back
to review samples page
Name
A Shayna Maidel
I attended Lake City Playhouse’s Black Box production of Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel on November 12, 2004. The play ran on November 11 and 18 at 7:30 pm, November 12, 13, 19 and 20 at 8:00 pm and November 14 at 2:00 pm. Ticket prices for all shows were $7.00.
The goal of the play was to illustrate that the bond of family can overcome worldly circumstances. A Shayna Maidel clearly met this goal in my mind. My impression of the play was that it was well worth attending and was a fairly accurate portrayal of what it might have been like to be a Jewish family in New York in 1946. It was highly entertaining, thought provoking and emotionally moving.
A Shayna Maidel is set in Brooklyn, New York in 1946 in the apartment of Rose Weiss. The play is about the relationship between two sisters who become roommates when Lusia comes to New York from Poland after the war. The sisters are basically strangers and are very different from each other. Rose was raised as a Jewish American by her father with all the advantages America provided. Lusia was raised by her mother in a poor Polish home and was taken to a concentration camp during the war. The Nazis murdered her mother, daughter and best friend and she lost contact with her husband. The play explores the relationships between the two sisters, and their father, Mordechai, and also past relationship between them and their mother.
I think the protagonist in this play was the Weiss’ family bond and the antagonist was Lusia’s past memories and daydreams. She had to deal with the horrors she had seen, the brutal murders of her child, mother, and best friend and temporary loss of her husband, Duvid. These memories presented a constant intrusion on her conscience and subconscious mind and prevented her from truly bonding with her sister and father. This was climaxed at the end of the play when Duvid is found. Lusia greets him and then introduces Mordechai and Rose as her “family” for the first time, showing that she has emotionally accepted them as family. The inciting incident occurred early in the play when Rose was told that Lusia was coming to live with her in New York. Lusia’s arrival forces change in Rose’s life. At first, Rose is distraught at the thought of her sister, who is a total stranger to her, disrupting her life. By the end of the play, the two sisters are becoming adult friends.
The acting in A Shayna Maidel was outstanding. Every actor flawlessly portrayed his or her character. It is difficult to pick out one actor over another that was better, because they were all so good. One scene that stands out in my mind was when Mordechai and Lusia are comparing family names. Mordechai read names from a book and asked Lusia if she knew what happened to that family member. Lusia responded again and again that they were murdered at various concentration camps. As Mordechai realized that one by one each of his loved members had died in Poland, his shoulders became more and more slumped, his eyes became misty, and his voice cracked with emotion. Lusia, on the other hand, spoke with growing anger each time she said the word “murdered”. She stood and paced and spat the word out. The last two names Lusia added on the list were her husband (missing) and her daughter (murdered). It was powerful scene and I doubt anyone in the audience was not moved by it. This played into the protagonist/antagonist idea as it became apparent to the audience how deep Lusia’s anger and pain was and how much the Weiss family was going to have to overcome.
Besides the outstanding acting, another production element that I noticed as exceptional was the lighting. The script required many changes from present to past as Lucia moved from 1946 in New York to childhood memories in Poland. Every time the audience saw her in her daydream state, the lighting changed from a regular indoor soft, warm lighting to a pale yellow, almost antique-looking light. It reminded me of looking at an old-time photograph that has faded yellow with age. I thought it was a terrific use of stage lighting. The lighting really helped the audience know which scenes were past and which were present.
The production did a beautiful job of moving from past to present, not only with the lighting, but also with the change in the character’s accents. Lusia had a very strong Polish accent when speaking in 1946. When she was in her daydream state, she spoke in perfect English, which was to portray that she was actually speaking in Yiddish. She did this perfectly.
A Shayna Maidel was definitely worth doing. In fact, it was one of he best plays I’ve seen and a refreshing change from the other plays that have been required in this course. I’ve already recommended it to almost everyone I know.