My Mother and Other Catastrophes

My Mother and Other Catastrophes
Rivka Hartman. A Live Play Reading. Pop Up Theatre. 7 & 14, 2015 March at Gleebooks, Glebe and 8 & 15 March, 2015 at Sydney Jewish Museum, Darlinghurst.

Playing in Sydney for three more performances, then moving to Melbourne for a performance as part of the Jewish Film Festival – Holocaust Series, this play is a “darkly comic story of four generations of Jewish women, the matriarch of whom – Gitl Silverstein – is 116 years old, a survivor and dominating scold, undiminished by suffering and hopelessly dysfunctional progeny.

Through this family, Australian playwright Rivka Hartman, (Daughters, After Paradise, A Most Attractive Man, Wanting) takes her audience on a journey from the simple life of a Polish village to the horrors of the prison camps; from the decision to seek a new life to the difficulties of establishing a new home and maintaining ideals and traditions in a different country. It covers the problems of growing up as a migrant schoolgirl in ‘white’ 1960s Australia and the ongoing pull between old and contemporary values and ideals.

By reading the stage directions as a narrator, Taylor Owynns creates the changing scenes for the audience, and working in a very limited stage space, with scripts in hand, the actors bring Hartman’s characters and their frustrations to life.

Elaine Hudson brings the weight of her experience to the demanding role of Gitl. One almost forgets the fact that she is reading, as she establishes the great strength, the indomitable energy and the underlying dignity of this woman who is a symbol of suffering, survival and the determination to maintain traditions and values. Hudson epitomises all of this, as well as the humour inherent the role.

Anne Tenney plays her daughter Miriam with similar vitality and belief. This too is a demanding role, as Miriam takes the play from the 60s into the 21st century. Thus Tenney is required to portray her as schoolgirl, an idealistic hippy, a ‘new age’ mother – and to deal constantly with Gitl’s interference and criticism.

Establishing the veracity of this mother-daughter relationship is vital to the play, and, despite the fact that it is a reading and space is so restricted, Hudson and Tenney are convincing in their love-hate struggle.

John Grinston plays all of the men who are part of their lives – an ageing father, a hippy husband, a doctor, a Nazi officer … and Hitler! He makes these changes quickly and successfully in this reading, but it is in the very short film at the end of the play that he particularly shows his talent.

Florette Cohen plays Miriam’s daughter, Sandalwood (Sandy), who rejects her upbringing for the insecurity of stand-up comedy and, eventually, the near catastrophe of substance abuse. Cohen has a vibrant voice and strong stage presence. ‘Twould have been nice to hear a few jokes injected into the anger and frustration of her supposedly stand-up.

Madeleine Withington waits patiently for her few lines as Dvorah – lost daughter and sister, grand-daughter and great grand-daughter.

From Gitl’s life as one of twelve children growing up in post World War I Poland, Hartman’s play covers over a century of history that needs to be recorded and in the context of the Jewish Film Festival-Holocaust Series, it is an important and moving re-telling of a story that needs to be told and re-told. As a stand-alone play, however, it will need more work-shopping to develop and sustain wider audience appeal – especially as new generations face similar horrors and atrocities and the fight to overcome them.

Carol Wimmer

Images: John Grinston as Hitler and Anne Tenney and Florette Cohen.

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