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Synopsis. . . . . Cast and Crew Bios . . . . Meet the Playwright .......Feature Story . . . . .The Myth of the Wandering Jew
The stage is bare except for a chair, a large chalkboard and a screen for showing slides. The Librarian shuffles onto the stage with a battered suitcase. He has lived a mundane life in a Hoofdorp, Holland. He takes his job quite seriously and pays close attention to every minute detail. With no family and no friends, the library is the Librarian's life, and his date stamper, his only friend. Because he knows no different, the Librarian is fairly content with his dull life. But, one day at work, something happens that changes him forever. The Librarian starts off by beginning to tell the audience a story, which unfolds into the play. He first gives the audience some background regarding his job and duties at the library. His main duty is checking in books that come through the overnight slot, which is simply for returning books on time, not for returning overdue books. One day, while going through the books that came in the previous night, the Librarian comes across a book that was checked out in 1873. He is shocked at discovering a book that is 113 years overdue. Immediately, the Librarian becomes fascinated and obsessed with the book and its absurd lateness. The only record of the library patron is the initial A. in place of his name and a post office box in China. The Librarian finds it necessary to learn more about this library patron but discovers that he cannot do this from his current location. He, therefore, is left to follow his one clue - a dry cleaning receipt. Before he quite realizes what he is doing, the Librarian is at the dry cleaners in London. This is just the beginning of his travels. The quest that the Librarian surprisingly finds himself on carries him all over the world. At first, the Librarian finds himself out of his element. Prior to this search, he had never left Holland, his country of origin. Each place that he stops, he gathers more and more evidence about the mysterious library patron. He travels from London, to Germany where he begins to connect the library patron to the myth of the Wandering Jew. The myth describes a man who angered Jesus and is thus forced to wander the earth by himself until Judgment Day. The more the Librarian discovers about the library patron, the more similarities he finds between the patron and the Wandering Jew. The Librarian starts to think that they are the same man. Although no one believes the Librarian's theory, he continues to search for the mysterious library patron for he is certain that he does still exist. His search takes him all over the worlds and spans many years, gradually opening him to a new vision of life's meaning and purpose. top of page . . . . . Meet the Playwright .......Feature Story . . .. .The Myth of the Wandering Jew
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR In Atlanta, she was Artistic Associate at Actor’s Express from 1995 - 2000, where she was named “Best Director” by Atlanta Press for her production of A Doll’s House. Her production of Three Sisters won “Best Director” and “Best Production” 1996 from the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. She has also directed at Georgia Shakespeare Festival, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Mark Taper Forum, and was Resident Director for The Continuum in Los Angeles. Other directing forays include operas, festival performance events, and film. She is the recipient of TCG’s 2003 Alan Schneider Director Award, as well as fellowships from the Drama League of New York, and the California Community Foundation. A frequent visiting professor at UCLA and Cal State LA, she is also an instructor in arts-in-education programs nationwide. Nancy also designed the set for this production. ABOUT
THE ARTISTS Marcella Y.
Crowson* Efren Delgadillo Jr.
Jeff Cone Justin
Townsend
Jen Raynak Jacob Fenston Casting by Julia Flores
Casting top of page. . . . . Synopsis... ...Feature Story . . . . .The Myth of the Wandering Jew
PCS's Director of Literary and Education Programs, Mead Hunter, recently badgered the reclusive Glen Berger into talking about how he came to write Underneath the Lintel, a play that's been described as "a metaphysical detective story." MH: Whereas O Lovely Glowworm took over a decade to morph and meander and evolve into the form we saw last spring here at PCS, you've said that Underneath the Lintel came spilling out of you all at once, in a rush. What was it about this story that demanded that you give voice to it? GB: Well actually, all my plays begin with that same damn demand "to be given voice." The next step in my process is to say with great deluded confidence to that demand, "yes! I will give you voice! And this time, it'll all come out in a rush! I see it so clearly." Step Three is to bask in the anticipation of an easy writing assignment. Step Four is to figure out just how to turn the demand into something tangible, something that can be presented. How do we display the tale? With wall brackets? On a plinth? A clothes hanger? It's all trial and error, and it's almost invariably the very last pair of pants in the store that fits. By sheer luck alone, I hit upon a workable framework for Underneath the Lintel a little earlier in the process than usual. It was luck. Sheer luck. MH: I understand that the earliest performances of the play took place in a downstairs cabaret club and that its central character, the Librarian, was played by none other than Glen Berger. Was