by Jill Huber
NJJN Bureau Chief/Monmouth

March 31, 2009

At the heart of a new play having its Garden State premiere this month at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch are issues that have transcended the centuries: anti-Semitism, sexuality, gender roles, friendship, and the stress of war on the families of soldiers in the thick of battle.

The Housewives of Mannheim by Alan Brody will open in preview on Thursday, April 16, and run through May 17.

The play takes its name from a mock Johannes Vermeer painting that depicts four 17th-century women enveloped in the warm camaraderie of shared domestic tasks. But this is 1944; World War II grinds on, and Jewish housewives May, Alice, and Billie, portrayed, respectively, by New York actresses Alexandra Eitel, Wendy Peace, and Corey Tazmania, reside in an apartment building in a working-class section of Brooklyn.

May is the neighborhood beauty, while Alice is the local yenta and self-proclaimed moral compass of the community. Their husbands are overseas battling the Nazis. Billie is a “bohemian” and entrepreneur who sells linens from her apartment. She is trapped in a loveless marriage; ironically, her husband is the only one of the three still at home.

The three women are part of a tightly knit community in which everyone knows everyone — and everyone’s private business. They care for their children, maintain their homes, gossip, and shop at Waldbaum’s and Loehmann’s.

But the introduction of Natalie Mosco’s Sophie, a European concert pianist who has escaped the Holocaust, changes the dynamic among the trio of Brooklyn housewives. The sophisticated Sophie brings a worldview of life from which the Brooklyn women have been sheltered. They begin to wonder if there is a more challenging and rewarding life beyond their familiar environment.

‘Respect for humanity’

The playwright is Alan Brody, a Cambridge resident, novelist, and theater professor at MIT whose many plays have won numerous awards — including the Rosenthal Award in 1989 and the 1990 Eisner Award from the Streisand Center for Jewish Culture. Housewives was cited as best play of 1995 at the Harvest Festival of Plays and subsequently won the Reva Shiner Award at the Bloomington Playwrights Conference.

He says The Housewives of Mannheim is a “memory play.”

“I lived in a Brooklyn apartment house that was an extended community very much like the one in Housewives until I was 12,” Brody told NJ Jewish News. “We were a Conservative Jewish family” in an ethnically, though not necessarily observant, Jewish neighborhood, “which was very common in those assimilating days.”

The play also evoked childhood scenarios for SuzAnne Barabas, NJ Rep’s artistic director, who is directing the play.

“My mother in Brooklyn was the same as these women,” said Barabas, a resident of Long Branch. “This was the life they lived, built around family and shopping at local stores. Who they are drives this story. But this community doesn’t exist anymore — it’s moved to the suburbs.”

Brody said he always wanted to capture the essence of the woman who was the model for Billie, who, despite outward appearances, harbors a dark secret.

The real-life “Billie,” he said, “was my best friend’s mother and I adored her. She was also the funniest woman I ever met.”

Tazmania, a Brooklyn native and third-generation Jewish New Yorker, told NJJN that although she did not grow up in a religious household, she is able to identify with Brody’s play.

“My upbringing gives me a familiarity with Alan’s play, but honestly, it was the character of Billie that inspired me,” she said. “She is written with such a strong lyrical quality.”

Housewives, she said, is about tolerance and learning to show respect for the essential humanity in everyone, despite issues of identity and self-determination.

“I can’t think of a better time to tell this story,” Tazmania added.

“I think the women in the play represent aspects of the ideological shift in American Judaism during the second world war,” she continued. “The resurgence of feminism, the fight against anti-Semitism at home and abroad, and the chance meeting of a survivor from wartorn Europe are all catalysts in helping these women redefine what it is to be part of the American-Jewish community.”

But Brody would rather leave the play’s interpretation to the audience.

“I don’t like to prescribe those things, whatever the impulse and ideas were that propelled me,” the playwright said. “I’d rather the audiences take away their ideas from the structure, action, and characters. But I found the years from 1944 to the mid-’50s were the root of any number of things we’re experiencing now, such as the spike in prosperity post-World War II that made us believe the economy and self-interest were invincible.”

Reservation and ticket information is available from the NJ Rep at 732-229-3166, or on-line at www.njrep.org.

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