An Artist's Workshop

LIFE'S WORK: Sara Valentine (left) and Miriam Hyman play women separated by generations but united by artistic drive in An Artist's Workshop. For Art's Sake

by Toby Zinman

This is a brave and ambitious new play -- often moving, often confusing, trying to say too much, taking too long to say it, full of big, passionate ideas incompletely thought through, incompletely theatricalized. Its subject is no less than the need to make art -- both the artist's need and civilization's need. It develops this subject through two plots. First there's the historical story of a Jewish painter imprisoned by the Nazis at Terezin, the notorious propaganda camp in Czechoslovakia where many artists, musicians and writers were sent. This story is interwoven with a fiction about a contemporary African-American filmmaker.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (Sara Valentine) was an Austrian painter who had worked with Brecht and who had an educator's gift for hope. She taught the children enslaved in Terezin to paint and draw, making them both surrogates for the family she never had and emblems of the human imagination enduring -- for a while -- the horrors of the Nazi camps. Alden Moore was inspired to create the show when she saw displayed, in the Jewish Museum in Prague, a suitcase filled with the children's art made at Terezin. That suitcase had belonged to Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who was eventually killed in Auschwitz.

Fran Seede (Miriam Hyman) is an experimental filmmaker bucking the system of government agency grant-supported art, since she makes films which are surreal, angry and assaulting to the spectator and thus, we're told, unfundable. But it is preposterous to draw parallels, as the play clearly does, between the political difficulties of a Yale-educated black woman making art in contemporary America and a Jewish woman making art in Nazi Europe. When Fran says, after a flop of an opening, "I died out here tonight" right after a scene of real death in Terezin, the show becomes an unintentional and grotesque parody of privileged artists living in a free country. (Fran even has a patron who hands her a check when she is denied institutional backing.) The lack of a grant is not the same as starvation, enslavement and murder.

And although both Valentine and Hyman turn in solid, very human performances, their characters as scripted often seem to be mouthpieces, making speeches instead of talking.

Written and directed by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, with too much exposition and too much aphoristic dialogue, the play also allows for stage images of startling power, as when the company, wearing wonderful and disturbing masks (made by Aaron Cromie), silently enacts the children's deaths. The actors form a fine ensemble: Jared Michael Delaney, Erin Weaver, Thomas E. Shotkin, Jefferson Haynes, Alden Moore, Sheila Garg, Justin Eamon Jain, Jessica Marcus, Michael Reid and Kevin Glaccum.

AN ARTIST'S WORKSHOP

Through June 6, Azuka Theatre Collective at St. Stephen's Theater, 10th and Ludlow sts., 215-733-0255

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