it hard later on to turn the role over to other performers? And did the play change as a result of their contributions? GB: I had originally written the piece for the Yale Summer Cabaret (my friend and colleague Wier Harman was the curator). I was writing all the way up to the deadline and knew that no actor other than the author would have enough time to memorize an hour and a quarter of material so quickly. So I wrote the first draft playing to my very limited performing strengths, and made certain choices such as making the Librarian a man wholly ill-suited for the task at hand and quite nervous about his upcoming presentation. I also made the decision, as actor, to completely ignore the writer's request that the Librarian have a Dutch accent, even though, as writer, I had anticipated the acto's difficulty with accents and decided Dutch was the best option, as many of the Dutch people I know have excellent English with just a little something untraceable added to it. I thought I could at least do that. I couldn't. So, when T. Ryder Smith (the first Librarian in the Off-Broadway production) came in to audition for the role, I was immediately staggered by the authenticity and seriousness he brought to the character. I could truly believe he was a librarian from Holland, and my perception of the play permanently changed in those first audition moments. I felt a renewed obligation to make sure this fellow was as fully realized a character as the piece could take. MH: No doubt you were present for some of those subsequent productions. When you're there in rehearsals, do you find that the actor tends to do an unconscious impression of... you? GB: No. They do, however, do conscious impressions of me behind my back. MH: Like many of your characters, the Librarian speaks with an offbeat syntax that is idiosyncratic; he seems quaint, not quite of our time. Did you have a model for his quirky speech patterns, or is he just fluent in Bergerish? GB: Idiolect is a great word -- defined as the individual's personal and unique way of using language. I wanted a "not-quite-of-our-time" quality to the Librarian's way of speaking if only because I wanted the Librarian to seem more and more like the object of his pursuit, a fairly "out-of-time" person himself. And, yes, there's one particular ancient recording of the music hall performer Dan Leno from 1904 that has him playing a Beefeater giving a tour of the Tower of London to a gaggle of old ladies, and unable to keep his tour on track because he's constantly distracted by "the refreshment room." Leno's cadences have left an indelible impression on me, affecting even some of the Goat's speech patterns in O Lovely Glowworm. So he's at least one influence. And "the unreliable tour guide" seemed an appropriate model for the Librarian character. I even appropriated the Beefeater's "Still. We'll Proceed," and made it the Librarian's phrase of choice -- not only as an utterance to get himself back on track, but, by the end of the play, as a more existential declaration, speaking of himself and all humanity. MH: It's amusing that the Librarian's tale begins with his outrage over a travel guide returned 113 years overdue, and then he goes on an international trek of his own, virtually creating his own travelogue. Is there personal significance, for you, in the various places the Librarian visits during his search? GB: The specific places? No. But when I first moved to NYC from Seattle, I worked as an assistant editor at Fodor's Travel Guides for a year. One of my jobs was sorting through the mail sent in by satisfied or annoyed users of the Guides -- annoyed because certain details of the books were out of date and they wasted precious vacation time heading to a restaurant that went out of business years ago. For some reason, the idea that every detail in those books would in time be out of date (either the location of a particular shop, or, due to continental drift, the location of the entire country), always moved me. In one of the Fodor's conference rooms was a shelf of Travel Guides going back some 60 years or so, and I began to wonder at all the places listed in those earlier guides that were no longer around. What would it be like to go on a trip with an absurdly out-of-date travel guide? It would be a trip of ghosts. It would be haunting and profound I don't doubt it. When opening those letters written to Fodor's, I'd sometimes pretend that I was about to open a letter written by an impossibly ancient and ticked-off user of the guides recommending various restaurants to include in the book that haven't existed for 200 years. I would pretend this because it simultaneously made me chuckle and gave me the shivers, and also because my job was often pretty boring. Either way, it was one of the germs for Lintel. MH: In the play, you take a European myth that was originally anti-Semitic and you recuperate it, in a way... you transmute it into something pro-human. But I bet this has left you open to criticism from both Jews and Christians alike. Have you had to answer for this, and how have you coped with it? GB: Yes, there have been letters from Jews calling me anti-Semitic and letters from Christians calling me a Jesus-hater, and it's also been noted in letters that I must be pro-Zionist, and still other letters calling me oddly evangelical for someone with a Jewish name like Berger, and I honestly loved, really loved and dug the fact that I received letters at all, because it gave me a chance to enter into dialogue with the audience, and that's why I write these things in the first