Will there be girls?

I am returned from New York, where the Marvell Rep's staged reading of God of Vengeance was entirely worth waiting out a hurricane and eight hours of round trip to see.

They are a repertory company and so I've been warned the cast may shift for the full staging in 2012, but I am desperately hoping they can keep at least the three principals. Their Rifkele (Evgeniya Radilova) is perfect. The actors came in street clothes with hints of costume, so she had a plaid schoolgirl skirt and her hair in two plaits, but also neatly buttoned ankle boots as of the time; her Manke (Jocelyn Greene) was tall, lanky, in a leather jacket and grunge boots, but a kind of short wrap underneath, with a cheap silk pattern. Even minimally blocked, they had brilliant chemistry; I want to see their love scenes played for real. Yankel (Anthony Newfield) was also quite good, especially considering he was an eleventh-hour substitute: a tall angry hangdog man with half-spectacles and baffled, thrown-out gestures, doting obsessively on his daughter while seeing right past her. She was clear-eyed in their final confrontation, delivering the critical line "I don't know"—the answer to his desperate question, "Are you still a kosher meydl, a pure Jewish girl?"—with no shame, only a kind of namelessness; what she's done with Manke, is it a sin? How would she know? Her mother, Sore (Barbara Spiegel), is the brisk operator, the one who approaches everything with the expediency of her days as a working girl; she'll make a respectable match for her daughter if it kills one of them, but she doesn't share her husband's hang-up about the sefer Torah. The rest of the cast were a mix of students and actors I recognized from The Dybbuk. I don't know why there needed to be someone to read the stage directions.

I'm not sure the translation was the most fluent they could have chosen, but the crucial passages read well and at least it didn't transpose or update or over-slang the language. (I realized on the subway back to shirei_shibolim and terriqat's why Margulies' version doesn't work for me—in shifting the action to the 1920's Lower East Side, it simplifies what Asch's original play deliberately problematized. The Torah scroll becomes a talisman of the old world, the brothel the threat of the new; the assimilated father tries to keep his daughter traditional, but she's a child of boundary-breaking America in ways he doesn't even know about; thus missing the point of Got fun nekome that for all the sharp line Yankel draws between the upstairs and downstairs of his house, kosher and treyf, they are the same place and to characterize them as two different worlds is to fall into his delusion. No amount of attempted God-bargaining can ensure that where a Torah is, no one ever thinks about sex. Rifkele and Manke make love to echoes of the Song of Songs.) I think it could have contained more untranslated Yiddish and Hebrew, but I understand if most audiences wouldn't agree without a glossary in the program. I am so going back for the actual play.

Apparently if I fall asleep on the Amtrak from Boston, I still wake up in time to get out at New Haven. A ghost reflex: I was honestly surprised. I don't have the same problem on buses.