The revitalized theater on display over the past nine months at Laguna Playhouse brings both a welcome surprise and an unalloyed pleasure. New artistic director David Ellenstein has knit together a weave of well-produced comedies and musicals, the fabric of the century-plus venue bright again.
Beyond his administrative curation, though, Ellenstein is also a veteran director.
His initial directing outing in October was the fine froth of an unexpectedly adroit newish farce “The Angel Next Door.”
Now, broadening and deepening Laguna’s range of thematic ambitions, he and a strong cast deliver an impactful and deeply felt reading of a four-decade-old post-Holocaust play called “A Shayna Maidel.”
Written by Barbara Lebow, “A Shayna Maidel” (the phrase is Yiddish for “pretty girl”) debuted in 1985 and for a while became a staple of regional theater productions.
Ellenstein directed it at San Diego area theaters in 1989 and 2007. In his program notes, he describes it as a “beautiful play.”
Here, he fashions a beautiful, incisive telling.
Set in 1946 New York, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, “A Shayna Maidel” is a family drama focusing on three Jewish immigrants, two sisters separated by the Holocaust and their father who is driven to restore what is left of his family.
Younger sister Rose, in her 20s, is independent and making a modern, albeit self-pampered American life. Her older sister Lusia arrives from Europe, having somehow survived Auschwitz. She has lost her baby and mother; now she numbly searches for news of her lost husband, Duvid.
Leaving the plot otherwise unspoiled, the story is largely set in the present, though there are facets of a memory play as Lusia conjures up in her mind’s eye staged recollections of her family past (not Auschwitz sufferings).
In fact, while there are difficult, wrenching moments — journeys into the aftermath of one of humankind’s worst, defining debacles, are never easy — a portion of the success here is that Lebow’s play is never maudlin nor is Ellenstein’s staging overwrought.
The play’s focus is on this family reconciling itself, not constructed as a cry against painful injustice or for social injustice. There is no journey about trying to understand the unfathomable; while there is loss and guilt, these are experienced in a personal way, rather than as social recrimination.
The production is funded in large part through compelling performances.
Zarah Mahler’s Lusia arrives in the play as a hollowed-out representation of the impossibility of life after death. Mahler, lean and with a ghostly pallor, and emotionally outfitted with a thick, eastern European accent, is a bellwether of numb. What’s lovely about this interpretation is that Mahler’s version of Lusia’s return to the living is multifaceted: the actress conveys both single-minded purpose, while, in the flashback scenes, the fullness of her life before it was reshaped by horror.
As the confident, carefree Rose, Eden Malyn starts as an engaging New Yorker abloom in her young life. Early on, the actress breezily and wonderfully darts about the stage in heels, rapid-fire small steps bristling with brio. The actress later dazzles in a powerful scene of Rose’s vulnerability and self-realization.
As the gruff Mordechai, a self-confident merchant in America, but also a guilt-tinged martinet father, Joel Swetow feels a bit boxed in throughout much of the play in his character’s patriarchy. But, when his emotional growth abruptly explodes, Swetow’s in-the-moment swift physicality is breathtaking.
Among the secondary roles, Marnina Schon shines as Hanna, Lusia’s youngest friend/confidant and internalized gyroscope.
Beyond the ensemble, the evening as a whole is thoroughly realized theater-making.
Stephen Gifford’s tan-colored, fixed set piece location is the living, dining and bedroom quarters of a modest but comfortable Manhattan apartment.
Above and behind the set, Gifford has fashioned an intriguing and impressionistic jagged fabric-like material. Shrouded initially in semi darkness, it at first seems possibly as a blurred allusion to the unsettling topographic mapping of strife-torn Europe in World War II.
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But a later shift in Jared Sayeg’s continually handsome lighting subsequently reveals that to have an impressionistic layer of gentle, puffy little white clouds against a blue sky, perhaps the promise America holds for those who have survived the horrors of the other terrible place and time?
Elisa Benzoni’s period costume design nicely accents the primary characters, starkly and tastefully accenting Rose’s up-and-comer stylishness versus Lusia’s threadbare immigrant schmattas. Ian Scot’s sound design atmospherically pipes in slower background Big Band era instrumentals.
Beyond the satisfactions of the show itself, one lasting takeaway from “A Shayna Maidel” moving ahead is confidence in Ellenstein’s sure hand for mining material and bringing riches alive on stage. Where will he take us next?
‘A Shayna Maidel’
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (from a possible 4)
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach
When: Through March 31. 7:30 p.m., Wednesday-Fridays; 2 and 7 p.m., Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Sundays, 1 and 5:30 p.m. Added performances on Thursday, March 21 at 2 p.m. and Tuesday, March 26 at 7:30 p.m. There will be no 5:30 p.m. performance on Sunday, March 31.
Tickets: $45-84
Information: 949-497-2787; lagunaplayhouse.com