{"id":8406,"date":"2010-11-14T01:40:58","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T08:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=8406"},"modified":"2010-11-27T01:12:14","modified_gmt":"2010-11-27T08:12:14","slug":"malenki-theatres-job-the-story-of-a-simple-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=8406","title":{"rendered":"Malenki Theatre’s Job: The Story of A Simple Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Malenki Theatre's Job: The Story of A Simple Man\/Photo: Gadi Dagon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Malenki Theatre\u2019s new home is a black box with wings \u2013 and in it, they soar. Job, The Story of A Simple Man<\/em>, adapted from the novel by Joseph Roth by Roy Chen and Igor Berezin, and directed by Igor Berezin, premiered in the company\u2019s new venue \u2013 Tel Aviv\u2019s Gay Center in Gan Meir, this past weekend.<\/p>\n

Malenki\u2019s Job<\/em> reaches far beyond the reworking of prose into dialogue; the novel has been brilliantly re-imagined as theatre. Embodying Rimbaud\u2019s statement \u201cJe est un autre\u201d the actors work with large-scale fabric puppets desigend by Polina Adamov and made by Oxana Yanovitsky and Leonid Elisov. The puppets are strapped onto the actor\u2019s torso, arms slipped through the sleeves of the garment with the actor\u2019s hands emerging from the sleeves and feet revealed at the hem, they merge and move together, and yet remain separate.<\/p>\n

The puppets are faceless; the entire first act takes place in the simple austerity of a black box. There are no illusions or pretense of realism \u2013 Job<\/em> is a celebration of art.<\/p>\n

Roth\u2019s novel begins in the realm of myth \u2013 \u201cMany years ago\u201d and tells the story of Mendel Singer, a teacher of children \u201cwithout notable success\u201d in Zuchnow, Russia, with the Biblical story of Job as its frame of reference. Self-reflective at every turn, the play begins with two men holding up a large puppet, flanked by two seated actors: Dima Ross and Esti Nissim. Ross begins to recite the familiar Biblical text \u201cThere was a man in the land of Uz named Job,\u201d setting up a multi-layered dialogue within the play from the very first moment. Soon he will literally step into a character as he straps on the puppet with its black skullcap, long black ear locks, black leather strap wound around the arm and white fringed tzitzit – literally embracing his identity as Mendel Singer.<\/p>\n

Like a master puppeteer, Berezin makes a deliberate choice to begin with an act of connection \u2013 to the Biblical text, and the physical connection of the actor to the puppet, that is also an act of displacement. Just as the play refers to something outside itself, a prior text \u2013 the novel, we are reminded that the novel refers to a prior text, the<\/em> book, the Bible. Refusing illusion, the casual strapping on of the puppets, recalling the everyday routines of getting dressed in the morning, tying on teffilin, implies that as an audience we are never allowed to forget that Dima Ross is and is not Mendel Singer \u2013 and Mendel Singer, is and is not Mendel Singer.<\/p>\n

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Dima Ross as Mendel Singer in Malenki Theatre's Job: The Story of a Simple Man\/Photo: Gadi Dagon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Who is Mendel Singer \u2013 a puppet, a character in a play, a man, a Jew? Actor and puppet are distinct in their appearance: Ross is dressed in functional, contemporary black shirt and pants; the puppet wears the traditional garments of a religious Jew. This daring and creative construction sets up a symbolic relation to Jewish identity, allows us to see it, and see the actors relating to it as a physical presence onstage. In situating Mendel Singer as a fictional character, a puppet \u2013 the audience is free to see beyond the familiar myths and stereotypes, into the absurdity and complexity of his humanity and the strange myth of identity itself.<\/p>\n

Malenki Theatre has put on a terrific show that speaks in a multiplicity of voices and languages: verbal, visual, physical, musical. Hebrew, Russian, English, Biblical texts, Yiddish lullabies and an old song (Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die) sung by American paratroopers to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic \u2013 their presence creates a many-layered discourse of associations. The first scenes establish a self-deprecating comic rhythm to the play, in the familiar scenes of Jewish life: the poor yet devout Mendel (Dima Ross), his pragmatic, complaining wife Dvora (Esti Nissim), and the children who tumble into their lives one after another: Jonah (Vadim Halif), Shemaryahu (Yonatan Bar Or), Miriam (Anat Gat) and Menuchem (Yefim Rinenberg).<\/p>\n

