presents



A play by Mario Diament

With Sally Levin*, Barbara Sloan*, Ramón Gonzalez-Cuevas, Marta Velasco*, Margerie Lowe,* Jonathan Angress, Larry Jurrist and Jessica Peterson*.

* Members Actors Equity Association

FREE ADMISSION

A woman's casual search for an object lost in her attic turns into a journey into the memories of her past...

Re-reading Ruth

The Book of Ruth is - no doubt for and from me now - the finest contemporary play I have ever been privileged to stage. I know that these are major words, especially since three other plays of Mario's were entrusted to me by my playwright friend. Ruth remains my pet play.

If I dug deep into the memory bank that I, along with many others often fear to tread, I would probably find some connections between the death of close members of my family - all of them getting on in years, getting Alzheimer's and getting the hell out of here and off to places unknown and this play of my friend's and my affection for it.

Where do loved ones go when they go gentle into that night? That was a preoccupation of mine back in 2001 as I saw during the preceding decade and would see during the following one my wife's parents die in close succession, followed by my own mother, followed then by another two very close relatives of ours - my wife's and mine - all five within a period of five years. There were also friends we said goodbye to before, during, after.

Although it is a tired cliché, there is inevitable truth in the old saw that art imitates life and vice-versa. And there is nothing quite as sobering and bracing as the first up close and personal confrontation with one's own mortality the first time around. This play reminded me when I first read it and still reminds me now of all that.

I love language and it follows that I would love language-driven plays. If one opts for action, I would strongly encourage all concerned to hike over to the nearest multiplex and see what's playing. Theatre, ever since Aeschylus penned (did they "pen" back then?) his first dialogue and theater as we sort of know it was sort of born, we have been listening to dialogue: talk, talk, talk. Shakespeare talks non-stop. Moliere did and Chekhov did. So did Ibsen and O'Neill (oh did he talk!) and Pirandello. Come to think of it Tennessee Williams and David Mamet and (fill in the name of your playwright du jour) all talk non-stop. Why?

In speaking dialogue characters define themselves and the plot of a play. Imagine Oedipus as a sullen and moody King who does not question, prod and investigate non-stop, even if to his detriment. Imagine Hamlet with no soliloquies to guide him and us through the labyrinthine psyche of the melancholy Dane. Imagine Ruth - a sweet little old Jewish lady who goes in search of something in her attic without dialogue. She has to talk to us or we don't have a play. But she needs someone to talk to. Surely Diament does not set out to write a one-woman play about a woman in search of a play!

There are a couple of other things I'd like to share with the reader. One has to do with the play's Jewish "heart", the other about theatrical trickery, a craft at which our Argentine playwright is most adept.

First things first... The Book of Ruth is about loss, about going home and not being able to go home, about the ephemeral quality of memory. It is only obliquely about the Holocaust. Even to paraphrase Eli Wiesel can be tantamount to idiocy. But, if I may, Wiesel has stated that no work of art or literature can begin to encompass the enormity of the Holocaust.

Mario Diament, whose mother lost almost all of her family in Poland in 1943 and 1944, knows of Wiesel's word to the wise and stays clear of more than a brief reference - primarily present in a harrowing monologue of Ruth at forty (more about that when the play starts) and another in Sosha's second act speech (ditto.)

What is extraordinary here is that, by consciously though not self-consciously avoiding the chest-beating into which one could lapse, Diament's two-act play packs an even bigger "punch" precisely because of its sobriety over a subject hat defies sobriety itself. Mario's writing is journalistically precise, emotionally controlled, intellectually passionate, and never ever over the top. His writing is quintessentially both Argentine and Jewish. Not cynically Argentine or folksy Jewish, but elegantly Argentine and Jewish in that it is rooted in Jewish literary tradition: argumentative, inquisitive, rational to a fault.

On the lighter note of theatrical derring-do please note how Mario Diament's dramaturgy embodies a coloring technique favored by many Renaissance painters: the so-called sfumatura - literally meaning "to smoke out." Mario makes characters appear and disappear before our eyes the way our memory works. Now it's here, now it's gone. Pooff!

Let us quickly dispel any fears of smoke curtains or smoke alarms or smoking on stage. Diament calls for characters to vanish and to appear right before our eyes, like figures on a canvas by Rafael or Leonardo. This causes directors and designers enormous headaches but audiences love it, and I know our audience today will love The Book of Ruth. I love it more than you can possibly imagine.

Rafael de Acha