place. I finally fashioned a rather lengthy standard response to the letters and it wound up becoming the prototype for the afterword to the published version of the play (available through Broadway Play Publishing). It's very lengthy, and perhaps PCS will print it in their study guide. The short answer is: "the play isn't about Christianity or Judaism but thanks for writing." The play was inspired in part by early klezmer recordings, and the desire to present the "jewish spirit" as I see it (and feel it) was one of the original impetuses for writing the play. The success of at least this dimension of the work was confirmed by the New York Jewish weekly, The Forward, whose reviewer enjoyed the Jewish spirit of the play, but only after seeing it a second time -- the first time having left the play in a huff, fuming over its "anti-Semitism." Apparently a different performer made all the difference for her. I suppose it's just Lintel''s cross to bear. MH: Now Portland has seen two Berger plays in one year. The Goat in Glowworm and the Librarian in Lintel both construct meaning out of the clues -- real or imagined -- that they find around them. Are you saying that this is what consciousness does -- imbue life with meaning? GB: Um, I suppose I am. I mean, what is meaning, at the end of the day? Meaning and Context are synonymous, really. The better our understanding of where and how we fit in, the more meaningful our lives become. In short, we find meaning in relationship. Our relationship to ourselves, our family, our community, nation, to art, to history, to earth with its 100 million other species, the universe, and All That is Beyond. It's the disconnected one who finds life meaningless. Both The Goat and the Librarian do the best they can to incorporate themselves into the larger picture. Perhaps the clues are imagined ones, but the clues are just the launching pad to send them to their very real epiphany, and when it comes, the clues and evidence are no longer needed. MH: Don't answer this if you don't want to, but... you've written that the title of Underneath the Lintel is a double-entendre -- a verbal pun of sorts. In one way it refers to the existential dilemma of the human condition. But what is the other sense? GB: So The First Sense, to be clear -- Our Librarian and the Librarian's Quarry each once made a choice and/or committed an irreversible act "underneath the lintel" -- a choice that would haunt the rest of their lives. We each have such moments in our lives where the choice to "do the right thing" is presented to us, though we often become aware of the magnitude of the choice only in hindsight. This is the first sense of the title, as it asks the question, "To what end, a Life, if it's punctuated with these maddeningly irreversible decisions?" For the Second Sense, I'll quote straight from Lintel''s Afterword -- I was paging through an encyclopedia of philosophy when I came across the word "sublime," which is defined as "the presence of transcendent vastness or greatness" While in one aspect, it is apprehended and grasped as a whole, it is felt as transcending our normal standards of measurement... it involves a certain baffling of our faculty with feeling of limitation akin to awe and veneration; as well as a stimulation of our abilities and elevation of the self in sympathy with its object. The word sublime comes from "sub"(under) plus "limen" (which, like "limit", is a word derived originally from... “"lintel."”) Though we rarely recognize the place, underneath the lintel is where we stand every day, every moment, of our life. Underneath the lintel there is nothing but a precipice, and before us —-- the yawning, staggering, bewildering cosmos. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here ... top of page. . . Cast and Crew Bios . . . . Meet the Playwright. .. . . Synopsis..... . .The Myth of the Wandering Jew. . . . . .
For the close of Portland Center Stage’s 2004/05 season, patrons were treated to a play unlike anything that had ever before graced the boards of the Winningstad Theatre. As the play began, with the audience still sitting expectantly in the dark, they heard a reedy, plaintive voice lamenting its lot: where am I? why am I here? why do I feel? what am I supposed to be doing? Imagine their surprise as the lights slowly rose to reveal the narrator of Glen Berger’s daffy, beguiling and touching play O Lovely Glowworm: a blind, mangy, worse-for-wear stuffed goat. Few plays in PCS’s history have inspired a more outspoken mixture of consternation and delight. Chris Coleman, as PCS’s artistic director, was deluged with letters and emails about the production. Some expressed outrage at the play’s loopy, meandering style (three separate plot lines are introduced in the play’s first ten minutes), while other patrons loved Glen Berger’s hilarious deconstruction of linear narrative. Fortunately, the grateful patrons far outnumbered the naysayers. The play was an artistic as well as critical success, earning Glen Berger a 2005 Drammy Award for Best New Play of the year. And now, following a brief intermission from production during which PCS produced its seventh Just Add Water/West Festival, you’ll notice we have bookended summer with Glen Berger plays. Launching the 2005/05 season is another of Berger’s effervescent, strikingly original plays: Underneath the Lintel. In terms of birth order, Lintel precedes Glowworm by several years, having seen its first audiences through a modest presentation in the basement of the Yale Cabaret. At that time, the hero of the one-man show, designated in