Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy
Yiddishkeit in Fort Peck, Montana? Really!!!!
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a production of "The Sunshine Boys" by Neil Simon at Fort Peck Theater, in Fort Peck Montana, about two hours north of my home in Glendive. My excitement at seeing real live theater was tempered by my skepticism about how this rural Montana theater company would interpret and present a quintessential Jewish work. "The Sunshine Boys" is about two aging Jewish vaudevillians ( played in the movie version by Walter Matthau and George Burns ) and it's deeply rooted in Yiddishkeit, irony and Jewish humor.
My anxiety about how the production would handle the cultural elements central to the play, as well as how an audience of white rural and presumably Christian Montanans would respond to the representation of my people, plagued me during the two hour drive.
Whenever I travel, I love to make sure that I experience local theater. I've seen some really wonderful productions which have taught me about the power of theater to connect us all across our differences. Two of the most memorable experiences happened twenty years ago while traveling with my former husband Nate and my good friend Dina in Alaska. We saw "Wit", in a tiny black box theater in Ketchikan. The local theater teacher played the lead and she was not only brilliant in her performance of a dying academic, but she displayed deep courage, vulnerability and humanity in her execution of the final scene of the play. I can still conjure the final image, of this woman walking naked through the audience, ascending through the seats on her way to "heaven." So moving. I can't imagine that anyone who was in that theater that night will ever forget it.
On the same trip where we saw "Wit "in Ketchikan, we also watched a production of another play in Anchorage. I cannot remember the title of the play, but I do remember that it was set in New York in the 1940s and it was about a Jewish family, confronting issues of assimilation. The writing was very Jewish and the themes and characters were immediately recognizable to Dina, Nate and me - possibly the only three Jews in the audience.
The theater company was dedicated to diversity, inclusion and non-traditional casting, and to that end, the Jewish daughter who is frustrated with her old fashioned mother was played by a Japanese woman. There was an unscripted hilarious moment when this daughter turned to her mother who was wearing a raggedly blouse and said, "You're not going out of this house in that She-ma-ta!"( with the accent on the final syllable) and for a quick second, I found myself wondering if this was a type of Japanese clothing I'd never heard of. ( For my non Jewish or assimilated readers, the actor was trying to say "schmatte" which means rag or tattered garment.) I am sure the others in the audience wondered why these three people were guffawing so loudly!
The cast and company of that theater in Anchorage failed to understand the culture of the play and playwright and didn't capture the rhythms and nuances of the language. As such, the intrinsic humor of the writing was subverted and the audience seemed to be laughing AT the characters rather than WITH them.
So that's what was on my mind as I entered this historical theater in the middle of what East Coasters would call "nowhere," but which was once, nearly 100 years ago, a bustling boom town made up of men looking for work on the WPA Fort Peck Dam project and their families who traveled to this part of Montana to take advantage of this government project which allowed them to find work and keep their dignity during the Depression.
With the population topping out at about 10,000 at the height of the dam project, Fort Peck now has a population of under 300 residents. So I was initially shocked but pleasant surprised to learn that this town has a vibrant and highly regarded summer theater season which has drawn people from nearby cities and towns for over 55 years. The historic building was erected in 1934, and during the time of the dam building, Fort Peck Theater ran movies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to entertain the workers and their families.
We bought hot dogs and soda at the concession stand, purchased a couple of souvenirs at the gift shop and rented chair pillows to cover the hard wooden seats. The set was well dressed and looked enough like an old New York flat from the early 1960s. It was easy for me to imagine that some old Jewish guy would call this place home. But as I looked around at the audience, I didn't see anyone who looked like me or any of my Jewish friends or relatives. They were mostly an older group, all white, seemingly Christian and I couldn't understand why they would want to see a Neil Simon play or if they would laugh at the ethnic characters the way the audience had in Anchorage.
They did not! From the moment the lights came up and the central character, Willie Clark (one half the famed fictional vaudeville act Lewis and Clark) took the stage, the audience was rapt! The actor, ( whom I later learned had directed the play) was entirely convincing as an aging Jewish vaudevillian and everything about his performance, from his physical movements to his timing to his accent was pitch perfect and reminded me of long gone great uncles from family reunions and cousins clubs of old. The other actors didn't quite match his believability, but they too felt authentic, imbuing their performances with sincere attempts to get inside their characters' "Yiddishe kopfs."
I relaxed into my seat as the play progressed. The audience was really enjoying themselves! They laughed out loud at all the funny parts -- the way Neil Simon meant for an audience to laugh -- with recognition of our shared human foibles and acceptance of life's ironies.
Those of you who know me, know that lately I have been having a hard time here in eastern Montana. I feel a bit out of place. It hasn't been easy finding community and I haven't made any friends. And I see a lot of MAGA stuff posted on community pages and I worry not only about being Jewish but also about my progressive political views.
In this time of engineered national divisiveness, I can't help but wonder what it is that keeps us together as a nation at all anymore. I did go to an event sponsored by Dawson County Democrats and that was very encouraging ( a subject for a later post.).
But this experience of sharing "The Sunshine Boys" with a couple hundred rural Montanans on a beautiful June Sunday afternoon -- laughing with them at Neil Simon's brilliant writing the way I did decades ago with an audience of urban Philadelphians -- offers a ray of light and hope in these dark times.
I am so grateful for this long life I have been blessed to be living, with so many experiences residing and working in different places with people of different backgrounds and cultures. At seventy, I have so much more to draw from when I try to answer deep, complicated questions.
E pluribus unum anyone?
Theater, art, and humor help.
