Wed 1/22 @ 7:30PM
Thu 1/23 @ 1:30 & 7:30PM
Fri 1/24 @ 7:30PM
Sat 1/25 @ 2:30 & 7:30PM
Sun 1/26 @ 2:30PM
Tue 1/28 @ 7:30 PM
Wed 1/29 @ 7:30PM
Thu 1/30 @ 7:30PM
Fri 1/31 @ 7:30PM
Sat 2/1 @ 2:30 & 7:30PM
Sun 2/2 @ 2:30PM
Yentl, now running at the Cleveland Play House, is best known in the 1983 movie version, a showcase for Barbra Streisand, who wrote, directed and starred in it.
Before that, however, it was a 1975 play by Leah Napolin and Isaac Bashevis Singer, based on a 1962 short story by Singer called Yentl the Yeshiva Boy. The source of the story’s conflict is that Yentl is not a boy but rather a girl passing as a boy in a Jewish orthodox community in Poland in 1870 in order to study the Torah and Talmud at an all-male yeshiva.
Streisand took liberties with the story in order to showcase herself in the way she wanted to be seen. CPH’s production is the Napolin/Singer version, which maintains the ambiguities that Streisand wrote out. Chief among those is whether Yentl is a female-identified woman who is hungry for learning or if she is transgendered. All this is set within a community generally thought to be very conservative and rigid in its assignment of gender roles.
The CPH production features Rebecca Gibel in the title role, Ben Mehl as Avigdor, her yeshiva study partner who develops a romantic interest in her, and Therese Anderberg as Avigdor’s fiancée Hadass.
It also features, in what she describes as a “small but juicy role,” a Cleveland stage icon, 84-year-old Dorothy Silver. Arriving in Cleveland in 1955, she and her husband of 64 years, Reuben, directed the theaters at Karamu House and the Mandel Jewish Community Center while racking up a sixty-year resume of acting roles.
Like the characters in the play, Silver comes from a Polish orthodox Jewish background, although she was born and raised in Detroit. She says she never felt restrained by the roles and traditions that caused Yentl to crossdress.
“I was first person in my family to go to college,” she says. “I paid on my own. I don’t think it surprised my parents that I went. They didn’t object to it. I think they were proud I did.”
“We were a liberal orthodox family,” she adds. “My mother and father did not dictate religious practice to us. They hoped we would remain sensitive and proud of the Jewish culture. A classic example is you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath. When I had homework, my mother said, do that in your own room. She practiced her religion in private and so did my father. I’m not an expert by any means, but I’m very aware of how important religion was to maintain connection to this community.”
Still, she was likely more of an expert than the rest of the cast and crew, all younger than herself. She had directed the play “a similar version but not quite as graphic about the sexual issues” at the JCC in 1977. But she says director Michael Perlman brought in experts in Jewish culture and religious practice, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciations, to assure the show’s accuracy.
“He himself is Jewish probably with a very secular background. He doesn’t pretend to know things he doesn’t know. He has a dramaturg who is very knowledgeable about these things, Melissa Freilich. It’s fun and comforting know that we are being accurate in terms of some of the detail.”
Silver’s “small but juicy” role is Yachna, the attendant at the women’s ritual bathhouse.
“A bride has to immerse herself in three times before being declared a kosher bride. It’s a very landmark moment in the life of the bride-to-be. It’s beautifully staged. It’s quite mysterious, at night. The other women of town are there, beating themselves with birches. Hadass is an orthodox Jewish girl. She can’t even think of getting married until she goes to the mikva. It’s an essential part of her becoming a woman, very much like a baptism. When the scene begins, I have a line that chastises her for being afraid of how closely I am cutting her fingernails. I say, it’s got to be close because when a bride goes to a ritual bath, the water has to touch every part of her.”
She says she feels that the way Yentl addresses gender roles and gender identity speaks to contemporary culture.
“There’s a scene called the transformation scene where Yentl makes the decision to disguise herself as a man. Those are still extraordinary issues. When I got Time magazine and Janet Yellen is on the cover — a Jewish woman is becoming our financial director of the country — I thought, wow, what a moment, and it’s 2014. I think the transformation moment is extraordinarily relevant to the choices being made now. I always think of what is going on in our world with gender identity issues when I sit in the bleachers with the other people in our ensemble during that scene.”
Yentl runs through February 2 at the Cleveland Play House’s Allen Theatre main stage.
Tickets are $15-$61.
clevelandplayhouse.com/main-stage/yentl
Photo: Dorothy Silver & Therese Anderberg