Theater for the New City's OPEN REHEARSAL Begins 1/19

"Open Rehearsal" by Lazarre Seymour Simckes, author of "Seven Days of Mourning," "Ten Best Martyrs of the Year," and "Nossig’s Antics," is a Pirandellian farce in which a play about a chaotic family pretends to be just a chaotic rehearsal. The playwright is an award-winning author whose plays usually confront difficult questions of Jewish history with absurdist logic. This is his fourth production at Theater for the New City and his first time directing his own work.

The piece is filled with mind-bending mirror images that are compelling and hilarious. Acts and scenes occur out of sequence. Actors forget lines and fight over the contents of the script. The author (the family’s old grandma) gets ejected by the director for giving notes to the actors but she sneaks back in to do Tai Chi exercises and tell truths to the audience. Romance develops between the daughter and the lighting assistant. She is a naive but sex-crazed college junior, prone to follow her mother's example and instantly marry a person she has just met. He is a nervous wreck who nearly electrocutes himself and the entire cast, then claims to be her brother in reality. Her philandering father, divorced though still stuck to her mother in Alaska, shoots himself in the head rather than kill his wife but reappears as a ghost at the engagement party. The mother, a multiple cancer victim and obsessive photographer, always comes late to rehearsal and recites only what she feels like saying. Other characters storm the stage from the audience. The play ends in a promised finale that gets canceled for lack of an elephant, a horse, a monkey, a tiger, and a bear, but the substitute finale will grab you by the seat of the pants. In short, tragedy and comedy shove each other around for the right to be on stage.

Simckes's plays always exhibit a unique flavor of absurdism rooted in the Jewish experience. "Nossig's Antics," which TNC presented in 2004 directed by Crystal Field, was a dark farce about Alfred Nossig, a leading Jewish intellectual executed in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Jewish Underground as a suspected Nazi collaborator. Critic Menachem Wecker compared the play to classic absurd dramas, then wrote, "The play ends with the old man saying, 'If I were you, and I am, I'd call it quits and say kaddish for myself.' And that is really the most interesting thing about 'Nossig's Antics': all along it has said kaddish for itself." Simckes’s first play, "Seven Days of Mourning," also dealt with kaddish, telling of a family that refuses to mourn the death of its youngest child who fell from a kitchen window in apparent suicide. A Talmud-quoting half-quack intrudes and attempts to force the household to face the reality of its pain and observe the seven days of shivah. Clive Barnes (NY Times, 1969) cited the play’s "quality of fascination, of wild exaggeration," declaring it "spiky, uncomfortable and yet intensely moving. A 'Fiddler on the Roof' without music, but with blood. Unique, wild, funny. I read it three days ago, I saw it two days ago and it still haunts and puzzles me. And the more I think of it, the more it worries my heart." Critic Dan Isaac (The New Leader, 1970) called it "a very good play, perhaps a great one."

In "Open Rehearsal," the characters are not identified as Jewish, but their humor and diction give them away. Simckes takes the grossest reality of everyday life and transcribes it into a vision that is aglow with comic inventiveness and a profound intuitive understanding of the human experience. The father kills himself over and over and the mother repeatedly visits hospitals with one cancer after another. The 'open rehearsal' is a playwright's nightmare. The play constantly tempts itself with tragedies that can befall both a family and a theatrical performance. Simckes holds up a kaleidoscopic mirror that melds the absurdity of life with meditations on logic, mortality and theater.

Simckes claims that his theater is not the dark absurdism that is all too familiar, but the "absurd theater rooted in the impulse to make life bearable." He writes, "I think of this play as a variety show like the Carol Burnett Show or the Sid Caesar hour, yet a serious family drama. Skits follow skits rehearsed out of sequence. The play doubles back on itself as the director uses substitutes for the lead roles, but everyone in the cast is a member of the same family. It's a screwball comedy rooted in the absurd tradition that harks back to Greek tragedy; a form of therapy, of healing confrontation that exaggerates like a silent film. The antics still allow the audience to read the emotions of the characters. The play is a love letter to theater and to life."

"Open Rehearsal" was selected by Edward Albee as first runner up in Yale’s inaugural Drama Series Competition of 2007 and more recently had a reading at Ensemble Studio Theatre directed by David Margulies.

Lazarre Seymour Simckes, playwright, novelist, psychotherapist, and translator from the Hebrew, is a graduate of Harvard College (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Stanford University (Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow and M.A.), and Harvard University (Ph.D.). His first play, "Seven Days of Mourning," adapted from his novel published by Random House, was staged at Circle in the Square. Other plays include "Ten Best Martyrs of the Year," reviewed by Michael Smith in the Village Voice as "timeless, mythic, enlivened by all kinds of stylistic intrusions and an almost hysterical inventiveness," and "Minutes," a burlesque encounter between Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler presented at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center in 2008. His play "Soldier Boys," a large-cast work about the times of Nicholas I of Russia, had a reading at TNC with Judd Hirsch as the Tsar. His last work at TNC was "Nossig's Antics" (2004), which the critic Richard McBee called "a riveting puzzle."

Simckes is also an actor; he has played the lead role in a short film ("Kvetch") that he created and co-wrote. As a psychotherapist, he has worked with multi-problem families and incarcerated sex-offenders.

Mr. Simckes has written two novels, many short stories, and several films, including an adaptation of "The Last Temptation of Christ" for Sidney Lumet. He has translated into English from Hebrew several works by noted Hebrew writers, including "Adam Resurrected" by Yoram Kaniuk.

He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Brandeis, Tufts, Bar-Ilan (Israel), and at Haifa University (1995-96) and the University of Tampere in Finland (1996) as Fulbright Visiting Writer in Residence. During his Fulbright year he conducted an interactive writing workshop ("Celebrating Differences") linking Israeli Arab and Jewish high school students with their counterparts in America under the aegis of the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications. He previously conducted televised writing workshops linking middle school and high school students across America, including the Virgin Islands.

Simckes has received numerous awards: a Littauer Foundation Playwriting Grant, an Ingram Merill Foundation Grant, a National Jewish Book Award for his translation of the novel "Becoming Gershona" from the Hebrew, and two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, one a Literature Award for his original screenplay "The Human Windmill" about legendary boxer Harry Greb.

He writes, "I consider Theater for the New City my theatrical home. Put simply, Crystal Field, the Executive and Artistic Director, understands my work. She has brilliantly directed two of my plays. I thrive in the invigorating atmosphere of TNC with its multiple events and stages."

The actors include Victoria Guthrie, Maria Silverman, Sheila Mart, Marilyn Oran, Justin Rodriguez, Josh Black, David Zen Mansley, Robert Homeyer and Primy L Rivera. Lighting design is by Alexander Bartenieff. Sound Design is by Steven McMullen. Costume design is by Susan Hemley. Pianist is Jess Stewart.

Jan. 19 - Feb. 5, 2012
Theater for the New City (Cino Theater), 155 First Avenue (at East Tenth Street)
Presented by Theater for the New City
Th-Sat at 8:00 pm; Sun at 3:00 pm
$10/tdf  Box office (212) 254-1109;  www.theaterforthenewcity.net
Running time 1:30.

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