Review: A SHAYNA MAIDEL at Laguna Playhouse

A Shayna Maidel is a shatteringly powerful drama at the historic Laguna Playhouse through March 31st.  This acclaimed play by Barbara Lebow is beautifully produced by the award-winning creative team at the Laguna Playhouse, with great sensitivity, rich texture, and mature brilliance in the direction by David Ellenstein.

A Shayna Maidel is an intimate look at the family of a Polish Holocaust survivor after WWII.  A Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor spoke movingly on a panel after the Thursday performance.  She shared that after the October attacks on Israel, she could not sleep.  She realized talking with other Holocaust survivors that “never again” was no longer true.

It is hard for me to believe that we are living in this age of staggeringly widespread antisemitism, that hasn’t existed in a fever pitch like this since WWII.  Harassment, vandalism, assaults, hate speech, and murder of Jewish people are up 400 percent in the United States, according to the ADL.  There are few synagogues and Jewish centers that don’t need security guards these days.  Rabbi Richard Steinberg of Congregation Shir Ha-Ma'alot spoke stirringly and beautifully in the discussion after the play, and I wish every performance had the benefit of his insightful and thoughtful commentary.  Rabbi Steinberg said that he has fought antisemitism his whole life, but that last year was the first time in his 56 years that he has personally experienced it.

Now, more than ever before, it is restorative and vital to celebrate stories of Jewish life and culture, and listen to the warnings of history about where this insidious dark bloom of hate will take us.

Playwright Barbara Lebow does not make her 1984 play A Shayna Maidel into a history lesson.  It is a personal story of family and loss and emigration and trauma and resilience and hope, and it is all the stronger for that.  There is storytelling in the historical present of the 1940s, as well as dreams and memory.  I found it painfully moving to watch.  This is a very human and personal drama, anchored by a lead performance of ferocious realism, heartbreaking vulnerability, and bone-deep power from Zarah Mahler.

With everything in her old life destroyed and most of her family and friends murdered by the Nazis, Lusia Pechenik (Zarah Mahler) arrives homeless in New York City, helped only by international aid organizations.  Her husband Duvid (Josh Odsess-Rubin) is still missing.  The only family she knows are gone: her best friend (Marnina Schon), her mother (Samantha Klein), and her baby are all dead.

All she has left in the world are her father Mordechai (Joel Swetow) and her sister (Eden Malyn), who are strangers to her.  Her father and her younger sister left for America when she was a still child, and for financial and perhaps other reasons, she and her mother never came to join the rest of the family.  And then the horrors of the Nazis and the war are everywhere.

One thing that remains unclear to me in Barbara Lebow’s writing is how the family that remains in Poland supports itself, and why the family remained separated for so long.  Does the father send money, does the mother have a profession or another source of income, are other family members helping?  It would seem difficult for a struggling family in the depression era to support two separate households.  I remained uncertain if there is a deep marital riff or disharmony.  And perhaps the ambivalence and complexity is intentional, to explore how little we understand and can really know even about the people closest to us, how at the heart of every family is some inexplicable mystery, some central narrative that never really makes sense.

The staging is richly crafted and detailed, as stagecraft at the Laguna Playhouse always is, although I don’t know if it adds to the mood or narrative.  The only narrative moment in the play that does not fully land is when Eden Malyn, playing Rose Weiss, breaks down.  It does not manage to fully break through all her constructed layers and get down to the bone.

There are absolutely beautiful, nuanced, deeply felt performances from the superb cast throughout.  A Shayna Maidel is first and foremost a family story, and one of the things I have realized watching both films and live theatre is that family is one of the hardest things to get right.  A family has its own innate rhythms, patterns, and intimate dynamics, it has a powerful feeling of familiarity, an indelible sense of texture, of love and irritation, of mood and heart.  It is very hard to create this sedimentary buildup of years and decades in mere weeks. Yet to the great credit of the cast and the direction, the family on stage at the Laguna Playhouse feels breathtakingly real and textured and complex.  The portrait on stage of the closeness and life-giving comfort of marriage is one of the loveliest I've seen, with beautiful and tender work from Josh Odsess-Rubin and Zarah Mahler.

David Ellenstein is one of the best directors we have, and I have greatly admired his recent work including the laugh out loud hilarious, deliciously frothy romp The Angel Next Door at the Laguna Playhouse.  Ellenstein is a master of tone and luminous texture, of profound humanism.  As an actor himself, David Ellenstein knows how to elicit tremendous performances.

A Shayna Maidel is dark and raw and haunting, but also inspiring in its hope, faith, and resilience.  A truly masterful and essential production from the Laguna Playhouse.

A Shayna Maidel runs through March 31st at the Laguna Playhouse.  The Laguna Playhouse is located at 606 Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach.  You can call (949) 497-2787 for tickets or click on the button below:

 

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