The Human Touch

The Yiddish Theatre in New York is holding its head up–at least so far as I am concerned. It may sound like treason to say so, what with Maurice Schwartz and his Art Theatre troupe out of the city on tour and that old favorite of the old generation, Boris Thomashefsky, staging a comeback in an Allen street restaurant. But if this be treason, make the most of it! as Patrick Henry said. It seems that a group of persons, taking advantage of Mr. Schwartz’s absence from the theatre at Twelfth street and Second avenue, has installed a company of actors in that Pantheon of the East Side, and told them to go ahead and act.

I dropped in the other night and saw the company perform in a Yiddish adaptation of August Strindberg’s drama, “The Father.” I thought I was going to see the Pirandello opus, “He, She and the Ox,” and when the first rise of the curtain failed to reveal an ox grazing on the stage and when, moreover, the first lines gave intimations of tragedy, I felt a little discomfited, as if I had been cheated in a trade, and made up my mind to leave at the end of the first act. At the end of the first act, I made up my mind to leave at the end of the second, but in the middle of the second I knew that I was going to stay until the end; I was going to see that tragedy through, to the death or the suicide I anticipated.

Now Mr. Paul Baratov, who played the part of the self-doubting father; Bella Bellarina, who enacted the role of Laura, his wife, and Frances Weintraub, who took the part of Margareta, an old servant–not to mention the other actors, director, etc.–may take it as a tribute to themselves, and to August Strindberg, too, that they conquered not only myself but the audience as a whole.

I have indicated, in a previous column, how unruly and ill-mannered the average audience in that theatre can be, but this old-fashioned intellectual melodrama–the mark of a misogynist Ibsen is all over it–subdued that audience effectually. There were a few ill-timed giggles and snorts, a little bit of explanatory conversation during the course of the play, and there was one old lady who would call loudly for Mrs. Epstein, in somewhat of a panic, every time the theatre became darkened before the curtain rose. Outside of that, the audience was subdued, subdued by the force and simplicity of the drama, and the capacity of the actors in interpreting it.

To my left were sitting two young women, one of whom explained to me, in somewhat of a patronizing tone of voice, that she did not often visit the Jewish theatre. During most of the play she and her companion sat on the very edge of their seats and every time the poisonously scheming Laura said something particularly hateful, or manifested by a particularly eloquent lift of the eyebrows what dire plans she was meditating against her husband’s peace of mind, the young woman nearest to me would turn a face full of sympathy for the husband in whose net of intrigue “the father” was going to be strait-jacketed. There was a lot of sympathy for Paul Baratov that evening, and he deserved every inch of it.

He is, if you don’t already know it, a magnificent specimen of a man and when, in the first act, he put an arm around the shoulder of Jacob Mestel, as the pastor (a medium-sized individual) you had the feeling that a giant was about to crush a man, or a man a dwarf, and against his large and towering bulk the slight figure of Bella Bellarina seemed sinisterly serpentine. He seemed to be equally able to play the part of the raving maniac and the beaten child, with out overdoing either role–a temptation few Jewish actors resist And as for Miss Bellarina, she played her hateful part with such superb hatefulness that it would have been a pleasure to wring her neck, and one of the disappointments involved in seeing “The Father” is that, at the end, her neck remains unwrung.

But this company of performers has another little triumph to its credit. In the row behind the one in which I was sitting–H, to be exact–there were two couples who had come to the theatre in the expectation of having a good laugh, a rippling, quaking belly-laugh, for they looked like persons who could eat heartily and laugh heartily. At the end of the first act, there were obvious marks of distress. “Ah, we should have gone to a movie,” in less literary language. And, “Gee, this isn’t a comedy.” “What kind of Jewish are they talking; I never heard such a language, I can’t understand a word.” They also were going to stick it out for another act. They continued restive during the first part of the second act, and then lapsed into attentive silence. At the end of the second act, a council of war decided they would stay, one of the more enterprising among the four learned the name of the play and of the author and also that it was a drama, not a comedy. And from the one who had complained of the curious Yiddish used in the play I now heard: “Yeah, I get it now. It’s a pretty good show!”

All of which merely proves that August Strindberg could write a powerful play about the processes by which a hateful, scheming woman makes an honest man mad and that in the cast headed by Mr. Baratoff he has found–posthumorously–a very excellent corps of incerpreters.

The success of that performance seems to indicate that a Jewish audience can be conquered with out the employment of such attention-diverting devices as music, dancing, crowds, frequent change of scenery, crass humor alternating with delirious melodrama. There is only one set for “The Father” and seven actors and never at any one time are all the seven on the stage at the same time. Mr. Baratov bears a manful load manfully.