“A nickel for a song!” calls out Joe Peltner (Morgan Morse) as he strolls onto the stage with an accordion strapped to his chest. Soon he’s joined by a clarinetist (Jason Cohen) and a violinist (Lauren Jeanne Thomas). They don’t get a coin though, leading Joe to conclude, “Music they love, musicians not so much.”
The year is 1896 and Lower Manhattan is the home to a crowded immigrant community of Ashkenazi Jews who’ve left the Russian Empire. The neighborhood’s main drag provides the name of Sharyn Rothstein’s new play, Hester Street, receiving its world premiere production, directed by Oliver Butler, at Theater J. (Rothstein’s last local area world premiere was 2019’s legal drama, The Right to Be Forgotten, at Arena Stage.)
Joe’s insight into what makes people give up their nickels has led him to open his “dancing academy”—more a place for mingling than training. One of the minglers is Jake (Jake Horowitz), a tailor who has been in America for a few years yet considers himself a “Yankee” as well as a ladies’ man. Things change when Jake, functionally illiterate even in his mother tongue of Yiddish, has to ask his roommate and fellow tailor, the yeshiva-educated Bernstein (Michael Perrie Jr.) to read a letter for him: Jake’s father has died, and now Jake’s wife, Gitl (Sara Kapner), and son, Yosselé (Katie Angell), are leaving their home in the Russian shtetl of Povodye to join him in New York. Jake borrows money from Mamie (Eden Epstein), his girlfriend, who doesn’t know he’s married.
When Gitl and Yosselé arrive, hair is a point of contention: Yekl, as Gitl knew Jake back in Povodye, now shaves his beard; Jake doesn’t like that Gitl, like many married Jewish women of the Pale of Settlement (the region of the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to reside)—and unlike most New York Jews—keeps her natural hair hidden under a large wig. The contention between the couple grows when Jake cuts off Yosselé’s payot (the long sidelocks of hair worn by men and boys in some traditional communities) and gives his son a more Yankee name: Joey.
Gitl finds friendship with the landlady, Mrs. Kavarsky (Dani Stoller), and Bernstein (who still lives with Jake), both of whom have negotiated a new identity in the New World that preserves the Jewish traditions they care about.
Hester Street’s pedigree is fascinating. Rothstein adapted the play from the 1975 film of the same name written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, which was adapted from Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. It became one of the first novels about contemporary Jewish life by a Jewish author for an American audience. Nearly 80 years later, Silver’s film would be one of the first independent films by a woman filmmaker focused on the immigrant experience (it also earned Carol Kane an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Gitl). While Cahan was a native speaker in Yiddish, Yekl was written for English speakers. However, Silver, as a filmmaker, could’ve had her characters speak Yiddish while offering English subtitles, but didn’t implement them until Gitl becomes fluent in English. Theater J’s production replicates the effect of subtitling in scenes where Jake and Gitl speak Yiddish (Miriam Isaacs is the Yiddish consultant for the show), with the English projected by designer Patrick W. Lord onto curtains and hanging laundry in an elegant serif font.
If there is a single design element most likely to be spoken about it will be the way Wilson Chin mounts the apartment on a turntable, allowing it to be spun clockwise and counterclockwise to signify a scene change. This lets the characters and the audience fully explore the small apartment from different angles. It also achieves something akin to the movements of a film camera, allowing audiences to see the fascinating details of everyday life like Joey peering out the window onto Hester Street below.
Joel Waggoner’s songs, sung by Morse, function chiefly as interludes commenting less on the drama than on the world in which the story takes place. Perhaps the most poignant song is the satirical “How Long Have We Got?” It takes the upbeat form of a freylakh, but the lyrics are pure gallows humor: “How long have we got/ History tells us not a lot/ How long can we stay in the U.S.A./ Until they kick us out one day?” It’s not merely an ironic counterpoint to a story of immigrants making a new home, but a reminder that over the past several years the country has seen a steady increase in antisemitic hate crimes and a normalization of antisemitic rhetoric even prior to Oct. 7.
The music, does, however allow for some momentary flights from the naturalistic drama and into surrealism: Many of the questions from Ellis Island immigration officer (Cohen) are notes played on a trombone, a merchant of love potions (Thomas) gives her sales pitch by bowing her fiddle, and Cohen, this time as a rabbi, blows his introductory remarks through a clarinet.
The show features a strong cast. Kapner convincingly plays Gitl’s development from being lost in her new life to being a protagonist able to navigate between tradition and new desires. Horowitz still manages to play Jake with an ounce of humanity even when he is being cruel, selfish, and duplicitous, and Angell is energetic and charming as the young Joey. Stoller, however, steals every scene she’s in as Mrs. Kavarsky—a fast-talking and fast-moving force of comedy who knows everyone and has an opinion on everything.
The story’s climax and denouement will contain few surprises, but this production’s attention to acting and design, down to the smallest details and gestures, is engaging and engrossing.
Theater J presents the world premiere of the play Hester Street by Sharyn Rothstein, directed by Oliver Butler, with original music and lyrics by Joel Waggoner, based on the film by Joan Micklin Silver, which is based on the novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto by Abraham Cahan. It runs through April 28. edcjcc.org/theater-j/. $59.99–$90.99.