Summer Intern Sarah Kelly Konig, also working as the Assistant Stage Manager on Money, Love and Shame!, files a report from the front line:

A Goy (Me) and a Mensch (Allen Rickman) Schmooze about Yiddish Melodrama

SKK: Money, Love, and Shame! has not been performed in a very long time, correct? So how did you find out about it?

ALR: How I found out about it was it was an old Yiddish actress who was a friend of ours – and when I say old, I mean old – I think she started in Vaudeville. Her name was Mina Bern, and I got, from a mutual friend, a script [of Money, Love, and Shame!] that was a chopped down version for four or five people that Mina used to tour with. I read that, and I was kind of intrigued by it, and then I found a copy of the full-length script that was published in Poland in the 20s, and I was absolutely hooked – all in Yiddish of course.

SKK: Can you tell me about the translation process?

ALR: I’ve translated everything that I’ve ever directed, but it’s a somewhat different animal. Because whenever I’ve translated before for Yiddish theatre, when we’re acting in Yiddish, [the English translation was] via supertitles that are over the heads of the actors. But translating for the supertitles and translating for the dialogue that will actually be acted is a slightly different thing. When you write for the supertitles, you’ve got to be very stingy with word count because we read more slowly than we hear. So my instinct at first was to keep it as short as possible. But eventually it sunk in, that I am allowed to put in two more words here or one more word there if it makes for better dialogue. And so I started with a fairly straight, kind of literal-ish take of the translation and then kept polishing that to make it more dialogue-y. When you translate, you feel a responsibility to the original text and author, but the original author is long dead and nobody who is going to come to see the show knows the original Yiddish text by heart. To be slavishly devoted is actually a really bad idea because it will play like translation. The way that people express themselves in these languages is different. I [also] tried to make it more English of the period in which the play is written. And the thing I am most pleased about – is that several people came to me and said, this doesn’t feel like a translation, it feels like this is the text that was written in 1910. So that was the process. And George S. Kaufman, who is one of my gods, said, “Plays are not written. They are rewritten.” And he is very, very much right.

SKK: (Note: If you’re like me and nobody has ever sat you down and told you what you need to know about Yiddish theatre, you might mistake Money, Love, and Shame! for a classic Yiddish comedy because it is so very funny. But in 1910, it was a very serious play! Allen Rickman clues you in so that you’re not a schlemiel like me!)

ALR: At the time this thing was written, people took it seriously, which is exactly what’s so funny about it. It is so ridiculous. It is so shapely, manipulatively melodramatic. It is so many cheap effects just to try to move people to have an emotional reaction, and it’s so blatant and shameless about how manipulative it is that people might have been suckers for it at one time, but we look at it now, and it’s just piss in your pants funny.

SKK: Can you talk a bit about the genre of Yiddish melodrama?

ALR: They did melodramas in Yiddish similar to the way melodramas were done on the American and British stages. The difference is a lot of the melodramas that were done in America and England had a lot of spectacular scenes – that cliché girl tied to the railroad tracks when the train is coming etc. that’s a stage thing – and Yiddish melodrama never had any of that big special effect stuff on stage, but the style of it, the heightened emotions of it, that’s very much a Yiddish theatre thing just like it is an American or British theatre thing.

TMT does stylized theatre and formal experiments a lot, and although this is not experimental, it’s definitely about playing with form. It’s so different than contemporary naturalistic theatre, [which] is slow, people talk at the pace that they do in life, things happen more or less the pace they would have in life. Melodrama is much, much faster and every line, every gesture is supposed to have an impact, a specific effect. It’s not about recreating life, it’s about telling a story in the flashiest, most exciting way possible – again it looks ridiculous to us now, and that’s the fun of the show.

It’s like watching a circus act or a juggler; you’re really seeing something happen – bing bing bang bang – everything’s got to be clicking, clicking all the time. And melodrama has—no matter how much misery there is in the play—it has to be entertaining.

Of course the word “melodrama” comes from “melo” – “melody” and we have the accompaniment with Steve Sterner, who is a silent film accompanist. Melodrama on stage had music playing underneath, just like later on there was music playing underneath silent movies.

SKK: Would you like to add anything more about your process and the TMT labs?

I just want to say how lucky I was to get a really wonderful cast. I’m just so happy with them, and our design team, and the support staff at Target Margin. They’re just very nice people, and that’s been a very nice experience all around.

So get off your tush and schlep out to The Secret Theatre for some Yiddish theatre and a good time!! (It’s really not a schlep, I’m just kibitzing! It’s a short walk from the E, M, F, G, N, W & R trains!)