New Yiddish Rep is presenting the US premiere of "Making Stalin Laugh," British playwright David Schneider's dark comedy that details the events leading up to the chilling silencing by Stalin of the revered Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels. Directed by Allen Lewis Rickman, the developmental workshop production plays an exclusive two-night engagement at Theatre 80, 80 St. Marks Place in the East Village, Sunday and Monday May 17 and 18, both at 7pm. The production's multi-lingual cast includes Israeli television star Gera Sandler (as Mikhoels), and Yelena Shmulenson ("A Serious Man").
"Making Stalin Laugh" world premiered in London last summer in an English-language production that The Independent called "a fascinating story." New Yiddish Rep's revised version will be performed in three languages -- Yiddish and Russian mostly and some English -- in a production that aims for language authenticity in its portrayal of the remarkable theatrical community that thrived (under dubious circumstances of course) as Stalin's early support of the celebrated Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) for propaganda purposes suddenly gave way to something far darker after the defeat of the Nazis and end of World War II.
"In this revised version of the play," comments Rickman, "the characters will speak in Yiddish and sometimes in Russian, and in one scene in English, even a bit of German, just like their real-life prototypes." English supertitles are provided throughout.
New Yiddish Rep presents modern theater for diverse contemporary audiences in Yiddish. "Here there is a compelling reason to see this play in the languages that were spoken by the characters in the story," says
David Mandelbaum, New Yiddish Rep's artistic director. "Luckily in New York we have both the multi-lingual actors and the audience groups that can come together to experience this depiction of Soviet cultural forgetting in a high-impact way."
Dating back to 1921, when the GOSET troupe moved into a theatre a short distance from the Kremlin, Mikhoels and his colorful compatriots shrewdly managed to build a Yiddish theatre that was seen as a jewel of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Even though its audiences were mostly gentile, Jews in Russia followed with pride the rising fortunes of GOSET and the growing stature of the internationally acclaimed Mikhoels.
Mikhoels, whose murder in 1948 was officially listed as a car accident, was in fact a remarkable jumble of intelligence, humor, and savage egotism. He thought, to the end, that he knew how to outsmart the system, and get the last laugh.
For tickets, which are $25, visit
www.newyiddishrep.org or call
888-596-1027.