The poetic quality of Roth\u2019s novel is captured in movement, visuals and the use of text as sound. The comic, musical incantation of Dvora\u2019s litany of complaints: \u201cWhy are the carrots small, why are there no eggs, why are the potatoes frozen,\u201d is chanted over a tin washtub, jamming with Mendel\u2019s recitation to his students. The rituals of daily life and the traditional elements of the Jewish story are performed with vaudeville-like physical humor within the frame of a contemporary sensibility. Yet Berezin\u2019s strength as a director is most evident in moments when he takes the characters and the audience beyond words, penetrating the vast, hidden places of the soul: awakening in the night, Dvora tears through the fabric of her character, the comic density of the Jewish peasant woman, with a sense of wonder, discovery and loss, alone by the side of her sleeping husband Mendel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Questions of identity, loneliness and desire dance through every beautifully choreographed moment in the life of Mendel Singer, his wife Dvora and their children. These puppets yearn to live, to be noticed, chosen, and loved. Within the familiar story of the European Jew \u2013 struggling with poverty, living in constant uncertainty in fear of the authorities, the tensions between Jewish and secular life, the security and suffocation of family life, the attraction of America and the permanent sense of exile \u2013 each character is and transcends the stereotype. Accompanying the physical doubling of identity between actor and puppet is the sense that there are always at least two different ways to look at anything, and meaning is transformed by context.<\/p>\n

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Esti Nissim as Dvora in Malenki Theatre's Job: The Story of a Simple Man\/Photo: Gadi Dagon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If at first the actors are as one with the puppets, merging and moving in unison, the slight distance between the face of the actor and the cloth face of the puppet becomes a crucial element in the play. At first comic, as when Jonah, the oldest son, discovers vodka and the actor looks on in slightly detached amusement as the puppet head flops into drunken oblivion. When two sons are drafted into the Russian army, the resourceful Dvora ignores Mendel\u2019s injunction to surrender to God\u2019s will, and turns to \u201cpeople who can help,\u201d but it turns out that her carefully hoarded money is only enough to buy out one son. Her pained announcement is broken by Jonah\u2019s declaration: \u201cI want to go to the army.\u201d He takes off his puppet and puts it on the floor, saying: \u201cI, thank God, have finished with being a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n

To what extent can we choose, and to what extent are we manipulated by the cultural story into which we are inscribed? In Berezin\u2019s hands, the story of a simple man is never simple; it is implicated with irony and suffused with the poetry of loneliness and desire. Like the puppets, sewn of rough scraps, working with a limited palette of black, white and cream revealing the sensual nuances of texture, their faces traversed with seams, like different paths to the self, our identities are constructs of myth, memory and desire. Mendel\u2019s piety is set against Dvora\u2019s pragmatism: \u201cYou always remember the wrong pasuk (Biblical verse).\u201d<\/p>\n

Setting up the puppet as a visual, physical repository and symbol of Jewish identity, it exists within the play as something external that can be regarded, examined, and even discarded. Towards the latter part of the play, Mendel and Dvora sit at the table in \u201cGod\u2019s own country\u201d America, and Dvora \u2013 now Debra, reprimands Mendel: \u201cYou are talking like a Russian Jew.\u201d Mendel responds, \u201cI am a Russian Jew; that is who I am.\u201d Yet this claiming or acceptance of identity is spoken by the actor facing the audience, the puppet head is slumped forward, inert, like a wilted flower.<\/p>\n

Constantly setting up expectations and confounding them Berezin and an excellent ensemble cast create a magical evening, with stand-out performances by Ross and Nissim. At the end, he sends us back to the beginning, and we realize that we can re-enter the story from a different path, transformed by the experience shared on the stage.<\/p>\n

Job, adapted by Roy Chen and Igor Berezin, directed by Igot Berezin
\nSet design, costume design and puppet design by Polina Adamov
\nMusic: Evgeny Levitas
\nLighting: Misha Tcherniavesky and Ina Malkin
\nPuppet movement: Yaara Boym-Kaplan
\nMovement: Ilya Domnot
\nSword movement: Andre French Yudshkin
\nTech Manager: Mike Nikitin
\nTech team: Dima Svetov, Andre French Yudshkin
\nPerformers: Dima Ross, Esti Nissim, Vadim Halif, Yonatan Bar-Or, Anat Gat, Yefim Rinberg, Ilya Domanov<\/p>\n

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AYELET DEKEL<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malenki Theatre\u2019s new home is a black box with wings \u2013 and in it, they soar. Job, The Story of A Simple Man, adapted from the novel by Joseph Roth by Roy Chen and Igor Berezin, and directed by Igor Berezin, premiered in the company\u2019s new venue \u2013 Tel Aviv\u2019s Gay Center in Gan Meir, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}