Word: dreyfusism
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...Dreyfus in Rehearsal is a flawed play on its way to New York, but it's probably the best piece of professional theater in Boston at the moment. Ruth Gordon and Sam Levene play members of a pre-war Polish theater troupe performing a play about Alfred Dreyfus, and aside from a lack of historical depth, the show works fairly well. Nightly at 7:30, matinees Thursday and Saturday...
...play-within-a-play structure of Dreyfus in Rehearsal is the basic for the show's dramatic tensions and ironies. It allows comedy to coexist with tragedy, fantasy with reality. As the players are rehearsing and kvetching about their parts, anti-Semitism begins to rear its head in their little village. Arnold the barber is the first to understand it. The director, for all his harping about the play's relevancy, is slow to understand the real threats to his own well-being...
...play closes on a sad note. The young Jews have fled. The director has become a socialist in Warsaw, and the frustrated, would-be Dreyfus has fled to Germany with his wife. Germany seems a safe place to be, safer than either Poland or England. The older Jews are left to act their plays alone. They put on an old Yiddish match-maker comedy that closes with a little song and dance routine about things getting better someday. The irony is tragic and painful, for we know what lies ahead for these people...
...MAIN PROBLEM with Dreyfus in Rehearsal is that the first two acts are not as tightly constructed as the final one. The basic ironies of the situation are apparent as soon as one knows that the Dreyfus play is being acted out by Jews in pre-war Poland. But this tension, latent throughout the play, develops no further until the final act. It is difficult to balance tragedy and comedy, and the play often lapses into a no-man's land somewhere in between. Kanin might do well to cut a scene or two. A scene with a visiting Zionist...
...Dreyfus in Rehearsal has promise. Its basic structure is sound, its message is poignant, and there are snatches of fine acting. Hopefully, with a little editing and some more Boston rehearsals the play will be ready for the performance that really counts--opening night in the Big Apple...