thematic force). At the same time, it's far too brief to really risk losing us. 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. These three New York stories — all on the subject of family as burden and balm in an increasingly fractured, lonely world — unfold against scenic designer Kate Boyd's highly apt two-tone-cutout silhouette of an urban skyline, its stylized simplicity (reminiscent of so many scissors-and-crepe-paper productions) paying humorously romantic homage to the concept of 3D lit. Equally well suited to the range of comedy, romance, and heartache presented here, Boyd's set (richly lit in varying shades of color by David Robertson) exudes a lovely and nostalgic air that still manages, in mottled shadows and the cold monotony of its sharp angles, to retain a hint of gritty urban reality. The same can be said for the production as a whole, which again just shows to what extent TJT, Paley, and Malamud are all on the same page. * FAMILY ALCHEMY: STORIES BY MALAMUD AND PALEY Through Feb. 26 See Stage listings for dates and times Traveling Jewish Theatre 470 Florida, SF (415) 522-0786
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