Philly Fringe 2018: Half Key Theatre Company presents Arden Kass's ‘Behold Her’ (second review)

At Fringe and SoLow shows throughout the years, I’ve met people like Octavius Catto, Kalpana Chawla, the Publik Universal Friend, and now Dr. Leonore Brecher, a Jewish zoologist born in 1886 in Austria-Hungary. She died in a concentration camp near Minsk in 1942, after an immigration quota barred her from escaping to the United States.

Brecher was a brilliant scientist who studied a species of butterfly with extraordinary adaptive abilities: they could migrate on demand and even change colors. But as we learn in Behold Her, Brecher herself was repeatedly stymied and excluded because of her gender, nationality, and religion.

5,000 years well spent

Playwright Arden Kass and Behold Her producer Michaela Shuchman partnered to explore a history of Jewish women and their relationship to beauty, which, as Dr. Brecher’s inclusion shows, has many incarnations. In Kass’s funny, affecting script, beauty is a privilege, battle, hurdle, conspiracy, shield, and lots more — and as much as it constrains women, from generation to generation, we also reinvent it.

A gregarious flapper named Fanny (played by Philly powerhouse Marcia Saunders) warns us that 5,000-plus years of history is a lot to get through, and the show does run about 30 minutes over the stated time, but it’s worth it.

Saunders and Shuchman perform each vignette solo or in tandem with help from Josie Ross, who abets the action and occasionally interjects on Yoshi Nomura’s versatile set, flanked with racks of clothing that fly on and off the hangers for each scene.

From the department store to Congress

Behold Her presents a whirlwind of women who just might be you, and the music that weaves throughout the show, played live onstage by musician Charlotte Morris (along with lovely vocals from the whole ensemble), would be worth the price of admission all by itself.

Bess Myerson and Hedy Lamarr meet in Loehmann’s department store, sparring over their mixed but brilliant legacies. They pocket necklaces as talismans for all the things beauty stole from them. Rebecca Gratz soliloquizes. Bella Abzug takes the podium. Emma Lazarus recites. And generations of everyday women declare war on their weight, skin, and hair.

Meanwhile, offstage…

Speaking of what the women portrayed here go through to achieve proper notions of prettiness, from months of lettuce to ironing their hair, men are largely absent. One notable exception is “My Shabbos Beauty,” in which an increasingly steely young woman (Shuchman) tries to detail makeup tips permissible during Shabbos, only to be interrupted at every point by gruff pronunciations from a bearded elder buried in study (Saunders, in a shadow silhouette).

But all around him, it’s mothers meeting their daughters’ unruly bodies on the front lines of slender figures and shiny-smooth hair, highlighting the crucial irony of these feminine pressures. You could rail against each generation of mothers for years of scalded teenage scalps, dressing-room humiliations, and diet soda for lunch, but the truth is that these ultimately patriarchal prescriptions are so deeply internalized that it only looks like women perpetuate them. The men are offstage not because this is women’s territory, but because the men’s power is so assured that they can rely on women to carry out their orders. And that’s a feeling to which all women, Jewish or not, can probably relate.

For Cameron Kelsall's review, click here.