Theater Review

“Crossing Delancey” originally appeared Off-Broadway at the Jewish Repertory Theater in New York City on April 15, 1985. It was made into a movie in 1988. Twenty years later, does it still make us laugh? Yes, this play is relevant today because of its ageless theme. “Crossing Delancey” is a fun, uplifting evening. The romantic comedy centers around Bubbie, a smart Jewish grandmother who lives on the lower East Side of New York City. Although her granddaughter, Isabelle “Izzy,” works in a bookstore and lives uptown, once a week she comes downtown to visit her grandmother. Bubbie (Michelle Rosen) wants Izzy to find a husband because she feels it not good to be alone in life, and’she wants to dance at Izzy’s wedding. Izzy, a strong-willed woman played by Jean Franzblau, tries to tell her grandmother that she comes from a different generation and that it’s okay to be alone, she doesn’t need a husband, she has her life. It’s clear to see where Izzy gets her determination, because her grandmother is equally determined. Bubbie takes matters into her own hands and hires a matchmaker, Hannah (Geraldine Fuentes). Izzy is distressed not only by her grandmother’s interference, but by the custom. When she meets the intended match, Sam Posner (Tony Cicchetti) a man who’s inherited his father’s pickle business on the lower East Side, she tries politely to tell him that it has nothing to do with him, but that she’s already seeing someone. Working in the bookstore, Izzy has developed an infatuation for a published book author Tyler (David Wright) who comes in to buy periodicals and check on his book sales. Izzy thinks this man could be the answer to all her dreams. Sam, the “pickle man,” is not deterred by Izzy’s polite refusal. He pursues her. Bubbie has taken a liking to him as well and invites him to her apartment in an effort to smooth the way between the two. In many ways Bubbie and Sam are quite a bit alike: both are deep thinkers and tell stories that although are amusing, have deeper meanings. When Izzy finally stops and listens to who the author really is, she realizes the adage “beauty is only skin deep,” applies on many levels, that one has to go beyond the superficial to find the truth. Rosen who plays Bubbie is every person’s grandmother. What a wonderful actress! We want to watch her because she is effortlessly Bubbie. When she sings in her kitchen, it’s not a stage performance, but a grandmother singing in the intimacy of her home. Bubbie’s love of life is so strong, I’m not sure whether it’s the actress or the character and that’s the sign of a professional at work. She goes for broke in this role and it works. Her counterpart, the matchmaker, Hannah, is equally fun. This woman is a snoop, a busybody and yet a member of the community that everyone employs. How do you play a character that is a blessed nuisance? With elan, and that’s exactly what Fuentes does. One of the funniest scenes in the play is when Sam, dressed with clothes purchased from Hannah’s relative, comes to Bubbie’s apartment. The two women zing one-liners back and forth, while Sam tries to decide if he looks well-dressed or dressed like a freak. Playing Sam, Cicchetti is nicely understated. One could understand why a woman wouldn’t notice him. He has heart and intelligence, but that isn’t always the first thing a woman notices. Anyone who saw the movie “Crossing Delancey” (1988) remembers the remarkably shaded performance Amy Irving gave as Izzy. It’s difficult not to compare Jean Franzblau’s Izzy with hers. Theater, with its symbiotic relationship between actor and audience and its immediacy, allows an actor to search and stretch and change the performance from night to night, making this reviewer wish she could see Franzblau perform another night as well. She looked as if she were still searching to perfect the role. Wright is a good actor and I would’ve preferred not to hear the affected speech. The role of Tyler is already written so that the audience gets an idea that the character is self-absorbed and arrogant. The staging is wonderful, given that Bubbie’s kitchen, a book store, and a park bench all have to fit on the small stage. Set designer Jeremy Eason is to be congratulated on his effective, practical and yet lovely use of the space. “Crossing Delancey” runs through December 11 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. at the Pierson Playhouse, 941 Temescal Canyon Rd. Tickets: 454-1970.

