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MI • i biock W ci Te , earcW. • 626.2630 N Open For Lunch & Dinner Serving AUTHENTIC Thai Food and Cocktails Bangkok Club tq're 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mon. Thru Thurs. • 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fri. & Sat. I OPEN SUNDAY 5 -p.m TO 10 p.m. 29269 Southfield Road north of 12 Mile In The Southfield Commons 68 FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 1991 I 569-1400 didn't know that's what it was," she says. "In the sum- mer I'd get all the little kids together and we'd rehearse these kind of revues that had verse and songs and lip- syncing. We'd have little skits?' As a 10-year-old impresario, she wasn't thinking ahead to a career in theater, she was just having fun. Besides, her childhood dream was to be a teacher. "I kind of liked telling peo- ple what to do," Ms. Fleischer says with a laugh. "I had a plan, always, of how I wanted the shows to turn out and nobody else bothered to think that far ahead." Although she found value in high school music pro- grams, and appeared in the chorus of the student staging of The King and I, Ms. Fleischer recalls negative feelings about theater in high school — the drama coach was prone to tantrums. When she attended Central Michigan University, her at- titude about theater changed because of the warmth of the students and faculty there. She plunged into theater and speech programs, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in theater and speech with a minor in English (and a teaching certificate to boot). When she wasn't perform- ing in plays at CMU, she was particularly involved in oral interpretation competitions, pouring over written material — articles, poems, stories — and staging. "It was kind of like reader's theater," she says. "We'd take novels and stage them. It wasn't just a playscript. I lik- ed editing, putting the scripts together. Are you ready for this? For one of these tour- naments, I did a 20-minute version of Fiddler on the Roof with a single piano and three actors?' She laughs at the memory and admits that she wasn't thinking exactly how she could parlay oral interpreta- tion into a career. Ironically, in 1987, she would become the artistic director of the popular Readers Theatre pro- gram at the Jewish Com- munity Center in West Bloomfield — a direct link to her "oral interp" days when she would select and edit pro- se and verse to be read aloud. In the early 1970s, Ms. Fleischer taught high school in Detroit and Taylor before returning to college and ear- ning two master's degrees, in theater and directing, at Wayne State University. She now teaches part-time at WSU in the theater depart- ment. Ms. Fleischer converted to Judaism in 1970, the same year she married her hus- band, a Jewish real estate agent, whom she met while working weekends in a real estate office. "I was always a religious searcher," says Ms. Fleischer, who describes her household as humanistic. "I went to Hungarian Reform Church as a child; I was a confirmed Episcopalian at one time in college. I studied religion. I was always drawn to the spir- tual side of this human being we are. "I liked how Jews viewed life and death and family, and that Judaism found a way to unite religion and family more so than any other Chris- tian religions I had in- vestigated. I liked the fact that so much of what was significant in the religion was from the home." Family is an important idea for Ms. Fleischer, and it relates not only to her spirituality but to her career choices. Had she not felt the warm acceptance of theater at CMU, today she would likely be teaching fourth grade, her original goal. And she might not have worked at nearly every resi- dent professional theater in Detroit, from the Attic to U- D, from the defunct Fourth Street Playhouse to the Detroit Repertory Theatre. The only major theater she hasn't worked at is Meadow Brook Theatre. Next season at U-D-Mercy, Ms. Fleischer will perform in one show and direct a play called The White Rose, seen last year in a staging by the theater department of the University of Michigan. The drama tells the story of university students in Hitler's Germany who distribute anti-Nazi pro- paganda under the name The White Rose. ❑ A sampling of Yolanda Fleischer's directing work: Artichoke (1980 Actors Renaissance Theatre) Watch on the Rhine (1981 Attic Theatre) Awake and Sine (1983 Attic Theatre) My Sister in This House (1983 Fourth Street Playhouse) The Rainmaker (1984 Actors Alliance Theatre Co.) A Member of the Wedding (1985 State Fair Theatre) A Taste of Honey (1987 U-D Theatre Co.) A Shayna Maidel (1989 Ann Arbor Repertory" Theatre) Two (1989 U-D Theatre Co.) Blood Relations (1989 Detroit Repertory Theatre) Cantorial (1991 Jewish Ensemble Theatre) Ms. Fleischer works with Tim Pickering and Carol Lempert in "Cantorial."