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IDA
KAMINSKA brought a Yiddish "Mother
Courage" to New York last night in the
second of two productions her Jewish
State Theater of Poland is performing at
the Billy Rose Theater.
It was a
handsome production, and Miss Kaminska,
the consummate actress, is a doughty
wagonmaster in the Bertolt Brecht's
episodic anti-war tale, translated by
the star from the German.
The sets
were stark and imaginative. The company
was a pleasure to behold, following in
unison the pace set by their leader. The
curtain that dropped between the scenes
bore vivid drawings evoking Picasso's "Guernica."
Yet
something was wrong. Brecht did not fit
the Yiddish stage comfortably. His play
is on a great theme, wickedly comic, yet
somehow impersonal. Yiddish theater is
nothing if not personal. Even at its
worst, and always at its best, it is
examining the nature of persons, not
peoples, and those they rub against.
•
Where
Brecht says war is wicked, a Yiddish
theater might look at the type of men
who make wicked war and try to explain
them. Last night's production became
more forceful when Miss Kaminska and the
troupe were facing those terrible
individual moments of personal loss,
when the specific mother saw her
specific children dead.
As Mother
Courage's wagon is pulled through the
wars, her older son is taken into the
army. The second, simple son is shot,
the mute daughter is killed. Only Mother
Courage surmounts all hazard, fattening
off of war, while paying for it with her
family.
Miss
Kaminska plays the title role
brilliantly. Brecht's lines role off her
tongue witheringly. There is no
quavering little old lady here. She
dominates the stage; while others make
dramatic pauses, Miss Kaminska is always
in motion. It is a long play, and here
are parts that seem to come to a full
stop. Those who work with her catch the
humor and paradox of the ridiculous,
meaningless, endless war.
The little
Brechtian ironies lent themselves to the
skeptical, verbalized Yiddish shrug, but
these were touches, not substance.
Does this
mean that Yiddish theater must confine
itself to the ghetto, rummaging through
the attic of Jewish experience for
scripts? There was a time when there
were many Yiddish stages and audiences,
that one could have indignantly roared,
no! All human thought should be funneled
to those who will listen in any tongue.
But this
is not the case today. Even at home, the
Warsaw troupe plays to more people who
don't understand Yiddish than do.
Precisely because this type of theater
is hard to come by -- and it is great to
see this company at all, particularly in
"Mirele Efros" -- it would be more
meaningful to see it do things in its
own experience.
•
"Mother
Courage" does not fit the bill. But
there are modern plays that do. For
instance, "Death of a Salesman" is a
universal play, yet one that might have
been written for this theater.
"Mother
Courage" will have a number of
performances, with earphone English
translations for those who wish [it]. It
is not the troupe's glass of tea, but
since it is here only this once, so far,
it is still worth the visit to see Miss
Kaminska, and one of the few repertory
companies in Yiddish. And it is still
doing "Mirele Efros." |
