121.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER
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Peretz Hirshbein (1880-1948), born in Grodno, Russia,
and known as “the Yiddish Maeterlinck” because of his symbolist inclinations, is
considered the founder of Europe’s Yiddish art theatre before World War I. He’s
probably best known for his play GREEN FIELDS (1916), made into a classic of
the Yiddish cinema in 1937. Sometime in the 1970s, I served as adviser on an
MFA thesis production of it directed by Diane Cypkin, who remains an active
promoter of Yiddish theatre and musical culture. I remember it as a charming
pastoral comedy, completely unlike the darkly ambiguous, moodily poetic, and regrettably
soporific ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER (Oif
Yener Zeit Taikh) now being presented at the Here Arts Center by the New
Worlds Theatre Project. This group, founded in 2005, is devoted to the revival
in English translation of the more artistically literary plays of early 20th-century
Yiddish theatre, especially if—unlike THE DYBBUK or GOD OF VENGEANCE—they’ve
been neglected or forgotten. This is not the kind of sentimental, hammy but
kosher entertainment that comes to mind when many think of Yiddish theatre; instead it's comparable, at least in intention, with the more experimental work
associated with the European avant-garde.
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| David Greenspan, Jane Cortney. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Whereas Hirshbein’s longer plays—dealing with peasant
life—have cozily accessible plots, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER is heavy on
atmospherics and imagery but light on action and story. It uses images of blindness
and sight, darkness and light, water and dryness, fire and ice, cold and warmth,
and a river and ferryboat (bringing the River Styx and Charon’s ferry to mind). Hirshbein’s play, which emphasizes love's life-affirming but also destructive power, seems
directly influenced by Maeterlinck’s early one acts, in which childbirth,
death, blindness, old men, mysticism, and subtextual religiosity play a role,
and in which audiences are expected to intuit meanings not intellectually but
through their feelings and imaginations.
I’ve provided a full plot
summary at the end of this review for interested readers, but here I’ll confine
myself to only a brief outline. ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER, which begins
during a winter storm and ends when another storm erupts on a summer eve, concerns
a blind grandfather, Menashe (David Greenspan), alone with his granddaughter,
Mir’l (Jane Cortney), as the river waters rise in the darkness, eventually washing
their house away. We learn that Mir’l’s mother died in childbirth, of a magic
amulet her mother got from a holy man and that Mir’l now wears, and of how the
river killed Mir’l’s father and caused Menashe’s blindness. The flood destroys
the house, and Menashe freezes to death after seeing visions of angels on their
way. A Stranger (David Arkema)—is he an angel?—arrives, saying his ferry,
headed for the other side, was sunk in the storm; he refuses to let Mir’l die,
promising her a palace-filled future, and she consents to live. The Stranger
vanishes, time passes, and one summer evening at the riverside, Mir’l, who seems
to have lost her mind, speaks of her yearning to join the Stranger on the other
side. When another storm threatens, she rejects her grandmother Yakhne’s
(Christine Siracusa) plea to return home, hoping the storm will bring the
Stranger back to her. As the weather worsens, Mir’l has visions and, before
long, seeking to be saved, dashes into the rising river.
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| David Arkema, Jane Cortney. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
David Greenspan gives an intense performance as
Menashe, blending realism and non-realism in his high-pitched line readings and
almost puppet-like movements. (Mr. Greenspan is also sharing his talents in PUNK
ROCK at the Lucille Lortel, where he comes on late in the play.) Capable work
is done as well by Ms. Cortney, Ms. Siracusa, and David Arkema, but the stylized
quality of the writing and performances prevent any emotional involvement
in what happens to them.
Patrick Rizzotti’s minimal set, propless except for a
chair in the first scene, evokes a world of water via wrinkled, vertical
swathes of stiffened, translucent cloth on screens and borders beautifully lit
by Nick Solyom in combination with the projections of Bart Cortright. M.
Meriwether Snipes’s simple costumes ably convey a sense of who the characters
are. Shannon Sindelar’s simplified staging ignores Hirshbein’s explicit stage directions, depending on lighting and sound effects to establish the cataclysmic events in the audience’s imagination. She also blurs locales and seasonal shifts, as when she sets the final scene, not at a
riverbank in summer, as Hirshbein does, but behind the screens, almost as if it’s
taking place under water. What’s vague in the writing is thus even vaguer in
performance.
