Word: yenta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hundreds of Boston-area college students have received this e-mail from a modern version of Yenta the matchmaker. It is sent by DateSite.com, an on-line dating service started by a group of Winthrop sophomores that promises to spark action in the usually languid Harvard dating scene...
...stealing Shlemiel's latkas is doing the same with the stage. Comfortable and at ease with the silliness with the lyrics, he sings with the glee of a Puck and the energy to match the Klezmer Band's clarinet. Also exceptional are the buffoon Gronam Ox and his wife Yenta Pesha (Marilyn Sokol). Shlemiel himself (Will LeBow) is shlemiely enough and improves in the second act when his role becomes more dynamic...
There are more mundane reasons First Wives is a hit. It has three stars playing to their strengths: Midler the canny yenta, Keaton mining lodes of pruney anguish, Hawn a glorious hoot encased in her collagenized lips and sprawling ego. And before the film gets haggard in Act III, it's pretty darn funny, thanks to director Hugh Wilson (who wove a camaraderie of losers in his TV show WKRP in Cincinnati), screenwriter Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias) and rewriter Paul Rudnick (The Addams Family...
...Beckett play may aspire to silence, yet its characters can't shut up. The women, reminiscent of Beckett's Dublin youth, chatter on about postnuclear sunlight (Happy Days) or adulterous affairs (Play)--what's Gaelic for yenta? The men ponder the efficacy of torture (Rough for Theatre II, What Where), the memory of a mother's last days (Krapp's Last Tape, Footfalls). Their dialogue often sounds like bumper stickers for the clinically depressed: "Can there be misery loftier than mine?" asks Hamm in Endgame. But it is also savagely, and savingly, comic. As Beckett knew, all hope is comic...
They mask and they are loud, never sentimental and wimpy. They command their characters and the stage with farcial abandon. Yenta Pesha (Sokol) throws giant plastic pickles at her husband, Gronam Ox (Levin), whenever be does something stupid. She wags her tongue, spits and gags attempting some of the more delicate words of the Yiddish language, and her flexible face will always tell you what she's (not) thinking even if her words do not. In other words, she knows how to put on a show; it has little to do with drama, at least the type proffered...