The title of the exhibition, “Zelda by Herself,” speaks to how her fame is forever linked to her more celebrated husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But “The Art of Zelda Fitzgerald,” now on view at Pepperdine’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum, allows an enchanting glimpse into the creative soul of this famously flamboyant’and troubled’woman. Although overshadowed by her husband’s literary success, Zelda possessed her own creative juices, ones that flowed in many directions. She wrote plays, short stories and a novel, studied ballet, and was a dedicated artist. At age 25, Zelda began painting’the one artistic expression she practiced throughout her life. “She was an incredibly talented person,” says museum director Michael Zakian. “She divided her time among writing, painting and dance’and just being Zelda, which was a full-time job.” The Fitzgeralds were famous in their day as the couple who embodied the glamour of the 1920s. Scott himself named the decade the “Jazz Age” and also coined the term “flapper” to refer to a new breed of modern independent woman’best exemplified by his freethinking, strong-willed wife. Their tumultuous courtship began in 1918 when the couple met at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama, where Zelda was deemed one of the most beautiful debutantes. It wasn’t until after Fitzgerald’s first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” became a success that Zelda agreed to marry him. The exhibition includes 54 of her watercolors, all dating from the 1930s and 40s. The work ranges from whimsical, with a series of animated paper dolls she created for her daughter, Scottie (the Fitzgeralds’ only child), to fantastic, with Zelda putting her own, dynamic twist on a large group of pictures depicting fairy tales and children’s stories. She borrowed the language of modern art’skewed perspective and vivid color’and used it to craft her own highly personal images. “She did not consider herself a professional artist,” Zakian says. “In fact, only one work, a little landscape, is signed. She painted for herself and for her family.” Nonetheless, the Fitzgeralds had experienced the heady days of Paris in the 1920s, inhabiting a literary and artistic circle that included, among others, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Constantin Brancusi and Gertrude Stein. It was their influence that inspired Zelda to begin painting seriously in 1925. Her works were exhibited rarely in her lifetime’once in 1934 in a New York gallery and in a few private showings. “The best way to understand Zelda is to use that term they use in the art world, ‘outsider,'” Zakian says. “She was not someone trained in art school, but who made art because she wanted to.” At 27, Zelda, forever looking for ways to channel her creativity, became obsessed with ballet. She embarked on a grueling routine that culminated in a nervous breakdown. Her mental health deteriorated (she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic) and she spent the last 18 years of her life in and out of institutions. She died in a hospital fire at age 48. Despite her illness, she remained lucid for long periods and spent the majority of her days painting. Her devotion to Scott, and his to her, never waned. “They loved each other deeply,” Zakian says. “But at the same time they were very competitive. While Zelda greatly admired Scott’s abilities, deep within herself she felt she was just as good a writer. She probably had a similar flair for language, just not the discipline.” Zelda’s only novel, the autobiographical “Save Me the Waltz” was published in 1932. When Scott died of a heart attack at 44 in 1940, Zelda embarked on a series of fanciful cityscapes, recording the places the couple had lived in New York and Paris. These works, rendered in a more somber palette, are another example of how Zelda transformed the vocabulary of modern art to her own personal end. The works are at once naive and sophisticated, conjuring an almost dreamlike quality while appropriating the abstractions of Cubism. “I think you see Zelda’s mental state best in her figures,” Zakian says. “They all seem like they’re in motion. There is great energy moving through them.” A slide lecture by Eleanor Lanahan, granddaughter of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, will take place on Tuesday, November 22, from 7 to 8 p.m. at Pepperdine’s Smothers Theatre. Lanahan will draw upon family stories and extensive interviews with her mother, “Scottie,” to offer rare insight into the lives of one of America’s most famous literary couples. The exhibition continues at the Weisman Museum on the campus of Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Hwy., in Malibu through December 18. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Contact: 506-4851.

Starting November 21, we will have a rare opportunity to participate in a powerful form of activism. People worldwide with access to the Internet will be able to see, hear and communicate with survivors of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa. Gabriel Stauring, an activist and co-founder of StopGenocideNow.org, will be traveling to refugee camps in Darfur and Chad, which borders Sudan to the west, to help instigate this awareness project, called i-ACT (Interactive Activism). Stauring and Chris Bessenecker, an SGN working-team member, will post video footage from the camps on the Web site for 21 days and stage an interactive blog-type feature. Stauring, 39, recently visited Palisades Charter High School to discuss his upcoming trip with the Human Rights Watch Student Task Force, coordinated by Palisadian Pam Bruns, who started the youth leadership-training program in 1999 when she was director for HRW in Southern California. Stauring discovered StopGenocideNow.org about a year ago and took over the then inactive site with his sister, Rachel Veerman. The mission of the organization is “to protect populations in grave danger of violence, death, and displacement resulting from genocide,” and its current focus is the crisis in Darfur, which the United States calls genocide. “The