Lokshen -- Patrilineare

An Iceman Review

The Skirball Cultural Center has hosted the American premiere of Enrico Fink's Lokshen -- Patrilineare. This is a Jewish play but its human concerns are ones in which we all participate, Jew and Gentile alike. Indeed, the Iceman shares with his Hebrew brethren, the prepucial removal of an intimate piece of his epidermis. The Iceman's surgery was one of medicinal romance, not communal ritual; a slice of life, as it were -- not Levitical law. Fresh from the womb his genitalia appeared a tiny affair with little promise. At that early juncture he sensed that he might need all that heaven had provided and he was certain that he did not like the mad gleam in his doctor's eye. His objections were ignored. Snip, snip.  Slice, slice! The Iceman survived the mutilation but remains a goy to the gills. He attempts this review fortified with the remnants of a Lagavulin, a gift from a Jewish doctor who commiserates with his loss and his taste in scotch. Chop, chop. Chin, chin!

The notes for the drama note that the first word of the title, Lokshen refers to an Italian artist's exploration of culture, presumably Enrico Fink. The second word, Patrilineare refers to the Greek root, patr - father. Patrilineage is the line of one's progenitors. The protagonist is searching for the face of his fathers. During the course of an hour he will find hints and much that is inexplicable. His approach to meaning will include Yiddish folk songs, the lilting poignancy of a violin, and the haunting Hebrew of a Cantor's hymns.

The play is minimalist. Before the lights have dimmed, a stagehand brings two stools to the stage. He returns with a boom box. He spends some time trying to find a plug. Finally, as if by accident, he discovers the audience. The audience discovers that the play has begun. The explorations of the evening are deeply personal. The audience is made to feel an afterthought. The protagonist is going to tell a story. Since we happen to share his theatre he might as well tell it to us.

He presents a photo, which we can not see. He models a coat that he does not wear. He finds a tailor's receipt held once by a grandfather, now long since dead. With such fragments he assembles a story he can never truly tell and we can never truly fathom.

He believes his great-grandfather was born in a small Russian village that he guesses might be found "here," on a map held within his mind that records only major principalities. He imagines the timbre of his grandfather's voice. He attempts a melody the grandfather might have sung. He forces us to imagine an onslaught of Russian soldiers parting flesh from bone with drawn sabers gleaming in a noonday sun. He is disconsolate. Death is the province of the dead. Only by lying, as well, upon an ancient stone can we enter the consciousness of an Isaac awaiting a father's sacrificial sword.

For a portion of the play the playwright / protagonist is companioned by a lady in a black. This is the gifted soprano, Susana Montal. Here, she accompanies a number of his songs on the violin. Her hair is pulled back. A pair of strands falls from each side of her forehead, suggesting the flow of blood but also, lifelines with which the protagonist might return to the living. She is, at once, an opaque and a sexually charged image. Ms. Montal is as expert a mime as she is a consummate diva -- accomplished in silence and accomplished in song. Tonight she was called upon to play the stoic conscience of a race. It is a conscience that the protagonist will struggle to realize throughout the drama. Their interactions are as minimal as the two chairs that comprise the set - yet, the pairing of the violin with the protagonist's tenor is the dramatic center of the piece.

The lady in black seems to operate at what the director / playwright, Donald Freed, calls a "lower level of abstraction." Freed and Fink have pared away much of the musical scaffolding surrounding the play. A single musician is more dramatically a foil than the klezmer band that is usually employed. By accident and design this performance had a darker resonance than its European brothers.

The plaintive melodies issuing from the violin suggest a substratum of pain that the protagonist represses. At one point, Ms. Montal hovers over him as if her sexuality and violin were weapons threatening the sublimation he is powerless to discharge. If he is the suffering and death of millennia, then she is the Song of Solomon, that life will not gainsay.

The protagonist desires to tell the story of a past that he feels fated to share -- the fate of the chosen and the doomed. He reads a poem about a pogrom in Russia from early in the 20^th century. He understands that his grandfather immigrated to America at that same juncture. The poem describes the horrors of holocaust decades before the Holocaust. His songs suggest a suffering as old as Jewish memory and as young as his own. He will not speak of the fate of family members arrested in Mussolini's Italy. That story demands to be told only in the screams that were never heard, screams that the protagonist can never stifle.

Enrico Fink is a gifted vocalist and writer. His moving tenor easily fills an auditorium without the assistance of a microphone. The word Auschwitz, however, is only approached in the hollowness of a horrified whisper.

Lokshen has graced over a hundred performances in Italy and Europe. Tonight was its U.S. premiere. Audience and actors are indebted to the vision of Patricia Rae Freed who marshaled its tenuous promise into the finality of production. Fink, Montal and the Freeds have sculpted monumental theatre with the merest of means. They performed before a capacity crowd. The Iceman salutes them each with the leavings of his Lagavulin. He commendeths them all,

Mazeltov!