Wilma's "Enemies, A Love Story' (second revi

Beyond tasteless

ROBERT ZALLER

When you settle down in your seat at the Wilma Theater’s current production of Enemies, A Love Story, you're greeted by David P. Gordon’s splendid set, with its echoes of Russian Constructivism and Joseph Stella’s night views of New York, on the uncurtained stage. It’s a work of art by itself, quite apart from the drama it’s meant to contain.

Then, unfortunately, the play begins.

I haven’t read the Isaac Bashevis Singer novel from which the present work is adapted, or seen the Paul Mazursky film made from it in 1989. I can only say that, in its stage version, it is one of the most misbegotten ventures I have experienced in a long time.

Throw in a meddling rabbi….

The hero of Enemies, Herman Broder (Morgan Spector), is a Holocaust survivor whose wife, Yadwiga (Kati Brazda), is the Polish peasant girl who saved him, and whose mistress, Masha (Elizabeth Rich), is likewise a victim of the camps. In a switch from the usual, the shiksa Yadwiga, who adores Herman, is as appetizing as boiled potatoes, while Masha vamps Herman in her Bronx apartment, sending her mother (Barbara Spiegel) off to her room when things get hot.

Matters become complicated when each woman gets pregnant, and both Herman’s pre-war wife, Tamar (Laura Flanagan), and Masha’s husband (Bob Ari) turn up. And what could be more hilarious than a bedroom farce involving a man who wakes up every day from agonized nightmares, a sex-addled woman who can’t sleep a wink, and the dim-witted benefactress they betray? Throw in a meddling rabbi (Tom Teti) in training as a TV repairman, and you have the perfect Seinfeld prequel, with angst by Adolf and body tattoos from Josef Mengele.

One cringes for the actors

Let us stipulate that Holocaust survivors, no better and no worse than other people, are as fair game for satire as anyone else, and that the Third Reich can be a fine comedic subject (witness Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks’s The Producers). Enemies, however, tries to have it both ways, bilking its traumatized protagonists for laughs— Herman has lost two children to the gas chambers, and Masha’s pregnancy turns out to have been hysterical— while engaging them in bathetic jousts with God. The result is beyond tasteless, as Borscht Belt one-liners alternate with jejune philosophizing, or flow together, as in Tamar’s necrophilic wisecrack, “Can two bloodless corpses have orgasms?” One cringes for actors required to deliver such lines, no less than for audiences sitting through them.

Sarah Schulman, a Guggenheim winner, Fulbright scholar, and Prix de Rome finalist, was responsible for the script, and Jiri Zizka for the direction. It would seem heartless to critique the performers, though Elizabeth Rich’s Masha has a desperate energy that almost hints at a real character. The Wilma’s production values remain the best in town, and Jerold R. Forsyth’s inventive lighting should be noted. But this particular corpse is best buried with its present run.



To read Dan Rottenberg's review, click here.