international community and our leaders can really make a difference,” Stauring told the small group of students and at least five teachers who gathered during their lunch to hear him talk. “What it takes is political pressure. It takes people like you to spread the word and tell others ways to participate.” Dressed neatly in blue jeans and a black-and-white T-shirt with “Stop Genocide in Sudan” on the front, Stauring spoke passionately about his efforts to create awareness and action to halt the genocide in Darfur, though he is particularly modest about his activist work. “It kind of chose me,” Stauring told the Palisadian-Post about his involvement in the Darfur crisis. “One of the reasons we can focus on it is that it’s very stoppable.” The Darfur conflict began in early 2003 when rebel forces attacked and captured the capital in central Darfur. In response, the Sudanese government mounted a campaign of aerial bombardment supporting ground attacks by an Arab militia, the Janjaweed, who are still “killing civilians, razing and burning villages, raping women and young girls, abducting children, poisoning water supplies and destroying sources of food,” according to StopGenocideNow.org. While the majority of the resulting refugees are non-Arab Africans fleeing Janjaweed attacks, the victims include Arab and non-Arab peoples. Several thousand African Union peacekeeping troops are stationed in Darfur but peace talks have not produced any results. Death toll estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000, and experts predict that as many as one million civilians could die in Darfur from hunger and disease in the coming months. “The media just has not been paying attention to it,” said Stauring, who works as a family consultant for abused children at Girls and Boys Town in Long Beach. “The general public pretty much doesn’t know anything about Darfur.” He emphasized the urgency to act now to create solutions to the crisis, citing expert Samantha Power’s comparison of what’s happening in Darfur to “Rwanda in slow motion.” Power is a professor at Harvard University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” “It’s a really small group in power,” Stauring explained to the Student Task Force. “They claim they’re fighting a rebel movement inside Darfur, but as they’re ‘defending’ themselves, they’re killing people along the way.” The refugee camps in Chad and along the western border of Darfur that Stauring plans to visit are unlike any kind of “camps” we could imagine, with little food and water and a high risk of disease. “The conditions are extreme and people are surviving day to day,” he said. “Many [refugees] in Darfur had to walk 10 to 12 days to get to a camp and live in horrible conditions.” As another element to his journey, Stauring will deliver an important message to the refugee children in Darfur’a message of peace and hope in the form of 18 wooden tiles decorated with colorful, intimate collages by children in neighboring northern Uganda, where a civil war has been going on for almost two decades. The Ugandan children who created the “peace tiles” are called “night commuters” because they live in rural areas and walk miles each night to sleep in the bigger, safer town of Gulu, to escape abduction by rebel groups. In a workshop in Gulu organized by Christina Jordan, founder of Life in Africa Foundation, the night commuters used paint, stickers and various artifacts (photos, scraps of cloth or paper, broken toys) to express their personal experiences and inspire the children in Darfur. “Jordan really believes in the power of art,” said Stauring, who passed around some of tiles for the Pali students and teachers to see. On the back of each tile was a photograph of the artist displaying his or her creation, and Stauring plans to photograph the children of Darfur who receive the tiles so that the Ugandan artists can see who received their gifts. One tile featured a picture of a dove, a series of gold stars and the words “thank you” cut and pasted on it. Others were adorned with sequins, a leaf, small stones, and messages such as “Dream Big” and “Darfur Freedom Summer Vigil.” Stauring and PaliHi art teacher Angelica Pereyra, who is also the lead advisor to the Student Task Force, discussed the power of art with the students in Pereyra’s sixth period art class following the lunch meeting. Stauring said that the art created by the Ugandan children for their Darfur neighbors is “not just having an impact on individual kids, but on a lot of people, like me, who’ve been able to see this and be affected by these messages. “I wonder what they’re feeling right now,” Stauring said, referring to refugees in Darfur. “They’re probably thinking ‘somebody’s going to come save us’ and, still, no one’s come.” When the students inquired about solutions to the Darfur crisis, Stauring told them that the first priority is the protection of civilians, which involves disarming the Sudanese government and Janjaweed. “There’s nothing for [the refugees] to go back to,” he said. “They’re going to need help for decades. We have to do all in our power to make their stay in the camps as short as possible and get them back to a safe situation in their homeland.” The Pali students pressed Stauring for answers as to why the United States government or the UN have not intervened to stop the genocide, especially after the “never again” pledge not to tolerate such atrocities, following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “Our leaders don’t believe that we [Americans] care,” he told them. “Why go and take a risk on something that people don’t care about? It’s not risky to do nothing; it’s a little riskier to do something.” In four days, Stauring will travel about 38 hours from Los Angeles to Chad where he will visit the refugee camps with an Arabic translator during the day, and edit and post footage for the Web site each night. He encouraged the students to comment on what they see and hear, and start a dialogue with the refugee children. Pereyra said, “You have to first be a believer that your own words are powerful.” To be a part of i-ACT, go to stopgenocidenow.org/iact/.