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Woodward & Second 62 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1987 Yiddish Theater Revived With Help Of The Young 868-7550 M ost youth cannot remember the Gold- en Age of Yiddish theater, beginning in Europe in the second half of the 19th Century and immigrating to America around the turn of the century. America's major cities housed more than 20 Yiddish playhouses, the bulk in New York's Lower East Side, where in the early 20th Century an estimated 250,000 Yiddish theatergoers turned Second Avenue into a bustle of marquees equivalent to today's theater district. Among those theaters were Maurice Schwartz's famous Yiddish Art Theater, Boris Tomashevsky's The people's Theater, Abraham Gold- faden's Turn Hall and the sur- viving Folksbiene Theater. They featured such revered stars as Molly Picon, Jacob Adler, Menasha Skulnick and Aaron Lebedeff. As Picon wrote, New York could hardly house the number of theaters required to meet the appetite of im- migrants. But after the Holocaust, an attrition of Yiddish-speaking immi- grants darkened the marquee lights. The trick to reviving in- terest in Yiddish theater in- volves catering to a varied American-born audience that may remember their bubbes and zaydes speaking Yiddish, but never learned the language. This generation stems from a 1960s riots revival and a secure and assimilated group longing for a defined Jewish cultural identity and heritage. "We had to ask how could we bring things alive for now," explained Isaiah Shef- fer, director of On Second Avenue, Off Broadway's newest hit Yiddish musical. The revue fuses traditional Yiddish songs, such as Rozhinkes mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds) with rare material found in the YIVO Institute archives, like the vaudeville comedy rouser Hootsatsa, connecting the numbers in an anthology of Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side. "Nostalgia doesn't carry you very far," Sheffer con- tinued, but without an influx of new Yiddish plays, most productions must revamp old material for a present day audience. "Yiddish material must be made accessible to non- Yiddish speaking people," but must also please first and se- cond generation Yiddishists, said Moishe Rosenfeld, who with Zalmen Mlotek created On Second Avenue and a hit of two seasons ago, The Golden Land. A successful formula utiliz- ed the past few years either incorporates English into the show, provides translation through subtitles or, as in this year's production at the Folksbiene Theater, Riverside simultaneously Drive, translates from Yiddish to English through headsets. Yiddish purists, like Diana Cypkin, currently in River- side Drive, "can't believe peo- ple come to Yiddish shows to hear English," but unders- tand the need to appeal to a younger audience. "Just a synopsis should be enough;" said Cypkin, who is in her 30s and was one of the first of the younger genera- tion to be accepted into an ex- clusive Yiddish theater group, not 'very open to the younger generation. "But I accept it," she continued, "and hope it encourages people to learn Yiddish!' Bruce Adler, a third- generation Yiddish theater performer — descending from grandparents Joseph and Bessie Jacobson, and parents Henrietta Jacobson and Julius Adler — agreed with the modified stir about the future of Yiddish theater. "I'm not trying to build a new future of vaudeville Yid- dish theater," he said, equating it to the variety show medium on television. "Yiddish theater highlights a portion of culture that should be revered and preserved," Adler added. Not all the players belong to the Yiddishly cultivated. Many must learn their lines phonetically and some are not even Jewish. Carolyn Goor's first Yiddish show a few years ago "was kind of weird. I was making sounds that didn't mean much." But Goor, now in On Second Avenue, her fourth Yiddish production, is "beginning to understand and it doesn't feel as foreign." Lines become more pro- blematic than songs, she ex- plained, because of the possibility of a wrong cue line that could throw off an actor who does not understand the language. This is one reason revues and musicals flow smoother than Yiddish plays. "You can't play a regular drama if the youth talk a broken Yid- dish," said Seymour Rexsite, a veteran of Yiddish theater and now executive secretary of the 72-year-old Yiddish Theater Alliance, an actor's fund providing for indigent Yiddish actors. But Rexsite — who co-hosts Memories of the Theater on WEVD in New York with his wife, Miriam Kressyn, who adapted this year's Folks- biene play — observed that "for many years they've tried to bury Yiddish theater, but it's alive and well and will go on as long as one Jew is left." Rexsite, whose office walls are replete with memory photos of Einstein or Frank Sinatra attending Yiddish shows and portraits of stars with whom he has worked, calls today's shows, "theater with a Yiddish flavor," but ac- cepts the need to attract a younger audience. Not only does Yiddish theater exist in New York, Israel and Florida, but there is a demand in countries in South America, Europe and in such American cities as Chicago and Philadelphia. To continue the renaissance, Cypkin points not only to the English, but to the basic quality productions, favorable publicity, a longer season and recognized legitimacy from American theater. But no matter the result of the current renaissance, Cypkin proposes that Yiddish theater will never die. "It's a little flame that billows when people come and when they don't, it's a spark that waits." Copyright 1987, JTA, Inc. The deadline for the January edition of L'Chayim is Jan. 8 at noon. Organiza- tions who wish to have their family activities listed in that edition should type, double- spaced, their notices and in- clude time, date, place of the event and a contact person's name and phone number. Send notices to L'Chayim, The Jewish News, 20300 Civic Center Dr., Suite 240, Southfield 48076.