Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by Wendy Wasserstein, directed by Jim Warren
Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto
June 12-21, 2008
The Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company concludes its inaugural season with the Toronto premiere of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1992 comedy The Sisters Rosensweig. When Wasserstein died in 2006 at the age of 55, she was praised for having finally brought the identity crises of intelligent, successful women to the stage. While The Sisters Rosensweig may have been pioneering in its day, now, after sixteen years including six seasons of “Sex and the City,” the play seems to suffer from an identity crisis of its own. It veers uncomfortably between a sitcom-like style where everybody has quick comebacks and funny exit lines and a more realistic portrayal of characters as complex, sensitive people rather than joke-machines.
For a feminist playwright the work is oddly conservative. It has the old family-gathers-for-communal-celebration plot, in this case the two Jewish-American sisters Pfeni (Sarah Dodd) and Gorgeous (Linda Kash) arriving in London to celebrate the 54th birthday of their eldest sister Sara (Rosemary Dunsmore), an atheist expatriate and London head of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Gorgeous is a bubbly housewife and radio personality from Newton, Massachusetts, and Pfeni is a conflicted globetrotting journalist just flown in from India.
Strangely, the plot does not focus on the joys or toll of independence but on how to find the right man as if that were necessary for a woman to feel complete. Wasserstein sets up a no-brainer contest between Nicholas (Michael Hanrahan), an upper-class British snob the others call a “Nazi,” and Mervyn (Richard Greenblatt), an echt New York Jew and heart-on-his-sleeve mensch. There are peculiar inconsistencies. How can Pfeni maintain a relationship with anyone when she is constantly away and how can she not know that a relationship with bisexual director (Steve Cumyn) might not have complications? How can Sara’s daughter Tess (Sara Farb), so keen on celebrating Lithuania’s independence with her Lithuanian, Roman Catholic boyfriend, not know that she won’t feel quite at home with his compatriots and coreligionists?
The cast does not display a uniform acting style. Kash and Cumyn are both very funny in the attention-getting over-the-top style that passes for normal in television comedy, while Dodd, Dunsmore and Greenblatt seem to be acting a far more serious drama. Dunsmore, in fact, is so convincing as a woman grown stonily cold by having rejecting her heritage that her sudden desire for a fling with Mervyn seems preposterous. The action is played out on Phillip Silver’s impressive set of Sara’s house, surely the most beautiful set ever to grace the Jane Mallet stage. All in all, Wasserstein’s play is an unchallenging, moderately entertaining piece that is rather too keen to tell you repeatedly what it is about than to trust you to work it out for yourself.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-06-16.
Photo: Linda Kash, Rosemary Dunsmore and Sarah Dodd.
2008-06-16
The Sisters Rosensweig