New Jersey Jewish News
Life and Times Feature

A pretty girl, a beautiful play

by Deborah Schapiro
Special to NJ Jewish News

This play is not about the Holocaust itself, but about its aftermath. It is about reconciliation for a family that is in crisis.” So said Montclair resident Penny Potenz Winship in a recent discussion of A Shayna Maidel, the 1984 drama by Barbara Lebow that she is directing at the Nutley Little Theatre. The play will run for three weeks beginning March 31; the April 1 performance is a benefit for the sisterhood of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield.

Winship clearly loves A Shayna Maidel: “The title means ‘a pretty girl,’ which is appropriate because the play itself is so beautiful,” she said. “It is about being able to survive no matter what; it is also about the strong bond of family even after separation. I don’t like plays without hope or meaning; this one has both.”

Winship is drawn to Jewish-themed works: “About five years ago, I directed a play called Kindertransport, also at the Nutley Little Theatre. Kindertransport deals with a young girl transported in 1939 from Germany to the safety of the English countryside. As in Shayna, the main character assimilates to the point of losing her Jewishness, but then it comes back to her strongly.”

Winship felt strongly that A Shayna Maidel had to be imbued with a Jewish sensibility and authenticity — a bit of a challenge since she, a Jew herself, is directing a cast made up entirely of non-Jews.

“For some reason, there is not one Jewish person in the cast; in fact, not one Jewish person even auditioned for me,” she said. “So I took the cast to the West Orange home of two Holocaust survivors I met through a friend. We videotaped a session of the survivors trying to teach the cast proper pronunciation of the Yiddish and German words in the play. The cast loved it; they really gained a deeper understanding of the lines they were saying.”

Winship has been involved in theater for decades. From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, she owned the Penny Gate Company, an off-off-Broadway theater in New York. At Penny Gate, she produced some 30 plays. She also stage-managed a dinner theater on Staten Island in the 1960s. After moving to Montclair in the 1970s, she began working with community theaters as an avocation; her career, from which she is now retired, was in the field of medical education.

For the past 15 years or so, most of Winship’s directing has been at the Little Theatre. “I absolutely love this place. It is very small — only 48 seats — but wonderful things happen here. The people here allow me to do what I love to do — to direct plays with tremendous substance in them. I get to choose the plays I direct, which is an amazing gift.”

Winship concluded, “To me, theater is a community experience, one that teaches us about ourselves as well as the world.

“Doing A Shayna Maidel has been a wonderful experience. This play in particular has things to teach us; I don’t think anyone should ever forget what happened. Really, everyone should see it.”

WRITTEN BY award-winning playwright Barbara Lebow, A Shayna Maidel was produced off-Broadway in 1987-89, in addition to many regional productions.

The setting of the play is the Manhattan apartment of Rose Weiss; the time is 1946. Born in Poland, Rose, now in her 20s, had come to the United States at the age of four with her father, Mordechai. Rose’s mother and sister had remained in Europe; the plan had been for them to join Rose and her father, but the sister fell ill, the mother stayed to care for her daughter, and soon they were trapped by the Nazi juggernaut.

Their ordeal in the concentration camps, which only the sister survived, has brought a burden of guilt and conflicting feelings to the aging Mordechai as he awaits the arrival of his elder daughter, Lusia. With her halting English and Old World ways, Luisa is a striking contrast to the completely Americanized Rose, who is somewhat embarrassed by her refugee sister’s presence and fearful that it will threaten her own hard-won independence.

Distraught and fearful that she may never be reunited with her young husband, Luisa embraces a series of memories and fantasies that make real the joys and horrors of her life before the war. But when Mordechai gives Rose a letter from her mother — left many years earlier with a non-Jewish friend in Poland — family bonds are somehow restored. Old obstacles and grief give way to a renewed sense of hope and the conviction that a better future may yet arise from the bitter ashes of the tragic past.

“Shayna maidel” can be translated as “pretty girl” but is understood to mean a deeper beauty within the heart and mind, referring in the past to an image of the murdered mother, a beauty which is now Rose and Luisa’s inheritance.

A Shayna Maidel will open at the Nutley Little Theatre on Friday, March 31, and will run through April 2.

Tickets cost $12 and can be obtained by calling the NLT ticket line at 973-667-0374. Performances are at 8 p.m. on March 31 and April 1, 7, 8, 20, 21, and 22. There are 2 p.m. matinees on Sundays, April 2 and 9. The Saturday, April 1, performance is a benefit for the sisterhood of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield.

The cast includes Joseph Bukovec of Nutley, Carole Caton of North Caldwell, Julianne DiPietro-Renshaw of Maplewood, Noelle Rhodes of West Orange, Theresa Lyons of Nutley, and Brian Vigorito of Pompton Lakes. The crew includes Alex Oleksij of Nutley, stage manager; Dee Mingo-Clark of Bloomfield, assistant stage manager; Marion Slacked of Saddle Brook; and Josh and Bruna Merrigan of West Orange. Set design is by James Martino of Glen Ridge, and Elyse Halloran of Somerset is technical director.

The Nutley Little Theatre, which was founded in 1934, is housed in the NLT Barn at 47 Erie Place and may be reached by telephone at 973-667-0374.

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