By Cynthia Citron

Jens plays Eva Kelly, a German-born woman now living in Boston with her Irish-Catholic husband George (played with a mixture of stubborn denial and bewildered confusion by Mitchell Ryan) and their daughter Helen, a sadly misdirected Mimi Kennedy.  As a family, there is a basic disconnect between them—and a basic disconnect in the play itself.  Somehow, like the family, the play just doesn’t hang together.

As Eva, in the throes of her disease, loses contact with the world around her, she begins to relive her childhood in Leipzig, where she was born a Jew.  K.C. Marsh, Shauna Bloom, and Ryan Eggold engagingly play her father, mother, and brother, killed during the Holocaust, but all newly alive in her disintegrating memory.  Eva herself escaped their fate by being sent to America, where she was brought up as a Roman Catholic.  Even in America she felt compelled to hide the fact that she was a Jew, and she and her husband made a “pact” that it would forever remain an unspoken secret between them.  This would have been understandable in Nazi Germany, but in present-day Boston, where there is a large, well-accepted Jewish community, there would be no disgrace or danger in acknowledging her Judaism and no reason to keep it such a deep, dark secret.

Nevertheless, the revelation that her mother is Jewish comes as an unpleasant shock to Helen, who reacts with inappropriate emotion.  As an ardent Catholic, she should be horrified, outraged, appalled at learning that she is a Jew.  (In Judaism, religious identity is passed on through the mother).  But Kennedy doesn’t display these emotions, even though she says that’s how she feels.  Instead, she appears a little shrill and only mildly annoyed, more at the fact that she has been lied to all her life rather than that she is now being deprived of the religious convictions that have sustained her as she grew up in this strangely inaccessible family.

Early on, Helen and her father exhibit little sympathy for the suffering Eva.  (Helen refers to her mother as “a human ‘Where’s Waldo?’” and George grouses, “This is not what I signed up for!”).  George, especially, is enraged by Eva’s revealing their “secret” and continues to remain in denial about her condition.  But Helen, in an uncharacteristic gesture, decides to learn about her mother’s erstwhile religion and to establish a close relationship with the woman who is fast disappearing into the distant past. 

To help her with this is an improbable friend:  Jesus, as portrayed by Paul Witten.  Jesus is here presented as comic relief, offering pithy comments in current-day vernacular about his own Jewishness (“The Old Testament is our family diary,” he says) and his having to leave her to “go wash someone’s feet”.  He also serves as her guide, explaining such rites as the Mourner’s Kaddish, and proclaiming uplifting axioms such as “Everyone wants to destroy them (the Jews), but no one can.”

As directed by Deborah LaVine, each member of the Boston family seems to be performing in a vacuum, solitary and distant.  The earlier family members in Leipzig also do not entirely adhere, but that may be just the traditional formality of the typical German family of that time.  In this context, Salome Jens alone seems to be giving it her all, chewing up the scenery in fine fashion as she sinks into her malady and her past.   It is she who does all the heavy lifting, bringing the tragedy of the Holocaust to a fine point and steering her daughter to a predictable ending.  It is she who makes the play worth going to see.

 Leipzig is co-sponsored by the West Coast Jewish Theatre and The Group at Strasberg.  It will continue at the Lee Strasberg Institute, 7936 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, through December 10th.