In-Between Days

by Toby Zinman

It's 1986. A timid Dutch librarian is giving a public lecture called "Lovely Evidences" in which he will, with slide show and blackboard, present the discoveries he has made, purportedly about the existence of the Wandering Jew, but actually about the discoveries he has made about himself. His stamper -- one of those old-fashioned library date stamps -- hangs around his neck; it contains, he tells us, every date of every day that ever was, the date of everyone's birth and death.

It all began when a book was returned through the overnight slot; it was 113 years overdue. This strange circumstance seizes the librarian's mind and he begins a quest (with all his research skills) to solve the mystery of who the book borrower was/is. One clue leads to another, and before you know it, the man who had hardly ever left his hometown finds himself traveling all over the world: to Germany, to China, to Australia, to America.

The play -- actually an hour-and-a-half-long monologue -- philosophizes about the Human Will and the Human Condition and Man's relation to God. It's all pretty contrived and ultimately implies that to be human is to be the Wandering Jew -- the mythic cobbler who, the legend goes, told Jesus to shove on when Jesus collapsed under the weight of the cross on the man's doorstep. If we follow the play's argument, it says that to be human is to be ungenerous, self-protective and doomed by Jesus' curse on that cobbler to wander the earth, unable to rest, until the Second Coming. But somehow the monologue winds up as a joyful and defiant declaration of life and man's indomitable spirit. Like the play's title, it is all meant to mean something. Like the dramaturg's notes in the program, the play muddles this notion of standing underneath the lintel, which is to say, on the threshold, neither here nor there, with the librarian's much-repeated mantra, I am here.

Peter DeLaurier's performance of this eccentric and obsessed man does as much with Glen Berger's play as one could do. He suggests other characters with different accents, modulates convincingly from passive to passionate and gets the European gestures right (for instance, he starts counting with his thumb, not his forefinger). In the middle of his lecture, the librarian tells us that his detective work was getting interesting -- not riveting, but interesting. That's probably more than you can say about this show.

UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL

Through Nov. 2, Lantern Theater Co. at St. Stephen's Theater, 10th and Ludlow sts., 215-829-9002

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