the script only as “The Librarian,” was played by the author himself. “Knowing I was going to play the part,” says Glen, “the character needed to be as much like me as possible. Hence all his false starts of speech, his confusion, his tangents, his mucking about during his own lecture. It’s comic, yes, but it’s also the way a clerk might behave who has never before faced an audience.” Despite Glen’s modest assessment of his own acting talent, a healthy buzz about the play—as a dramatic singularity that was hilarious yet also sweetly touching—got around the theater community quickly. In 2001, two highly visible productions appeared: one at the famed Actors Gang in Los Angeles, the other at New York’s Soho Playhouse. The latter production, as directed by Randy White (who also directed the premiere of Glowworm for PCS), ran for 15 months at the popular off-Broadway venue. When it came time for Portland Center Stage to mount its own production, Chris Coleman did not hesitate to tap veteran director Nancy Keystone for the job. No stranger to challenging projects, Nancy is well known at PCS for her meticulous, razor-sharp approach to directing. She debuted here several years ago with her powerfully imagistic version of Antigone. The production struck a popular nerve with audiences, who were overwhelmed by the play’s visceral impact. However, if theatergoers assumed the style was Nancy’s normal modus operandi, they must have been surprised to see her work in subsequent seasons. The bawdy humor of Dirty Blonde, not to mention the harrowing banter of George and Martha in Albee’s naturalistic masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, showed Portland that Nancy’s directorial scope defied easy categorization. Indeed, Nancy has been a frequent visitor to Portland in recent years, returning her frequently to work on a multi-year, interdisciplinary project known informally as The Apollo Project. Supported by a generous grant from Theatre Communications Group, Nancy has used her PCS residency to develop this large-scale piece in collaboration with PCS and the local theater community. Part One of the project, subtitled Lebenstraum, premiered this year at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Nancy is currently honing and refining Part Two, which she calls Dark Side of the Moon, in preparation for its premiere in PCS’s first season in its new home in the Armory. Meanwhile, rehearsing Underneath the Lintel could hardly be more different from Apollo in terms of creative process. For Apollo, Nancy writes the script as she rehearses, constantly evolving it through her own research and through the input, the improvisations and the group work of her Los Angeles company, Critical Mass, and a team of actors she has assembled here in Portland. Contrariwise, with Glen Berger’s intimate, one-person play, Nancy must build the play together with her one lone actor, Time Winters. What are the challenges of this work? “One huge hurdle,” says Nancy, “is the theater itself. The Winningstad is a beautiful space, and the Librarian’s first look at his ‘auditorium’ conveys that it’s less than he hoped for.” In addition to serving as the play’s director, Nancy is also its set designer (in collaboration with Efren Delgadillo, Jr.), so the problem is no mere abstraction for her. “We thought of building a fake lecture hall on the stage of the Winny, but that seemed ridiculous—a step further away from the play’s earnest tone. So instead we’re going to rough the place up a bit—find ways to give you the sense of a drafty, dusty, underused hall that’s charging the Librarian too much for its rental.” Much of the stage will be bare, therefore, apart from the Librarian’s paraphernalia—his chalkboard, his slide projector, a makeshift screen. But as the play continues, this space will gradually be transformed by the accumulation of what the Librarian calls “eveydence”—clues he has found for his metaphysical detective story. Envisioning the resultant clutter, Nancy recalled the intriguing artworks of American collage and assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. “He was always constructing these intriguing boxes that he filled with bric-a-brac and all sort of interesting objects,” she notes. “It struck me that these miscellaneous-looking objects were exactly the sorts of things the Librarian might have salvaged, and now he’s showing them to the audience as evidence of his story.” Time Winters concurs with Nancy that Lintel has its special challenges. “Getting the tone just right is important,” he says. “My character is, well, really a character, but he believes his story with such an intensity that you believe him, too. The play’s subtitle is ‘An Impressive Display of Lovely Evidences,’ which is exactly how the Librarian sees the time he spends with his listeners. He’s offering them a gift.” Rich though the script is, Time acknowledges that preparing to play the febrile Librarian is a lonely business. “Originally I went into the theater because I like working with people, he says, smiling wryly. “It’s been different, working on a play as the only actor. The dressing room is….very quiet.” Yet there are pleasures in undertaking a tour de force performance. “It’s just you and the audience, for eighty minutes,” says Time. “No fourth wall. No sleight of hand. The Librarian looks at the audience, checks to see that they’re still with them, and he asks them questions. He looks and he expects to see answers in their faces.” “ I expect to see that.” top of page . . . . Cast and Crew Bios . . . . Meet the Playwright. .. . . Synopsis.