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| Jane Cortney, Christine Siracusa. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
I wish I could praise New Worlds for having uncovered
a lost gem in ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER. After a promising beginning, however,
the play’s lack of compelling action, its one-note characters, the continual underscoring
of Erik T. Lawson’s eerie mood music, the thematic obliqueness, and the
need to watch some scenes through translucent fabric may eventually
have the effect of a hypnotist’s watch swinging back and forth before your
eyes.
Here Arts Center
145 Sixth Avenue
Through December 21
Plot Summary:
It’s deep winter in the
dead of night, and we’re somewhere on the banks of a rising river where the whistling
wind, rushing water, and ice floes crashing into one another can be heard. A
nearly blind old man, Menashe, recalls the thrill of sailing a ferryboat across
the river in rough waters, but present conditions would make that impossible. He
tells his granddaughter, Mir’l, who can’t fall asleep, about a time when five
days of nonstop rain caused the river to rise and destroy a ferryboat. He recounts
the story of Mir’l’s mother giving birth to her as the river flooded and dying
before seeing her baby, and insists she wear her mother’s magic amulet to
protect her from harm. The amulet, which Menashe says Mir’l must never look
inside, was the gift of a mysterious holy man whose blessing also was a curse. The
water also killed Mir’l’s father and caused Menashe’s blindness. Menashe, who senses
his imminent death, pronounces Mir’l the pure child of sinless parents, but she
seems to be burdened by guilty feelings.
Meanwhile, the waters seep
into the house and Mir’l thinks someone is outside. She expresses great fear of
what’s out there and also of her zeyde, whose eyes seem to reveal evil. The
house is inundated and all goes dark although Menashe sees a holy angel coming
to their rescue. Mir’l climbs through the window to reach the angel and his
torch-bearing fellow angels and the house is destroyed. Menashe, having
followed a strange light, finds himself on higher, dryer ground, needing to
locate Mir’l, although his body is getting colder. He hears her voice saying
she’s cold, and offers to warm her. She feels to him like a block of ice.
Seeking the light from her amulet, he learns that someone tore it from her in
the flood. Menashe then grows warmer, thinking he sees his late daughter in
heaven.
A Stranger (David Arkema)
is heard, crying out to be saved from death. The Stranger finds Mir’l and her
grandfather, who is dead. Mir’l too wishes to die, but the Stranger won’t let
her, now that the ferry he was on was destroyed and he never made it to the
other side. Life must be preserved, he insists, and, after he insists that Mir’l
and he cling to each other tightly to keep each other warm through the bitter night,
she begins to feel the heat returning to her body. The Stranger promises a
happy future, including jeweled palaces, and when she says she can’t understand
him he declares that feeling can be better than understanding. Reluctantly
leaving her zeyde’s body, she fearfully follows the Stranger in his quest for
life.
The action shifts to a
summer evening by the riverside, where Mir’l wishes she could swim across to
the other side; she refers to someone, presumably the Stranger, who came to her
at night and left her when the sun rose. Her frightened grandmother, Yakhne, comes
to take her home, thinking she’s lost her mind. Mir’l, disappointed that the
grand promises made by the Stranger have not materialized, wants to go to him
on the other side, and tells her grandmother, in whose eyes she sees darkness, to
go away or she’ll jump in the river. She longs for the Stranger to come for her
in a ferryboat, and fears she’ll die of coldness before he arrives.
A storm threatens; Mir’l,
imagining it will bring the Stranger back with his promised palaces, refuses to
obey her grandmother’s demands that she take refuge, and waits for the river to
take her to the other side. Yakhne places her own amulet around Mir’l’s neck,
to protect her, but when her granddaughter throws it into the water, Yakhne
goes in after it. Mir’l, her heart broken by the Stranger’s disappearance, has
visions of fires on the river, and, as she grows ever colder, of her zeyde’s
eyes beckoning her. Yakhne tries to take her home, but Mir’l’s madness rages as
she thinks the Stranger is coming for her with ruby-studded palaces, and,
shouting, “Save me! Save me!” rushes into the waters.