STAGE REVIEW : ‘A Shayna Maidel’ Celebrates Human Feelings

“A Shayna Maidel” is an example of heart-on-sleeve theater. But it’s got a big heart, and an ample sleeve, and the West Coast premiere of Barbara Lebow’s play, at the Tiffany Theatre, is irresistible.

Mordechai Weiss (Joseph Ruskin) and his young daughter Rose (Cynthia Gibb) emigrated from Poland to America 16 years ago, leaving behind his wife and their older daughter Lusia (Gordana Rashovich), whose scarlet fever prevented her from making the trip.

Now, in 1946, the sisters and their father are re-united in Brooklyn. But the horrors that happened to the family in the interim are almost literally unspeakable.

Lusia arrives in New York searching not only for the family she hasn’t known, but also for her husband, from whom she was separated during the war.

Her thoughts revolve around two kinds of lists. One enumerates the relatives who died in the camps. She reads information about their fates to her father and sister, in response to the old man’s inquiries. Rashovich’s Lusia rigorously contains her emotions while she reads; there are so many names, and she lacks the capacity to grieve anew over each one. It’s as if she’s working on a spectral assembly line.

Lusia’s other lists are posted daily in the relief offices in New York--the names of refugees, among which she might find her husband Duvid. Lusia refuses to accept the possibility that Duvid’s name won’t turn up--and she refuses to change her own fresh-off-the-boat looks, fearing that Duvid otherwise might not recognize her.

Rashovich has haunted features, a searching gaze, a dark voice speaking broken English. But when she retreats to the prewar era in daydream scenes, everything about her lightens up (and, for the sake of comprehension, her Yiddish becomes fluent English).

In these glances backward, she is wooed by Duvid (Michael Spound), shares girlish chatter and intimacies with her friend Hanna (Kim Myers) and is taken care of by her dauntless Yiddish Mama (Julie Ariola). We understand how she could assign a low priority to her desire to join her father and sister in America.

Rashovich, who created this role at Hartford Stage and won an Obie award with it in New York, is unforgettable. But “A Shayna Maidel” (Yiddish for “a pretty girl,” which refers to both Rose and her mother during the course of the play) is Rose’s play almost as much as Lusia’s.

Rose wants to do right, but at first she’s not sure she needs or wants this particular sister--and Gibb’s nervous energy conveys this during the opening scenes. But then she’s drawn into the family history and discovers long-suppressed feelings--richly depicted in a heart-wrenching sequence during and immediately after the reading of a letter from her mother. Without losing her all-American manner, Gibb also shows us Rose’s European roots.

Throughout most of the play, Ruskin’s Mordechai maintains a stony exterior--which makes the first big crack in it, at the end, all the more moving. It’s an example of director Deborah LaVine’s ability to save the sentiment for the precise moment when it will be most powerful.

Jacqueline Saint Anne’s costumes are a vital ingredient, ranging from postwar stylishness on Rose to drab immigrant clothes (Spound’s are particularly useful in this regard). The clothes help create a warm, glossy sheen in a daydreamed scene about a reunion that never was. Equally evocative are the simple set by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio and their not-so-simple lighting.

Although written primarily in English, the emotions and themes of “A Shayna Maidel” suggest the golden age of Yiddish drama--from the added perspective of the post-Holocaust era. The nostalgia for the old country is especially painful in the wake of what happened in the camps.

At one point in her search for her husband, Lusia dares to ask a cop for directions--and discovers, to her astonishment, that he understands and speaks Yiddish. It’s a detail that might well generate more authentic Fourth of July feeling than any of the pageants that might be attended today.

“A Shayna Maidel” has many such moments--in which the survival of human feeling, despite inhuman horror, washes away doubts and defenses. Despite everything, Lebow’s play still finds the strength to say “ L’chaim. “

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