This work by the author of the rightly- acclaimed Bent (1979) takes the form of a monologue by an old Jewish woman about to turn 80. At the outset, Rose sits on the balcony bench of her Miami Beach apartment, of which we get a glimpse of an armchair, a lamp, and a telephone stand. Rose is sitting shiva for a nine-year-old girl, but we don't learn whom she is mourning until the evening's end. It becomes clear that she is also mourning the loss of the Yiddish culture that has played so important a role in her life. Her memory is not always reliable; she sometimes mixes fact and fantasy and has occasional hallucinations. Without ever moving from the bench, she gives us rambling reminiscences about her birth in the Ukraine, her childhood experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, her travels on a refugee ship, her eventual move to Atlantic City and Miami Beach, and her visits to Israel and Arizona. Along the way she has taken numerous men into her bed, had several children, and outlived three husbands.
The trouble with all this is that we have heard similar tales again and again, and Sherman offers us little that is fresh. He tosses in a few obligatory bits of history (a Molly Picon appearance, the ship Exodus, Yiddish words adopted by English), and an occasional aphorism ("Judaism's greatest contribution to mankind was asking questions that can't be answered," "God is like a policeman, He's never there when you want him"). But for long stretches we just don't care, and the mind wanders. The role is in the hands of the American actress Olympia Dukakis, who at 68 is making her London debut. I say hands advisedly, since she never moves from her bench, and can embellish what she says only by gesturing with one or both hands -- with periodic (scripted) pauses for a sip of water. Having seen her fail in recent years as Mother Courage and King Lear (!), I am happy to report that she does as well here as could be asked. It is of course a feat to memorize more than two hours of unrelieved speech; the sad thing is that this particular text is not worth learning by heart. Plans are underway to bring this show to Broadway.
