Crazy for you

Singer's Meshugah takes the stage at Trinity Rep

by Carolyn Clay

MESHUGAH. Adapted by Emily Mann from the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Set design by Michael McGarty. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by D.M. Wood. Sound by Peter Hurowitz. With Sam Tsoutsouvas, Tom Brennan, Mauro Hantman, Barbara Orson, Anne Scurria, Diana LaMar, Stephen Berenson, and musicians Kevin Fallon, Rachel Maloney, and Chris Turner. At Trinity Repertory Company, through April 9.

Meshugah is a potboiler in which deeper questions steam and bubble. Adapted from a novel by Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, it's the Enemies: A Love Story-like tale of a romantic triangle in which the ethical issues are not about freedom and fidelity but about judging and surviving the past. The characters are Warsaw Jews transplanted to New York City in the early 1950s. The elephant in the room, of course, is the Holocaust. And in the passionate, self-repudiating relations of the main characters, Freud's favorite couple, sex and death, are as tangled as bedsheets after a night of lust.

As adapted for the stage by playwright and McCarter Theatre artistic director Emily Mann, the play is affecting but also somewhat clunky. To begin with, this is not first-rate Singer. Written in Yiddish and originally published in serial form (as Lost Souls) in the Jewish Daily Forward in the early 1980s, the novel was translated into English by the author and Nili Wachtel and posthumously published in 1995. The story is told in the first person, which in the theater makes for a lot of expository address to the audience. And much of the novel's flavor -- the bookish bustle of Jewish life on the Upper West Side, amid memories that run from brown-flour soup to the tortures of the camps -- is difficult to transfer to the stage.

Perhaps unavoidably, Singer's secondary characters become two-dimensional, Polish-accented types who barely register. And the main story, about a middle-aged writer's growing obsession with and tortured acceptance of a lusty young woman who (it is gradually revealed) survived the Holocaust any way she could, can slip into melodrama. Even in the weighty shadow of the greatest horror of the 20th century and peppered with talk of "lost souls," Meshugah can seem a sort of Jewish bodice ripper punctuated by book discussion and music of the shtetl.

And yet, at Trinity Rep the piece is intensely acted, under Oskar Eustis's fluid direction. The production boasts an ingenious set design by Michael McGarty -- the walls constructed entirely of suitcases, as if to illustrate the uprootedness of the immigrant milieu -- and a trio of musicians who snake through mouthing and fiddling the raucous, mournful sounds of a world gone by. Sam Tsoutsouvas, as narrator (and Singer stand-in) Aaron Greidinger, begins by describing the day in 1952 when a Warsaw patron he had thought dead burst into his Yiddish-newspaper office. Whereupon Tom Brennan, as roguish sexagenarian libertine Max Aberdam, indeed pops up from under a sheet like a reinvigorated corpse, commandeers Aaron for the afternoon, and we're off.

Max, who is pushing 70, introduces Aaron to his young mistress, Miriam, who is not only a fan but has partially finished a dissertation about Aaron's work (very convenient, since she can throw back at the writer every idea he ever had). Aaron, apparently with Max's blessing (Max thinks monogamy an invention of Christian Puritans), begins an affair with Miriam, all hot sex and giddy intellectual discussion, that makes him feel alive for the first time in a long time. When he learns something of her sexual and collaborationist past (from a gun-wielding estranged husband, no less!), he is repulsed. She, however, refuses to be shamed, showing up on the doorstep of his favorite cafeteria as a red-clad Biblical whore. The revelations eventually get worse, and Aaron, who emigrated from Poland before the war, must confront the question "Who am I to judge the victims of Hitler?"

Actors have been imported to play the lead roles in the Trinity production, relegating the regular company members to the sketchy or exaggerated secondary characters. But Tsoutsouvas, Brennan, and particularly Diana LaMar, as wounded harlot Miriam, do fine work. Tsoutsouvas manages to be interesting while conveying the character's enervation, and his righteous, reactionary anger at Miriam is filled with pain. Brennan's Max is a larger-than-life romantic reprobate with a killer cackle. And LaMar, an earthy beauty who looks a bit like the young Ingrid Bergman, is keenly in touch with her mercurial character. She cries too much; some modulation would tamp down the melodrama of Meshugah. But she brings a deep sorrow near the surface, then complicates it with buoyant, flirtatious nuance.

The title notwithstanding, Meshugah is less about a world gone crazy than about a world gone godless yet still dominated by an idea of God. "I believe in God's wisdom but not in his mercy," says Aaron, implying that Man must take over in that department. In the end, painfully, possibly weakly, he cuts Miriam some slack. We should do the same for the impassioned, if imperfect, Meshugah.