THEATRE
The Sisters Rosensweig by Wendy Wasserstein
By Melbourne Theatre Company
Reviewer: Kate Herbert around 15 June 1994.
This review published in The Melbourne Times after15b June 1994
“Very funny. Some great lines." This comment I heard from all quarters whilst eavesdropping during the interval of The Sisters Rosensweig.
US writer, Wendy Wasserstein, writes a great gag. " Gender is mainly spare parts," quips the waggish bisexual theatre director, and there are plenty more one-liners to come.
Wasserstein's script is no masterpiece and is too long, but it is light and gently amusing and, yet again, director Roger Hodgman has done some inspired casting.
Sarah, (Judy Farr) an expatriate American Jew living in London, invites her two sisters (Genevieve Picot, Jackie Weaver) to her birthday dinner. In the first act the three seem disconnected, dissimilar and discordant (to use a few "d" words) but, by the second half, their bond is palpable. The trio is based on Wasserstein and her own successful sisters.
Picot is vulnerable and brittle as youngest sister Pfeni, a journalistic wandering Jew who is in love with an errant gentile bisexual, Geoffrey, played energetically and with wicked humour, by Tony Sheldon. Weaver is wonderfully brazen as Gorgeous, the loud, gushy, overdressed middle sister who is completely shameless about her role as a radio psychologist with no qualifications. Only in America.
There are strong support performances from Rachel Griffiths as Sarah's daughter and Gerard Lepkowski as her boyfriend Tom, the Lithuanian Liverpool Jew.
Farr exudes a regal melancholy as Sarah. Her dislocation and self-inflicted exile are pivotal. She prefers a country "where feelings are openly repressed." The play seems to be about expatriatism but emerges as a story of the struggle of these three women to deal with separation: from each other, from their country, culture, family and their dead but ever-present mother. Eventually it is clear that the notion of Jewishness and identity is less important than their search for love and security.
Through pure snobbishness, Sarah resists the persistent advances of Mervyn, (Max Gillies) the furrier who came in from the cold London night. She prefers the snotty Nicholas Pym (Ron Challinor) to the effervescent and warm Merv. The play began slowly but paced up when the highly-charged Sheldon appeared, followed by an irrepressible Weaver.
The production has tempered even the most stridently New York-Jewish of the characters. This has somehow lessened its impact. The humour is New York Jewish and loses something without the associated throw away, self-deprecating style. Wasserstein satirises her own community. To paraphrase, "What? Another Jew who raises the holocaust 30 seconds into the conversation?"
By Kate Herbert
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