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CLOSE-UP

Eleanor Reissa (at
right) and fellow
cast members of
`Those Were The
Days" rehearse for
Broadway opening
of the musical,
— the first Yiddish
show on Broadway
in more than a
decade.

24

FRIDAY, MAY 3, 1991

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filiated with Actors Equity.
Like Miss Reissa, most of them
are outsiders to the world that
created Yiddish theater. They
missed the high moment. Because
their connection with Yiddish
culture tends to be fragmentary, so
is their connection with Yiddish
theater, though their Yiddish
theater experiences often draw
them closer to Yiddishkeit as a
whole.
Miss Reissa is typical of the
pros, for whom Yiddish theater
means above all a job. It even
brings her some professional
benefits beyond Equity minimum
pay. Since it's so much smaller a
world than the mainstream, she
has already had opportunities to
choreograph and direct. But for an
ambitious American actor, Yiddish
theater can be dangerous.
Miss Reissa has dark curly hair,
dark sloe eyes, a Jewish nose, vivid
gestures, a Brooklyn accent. "The
whole package," she says with an
impudent shrug. She fears that if
word got around that she worked
in Yiddish theater, she would be

typecast in "ethnic" roles, very
possibly limiting her career forever.
Until recently, she never even told
her agent.
Avi Hoffman is another serious
professional worried that his career
in Yiddish theater might limit his
broader career. "Agents say Yid-
dish theater is a graveyard for
your career. Who are they to tell
me to be ashamed of my culture?
But still..."
But still there are benefits from
working in Yiddish theater. Only
in Yiddish theater is Miss Reissa
"not an offbeat ethnic type. I'm
simply an actress and an attrac-
tive woman and a versatile per-
former — just a real Jane Doe In
Yiddish theater, paradoxically,
Miss Reissa is liberated from
Jewishness into theater. Playing in
Yiddish theater has proved a side-
ways route into her own identity.
Miss Reissa lives her "real life"
in English. But Yiddish was her
first language — though she can
read her scripts only when trans-
literated into English characters —
and Yiddish theater releases her

into the speech of her early
childhood.
"When I do Yiddish theater, I
like speaking Yiddish. I like it. It
feels . . ." In an effort to analyze
her own reactions, she smacks her
lips experimentally as if trying a
mouthful of wine, and the taste
seems to surprise and amuse her.
"The words feel good in my
mouth," she asserts.
Playing Yiddish theater on tour
in Israel opened Miss Reissa to
Zionist sympathies. And last year,
backstage with the cast of Songs
of Paradise, she found a tiny com-
munity of insiders within an in-
siders' world: four out of the cast
of five are, like her, children of
Holocaust survivors.

Irony Of Ironies

A

nother of the four experienced
the expansion of his Jewish
consciousness more violently. "For
me to be doing Yiddish theater,"
reflects David Kener, dizzy with
reversal, "is as weird as it gets."
An actor in his twenties, with