Notes from our Dramaturg

“Yiddish,” wrote author and Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer about the language in which he most frequently wrote, “has been in trouble for the last 500 years, and will be in trouble for the next thousand.” By that standard, Yiddish theatre, the environment tonight’s performance inhabits, has been in trouble for roughly 130 years—at least since it first arrived in America from Roumania in 1882. Performed and cheered avidly by hard-working immigrants who spent up to half their salary on tickets, the Yiddish theatre embraced Shakespeare, vaudeville, songs, improvisation, and the cutting edge of European modernism.

Perhaps the most important stories the Yiddish theatre told, however, were the stories by and of the speakers and writers of Yiddish themselves. As many as 24 Yiddish theatres across the country rang with the stories that encompassed the Old Country and the New World, the conflicting struggles to assimilate and to retain Jewish identity, and the efforts to preserve tradition and somehow accommodate change, much like a certain fiddler who first appeared playing and dancing on a roof in a Marc Chagall painting in 1912 (you know the one). The Yiddish theatre so retained its vitality that during the Depression, when the WPA funded the Federal Theatre Project, the distinctly Yiddish productions took to the stages across the country alongside the more trenchant Living Newspapers and the flashier Swing Mikados.

In James Sherman’s Jacob and Jack, it is this theatrical world and tradition that not only provides the background, but also emerges as its own character—or perhaps more accurately, a whole cast of characters. And in the intertwining stories of its titular characters, you’ll glimpse something of the soul and hear a trace of the heartbeat of the Yiddish theatre, and by extension, the Jewish experience. For as Jacob and Jack declaim, ponder, pontificate, and (not incidentally) joke their way toward an understanding of what it means to be an actor, a success, a husband, a man, and a human being, they also come to terms with what their Jewishness means—the same questions, perhaps, that Emanuel Goldenberg, Issur Danielovich, and Bernard Schwartz once asked before they became Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, and Tony Curtis. We might also keep in mind that many, many others who did not achieve stardom asked those questions, too.

Of course, none of this means you have to be Jewish to enjoy, appreciate, and laugh loudly at tonight’s show. But it couldn’t hurt...