There are many variations of this ancient myth, all of which tell the same basic story. This is how the story goes: Jesus was on his way to the cross to be crucified when a man mocked him. The man told Jesus to walk faster. Jesus told the stranger to wait until he returned (referring to the Second Coming). Thus, the man was condemned to walk the earth until Judgment Day. The other common version describes the individual as a shoemaker. Jesus stopped in the shoemaker’s doorway to rest for a moment while he was on his way to be crucified. The shoemaker mocked Jesus for loitering and told him to go quicker. Jesus gave the above-mentioned punishment (to wander the earth for all eternity) to the shoemaker. While the origination of the myth of the Wandering Jew is unknown, punishment for violating the will of the god(s) in the form of eternal wandering has been a theory at least since the Classic Period in Greece. Empedocles, who lived approximately from 493 to 433 BCE, wrote of the fate waiting those who violate the dictates of Ananke, Goddess of Necessity: There is a law of stern Necessity, The legend of the Wandering Jew first appeared in the Common Era in a pamphlet of four leaves entitled “Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzählung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus” (“Brief Description and Tales of a Jew with the Name Ahasverus”). The pamphlet purports to have been printed at Leiden in 1602 by Christoff Crutzer, but no printer of that name has been discovered, and the real place and printer can not be ascertained. The legend spread quickly throughout Germany, no less than eight different editions appearing in 1602; altogether, forty appeared in Germany before the end of the eighteenth century. Eight editions in Dutch and Flemish are known; the story soon passed to France, the first French edition appearing in Bordeaux, 1609, and to England, where it appeared in the form of a parody in 1625 (Jacobs and Wolf, Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, p. 44, No. 221). The pamphlet was translated also into Danish and Swedish; and the expression “eternal Jew” is still current in Czech. According to L. Neubaur, the legend is founded on the words given in Matthew 16:28: Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom (King James Version) This is quoted in the earliest German pamphlet of 1602. Another legend arose in the Church that St. John would not die
before the second coming of Jesus. From John 21:20-23: Yet another version declares that it is the attendant Malchus, whose ear Saint Peter cut off in the garden of Gethsemane (John 18:10), who was condemned to wander until the second coming. His action is associated in some way with the scoffing of Jesus, and is so represented in a broadsheet which appeared in 1584. An actual predecessor of the Wandering Jew is recorded in the Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover in the year 1228. An Armenian archbishop, then visiting England, was asked by the monks of St Albans about the celebrated Joseph of Arimathea, who had spoken to Jesus, and was still alive. The archbishop answered that he had himself seen him in Armenia, and that his name was Cartaphilus; on passing Jesus carrying the cross he had said: “Go on quicker.” Jesus thereupon answered: “I go; but thou shalt wait till I come.” Matthew Paris included this passage from Roger of Wendover in his own history; and other Armenians appeared in 1252 at the Abbey of St. Albans, repeating the same story, which was regarded there as a great proof of the Christian religion (Matthew Paris, Chron. Majora, ed. Luard, London, 1880, v. 340-341). The same archbishop is said to have appeared at Tournai in 1243, telling the same story, which is given in the Chronicles of Phillip Mouskes, ii. 491, Brussels, 1839. Claimed Sightings
The legend has been the subject of poems by Schubart, Schreiber (1807), W. Müller, Lenau, Chamisso, Schlegel, Julius Mosen (an epic, 1838), and Koehler; of novels by Franzhorn (1818), Oeklers, and Schucking; and of tragedies by Klinemann (Ahasuerus, 1827) and Zedlitz (1844). Hans Christian Andersen made his Ahasuerus the Angel of Doubt, and was imitated by Heller in a poem on “The Wandering of Ahasuerus,” which he afterward developed into three cantos. Robert Hamerling, in his Ahasver in Rome (Vienna, 1866), identifies Nero with the Wandering Jew. Goethe had designed a poem on the subject, the plot of which he sketched in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit.” In
France, Edgar Quinet published his prose epic on the legend in
1833,
making the subject
the judgment of the world; and Eugène Sue wrote his Juif
Errant in 1844. From the latter work, in which the author
connects the story of Ahasuerus with that of Herodias, most people
derive their knowledge of the legend. Grenier’s
poem on the subject (1857) may have been inspired by Gustave Doré’s
designs published in the preceding year, perhaps the most striking of Doré’s
imaginative works. Among the many literary references to the Wandering Jew, we must
acknowledge: top of page. .. . . Cast and Crew Bios . . . . Meet the Playwright. .. . . Synopsis.. .. . . Feature For more information about Glen Berger and Underneath the Lintel, you can download a pdf of PCS’s study guide at www.pcs.org
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