In eight exquisite and horrifying pages, Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” assesses the ravagements of the Holocaust by way of a tale of a woman, the woman’s niece and the woman’s 15-month-old daughter.
Reading anything this powerful, you think: Can a stage version of Ozick’s story possibly find a way to honor the material without theatricalizing it in the wrong way? Grief is well-suited to the page; take it public, and you risk easy melodrama and easier pathos. The 6 million people deserve neither.
Good news. “The Shawl” and Ozick’s related novella, “Rosa,” have been adapted into Robin Chaplik’s play “Rosa Lublin,” now at the Piven Theatre.
While certain passages from the book sound that way — like passages from a book — by and large Chaplik has found a way to transfer Ozick’s characters to a new medium.
Chaplik also directs this world premiere, and her handling of three especially fine performances is such that, at its most intense, the play at once casts a pall and a spell.
Rosa (Laura Scott Wade) and her niece Stella (Carmella Mulvihill) are Warsaw ghetto survivors, about to survive something far worse, a concentration camp. For a time Rosa’s daughter Magda survives as well, wrapped in a shawl that becomes a symbol of loss and remembrance for Rosa in her later years.
Those years are spent in Miami Beach, where Rosa (Celeste Lynch as the elder version) lives in a residential hotel. Hers is a meager, hard-shell existence.
Then comes a suitor: Another Warsaw native, a retired button manufacturer named Persky (Bernie Landis), offering a hearty sense of humor and a sympathetic ear.
All’s well that ends well? For a lesser writer than Ozick, perhaps. But on the page, and in Chaplik’s faithful adaptation, the coda opens a window to a better future for Rosa without papering over her past.
Lynch is often extraordinary: In a simple line such as, “I got my own troubles,” she can suggest a well of pain without falling headlong into it. She and Wade match up wonderfully well; Wade’s open-hearted, fervent quality complements Lynch’s averted glances and tightly held secrets.
Just as good is Mulvihill, whose no-nonsense Stella, who supports Rosa in the postwar years, adds a touch of wit.
Beyond these three, there’s a solid performance in Landis’ Persky, and passable ones from Thad Anzur (as a university scholar specializing in Holocaust survivors) and Steven Schine (as, among others, an officious hotel manager). Chaplik’s staging would be better off without the intrusive projection design.
The play ends four sentences earlier than Ozick’s novella, not for the better. And throughout, lines such as “She lifted the lid of the box and looked at the shawl” are unneeded; we know it, we see it.
Such matters don’t matter much with Lynch, Wade and Mulvihill working so intuitively and truthfully throughout. There’s a moment when Landis tells Persky that he understands what she has gone through.
“From movies you know it,” comes the seething reply, and Lynch’s Rosa may as well be talking to the whole of contemporary America, where people tend to prefer their Holocaust tales realistic but insistently uplifting, in the arm-twisting fashion of “Schindler’s List.” Ozick’s better than that. And while Chaplik’s adaptation needs to cut a few passages loose, in order to better establish a theatrical rhythm, the first act alone is reason enough to see “Rosa Lublin.”
“Rosa Lublin”
When: Through March 10
Where: Piven Theatre, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St., Evanston
Phone: 847-866-8049
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mjphillips@tribune.com
