by Martin Sherman
Directed by Diana Leblanc
A Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company Production
at the Jane Mallett Theatre
March 5-29, 2008

    At eighty, she wobbles on unsteady feet as she settles down on a low wooden bench to sit shiva for a murdered nine-year old girl (whose identity is revealed only very late in her long monologue), and though she is steeped in grief, anger, and nostalgia, she is also given to leavening humour that, like her life’s experience, is very much in the Jewish mode of balanced anomalies. She claims to “stink of the past century,” and her restless mind generates a long chronicle of a century of oppression, persecution, and atrocity in Europe as well as the Mid-East. A survivor of Cossack pogroms, the Warsaw ghetto, the Holocaust, she discovers that there is yet more to suffer. After losing her young daughter and two husbands, she must confront a shiksa daughter-in-law, a convert to Judaism, who turns into a Zionist extremist. She also must live with the fact of a gay grandson, Mid-East violence, Atlantic City, Hollywood, and the very idea of being a Jew—which is to say, one who dares to ask questions of God that cannot be answered, and one who learns that “the glory of the race has less to do with giving the world Moses and Marx and Jesus, and everything to do with the invention of the phrase ‘on the other hand.’”

   As played by Lally Cadeau (who has a beautifully expressive face and hands), Rose is able to become more than an emblem of a century, even though ultimately, the meandering text entraps the character by overstuffing history into her long story. Dressed in black, with white hair framing her face, Ms. Cadeau knows the value of sedentary stillness. Though she sits for most of the two-act play, she allows her eyes to veil with anguish or twinkle with mischievous and even unholy wit, and her large fingers to signal moments of distress or ecstasy. Her voice has a soft generic East European Jewish accent, with small cracks in the register as befits her age, but it skillfully modulates into various tones and scales, so that even when the chronicle grows pallid or clichéd, Ms. Cadeau is able to make it sound intimately connected to her inscape. In other words, without resorting to overtly histrionic exhibitionism, the actress is able to inhabit the character without turning it into simply a graphic history lesson or an unrelieved mourning ritual.

  Part of her success is due to her director, Diana Leblanc who, having directed the piece once before with Martha Henry in the title role, has envisioned the play as a meditation on “first and last things,” and Rose as a luminous being who keeps loss and grace in a delicate balance. Another part of the success is in the economic elegance, yet suggestiveness, of Philip Silver’s set (minimalist with intriguing connotations of studio, hotel, home, and desert), and Keith Thomas’ restrained sound design.

   The production cannot conceal the shortcomings in Martin Sherman’s text that is both over-inflated—it goes into the mass influx of European Jews into Palestine, life on a hippie commune, sex, and godlessness—and under-nourished—the Holocaust itself comes and goes glibly. It tells too much, yet it telescopes too much in the bargain. It also tries too hard to make Rose entertaining, so that it often seems as if one eye of the playwright were on the laugh meter and his other on the heartstrings, with the result that Rose’s comic tone overplays its effects and then suddenly finds compensation through sentimentality—as in the ending where she expires, having run out of incidents and almost an entire century.

   On the other hand (yes, the Jewish cachet is infectious!), this production is a distinguished start to a new professional theatre (under the joint artistic direction of veterans Avery Saltzman and David Eisner) that boldly declares its mission of Jewish theatre. The inaugural season of the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company has begun with a one-woman tour de force of fierce passion, reasonable wit, and poignant grace.

photo by Racheal McCaig



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