Imagination drives stalwart of theater
Newman still acting at 90 in production of ‘God of Vengeance’
Naomi Newman lives at the end of a short, steep lane in Mill Valley, surrounded by redwoods, the quiet punctuated only by jabbering bird calls or a distant car below.
“This is like a refuge,” the 90yearold says, considering her vista, “and a refuge can have a side of making you forget about the suffering of the rest of the world. That’s what still prods me to keep working.”
For the longtime Bay Area theater artist and cofounder of A Traveling Jewish Theatre, which closed in 2011, that sense of purpose hasn’t slackened during the pandemic.
The first Tuesday of every month, she performs stories and poems on Zoom with Israeli singersongwriter Lior Tsarfaty as part of a show called “Heart Songs.” She regularly performs with Canadian musician Jennifer Berezan on Monday Zoom shows. She works on her own solo pieces, especially “World on Fire,” which is about climate change.
Now, she’s in “God of Vengeance,” Sholem Asch’s 1906 play, written in Yiddish, that’s set in a brothel and includes a lesbian narrative. Its controversial 1923 production later became the subject of Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” whose own 2017 Broadway run won two Tony Awards.
Produced by the 12yearold Yiddish Theatre Ensemble, “God of Vengeance” runs online Saturday-Tuesday, March 2023. Translator Caraid O’Brien peppers the script with original Yiddish phrases, many of which are delivered by Newman’s character, Reb Eli, the matchmaker.
“Yiddish is very familiar to me,” Newman says. “My parents spoke a very literary Yiddish.”
Her father was an actor in Poland before meeting her mother in Detroit. The parents took Newman and her sister to Littman’s People’s Theater, a Yiddish theater, and her father recited Yiddish poetry and short stories at Jewish cultural events.
“They were, in a sense, secular Jews,” Newman says. “We never went to synagogue. But the language became kind of sacred.” She thinks of a Yiddish folk song for children: “Learn every letter carefully because someday, in exile, you will find a home in the alphabet.” (That song features in her own solo piece, “Snake Talk.”)
Director Bruce Bierman says Newman occasionally helped the other actors with their pronunciation. “She brought inflection that you can’t buy,” he says. “It has to be in your background somewhere.”
Newman’s family figures into her “God of Vengeance” performance in a still more tangible way: The hat she wears as part of her costume belonged to her father.
She marvels that Asch wrote the play when he was just 22, ticking off qualities in the script that show wisdom beyond his years: “his compassion, the way he wrote about the whores as human beings, his acceptance and seeing and writing about being a lesbian, and his willingness to uncover the Jewish community’s idealization of who we are.”
The end of Act 1 is an especially gorgeous scene, ripe with dramatic irony. From one room, a mother calls to her daughter, imagining the husband the girl will fetch: “a handsome khusn, with two black peos around his ears with a satin coat and a little velvet kasketl — like a rabbi would wear.” From the next room, the daughter eggs her mother on with leading questions, all while she’s in passionate embrace of one of the sex workers her parents employ.
At another point in the play, Newman’s character gets to deliver one of its great lines: “If God can forgive you, then we avadeh can forgive you.”
Her voice is gravelly, earthburrowing — the voice of a lifelong artist.
Her friends, collaborators and family, including her partner, the percussionist Barbara Borden, and two daughters, might expect nothing less. But she notices much more demeaning assumptions from the outside world.
“There’s so much ageism,” she says. “People think you’ve stopped thinking. I see it everywhere. I feel it. It’s challenging, because any ism is so dehumanizing, and sometimes I want to scream. Sometimes, my feelings, my ego gets hurt, because people don’t want to engage with you. They dismiss you.”
But there’s an upside: “Lots of times, I just use it in my work.”
Still, she finds herself missing that outside world — “the people in the market, the people on the street, the people in the restaurants: in other words, the world that is larger than my personal life. I miss that.” Without them, she says, “I think we get too selfabsorbed.”
Selfabsorption blocks curiosity and the imagination, qualities Newman prizes. “She asked more questions than anybody,” Bierman says of Newman in the rehearsal room. “She instantly becomes curious about everybody in the room.”
When The Chronicle interviewed Newman when Traveling Jewish Theatre cofounder Corey Fischer died last summer, she said that imagination was how Fischer connected to his Jewish heritage. Months later, when asked if the same is true for her, by way of an answer, she fetches from her TJT archives a poster that reads, “A new home for the imagination.”
“I have a big imagination and a Jewish soul, and they’re connected,” she says.