Maurice Schwartz has carved a magnificent spectacle out of Lion Feuchtwanger’s historical novel, “Josephus”, but the question is: Has he carved a play out of it? I fear not.
What Mr. Schwartz did with Dr. Feuchtwanger, in stage settings, stage effects, costuming, dialogue, direction, action, casting and the dozen etceteras of details that go to make a stage performance are for eyes and ears, and perhaps a little for the mind, but not for the heart. By which I mean to say that the spectacle at the Yiddish Art Theatre does not transport the beholder and the hearer into the life and times of Josephus and Vespasian and Berenice, does not lift him back into the past so that he may realize the personal tragedy of Joseph Ben Matthias, renamed Flavius Josephus, as if it were the tragedy of a contemporary with whose surroundings we were familiar. Which leads me to suspect that when a regisseur succeeds on the panoramic scale he cannot succeed on the human scale too. That is, except when you’re a Reinhardt, you cannot put on a spectacular show with a vast crowd of actors and expect to make the audience’s collective heart skip a beat over the plight of a member of that crowd. So far as I can recall, Reinhardt’s productions of “Everyman” and “Danton” were the only magnificent spectacles in which the human tragedy—or the human touch, if you will—were not absent. Maybe I would change my mind even about these if I saw them again, at this stage of my life.
But whatever we say about Mr. Schwartz’s production of “Josephus”, let us bear this in mind: that if he fell short, he fell short because his goal was so much more difficult than that which the average producer, Broadway or Second Avenue, sets himself and that he might have succeeded had he set himself a far less trying task. His version of Josephus, scene by scene, has nothing cheap or shoddy about it. I can sense, from my little knowledge of the theatre, that Mr. Schwartz was no easy taskmaster during the rehearsals, for he must have demanded, and received, the best from each of his actors. There are individual scenes and settings which almost complete the miracle of transporting us to pre-Christian Era Jerusalem and Rome. I could mention, for example, the Temple scene of excommunication, or cherem; the brief, but impressive, dialogue between Josephus and his old Rabbi, Jochanan ben Saccai; Michael Gib-
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
