Religion Reaffirming Theater

Eason continuedfrom previous page I see the stars right through the back of your head. They talk to me as if you were not a closed contentment. I hear music where you are inside talking to tomorrow, a blinking of night and day where you remember. AU of the toys I gave you for every reason fall out of the closet where the door is a single bird passing beyond a flower. Here again is the ethos of the Renaissance, preserved, unassumingly presented: the sky in each of us, the world within each gesture, between intimates . Here, the speaker has found all possibility in another's eyes, which are so seemingly fluid that they melt into the blank canvas of the night world extant and waiting—the sky beyond the head. The pure, closed and self-sufficient beauty of the individual Everson describes is so sure and so contained, and yet there is the slimmest possibility that in the flicker of this person's eyes is a wide open gate into the garden of this person's soul. The closure is so seemingly succinct and, in its tiny way, universal: the whole world of their relationship (or would-be relationship, as the title, in the direction of the subject, suggests) is the whole world. All the stored and hidden gestures shared between the speaker and the subject are no less hidden than the flight of one bird—come to stand for all—behind one flower—come to stand for all. Such a simple argument, outlayed so simply and likewise beautifully: which of love's most secluded moments can be hidden from the world, when these coveted moments are as private as Nature, occurring. Thus, "Closet" is a plea for the subject to recall shared silent ecstasies—"the toys"—given quietly, in all the open. And thus Landis Everson has shared himself. . . . Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said "I am waiting / for a rebirth ofwonder/ and I am waiting for someone / to really discover America"—maybe that someone was likewise waiting, all along. Haines Eason has reviewed booksfor Pleiades and Cutbank. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Smartish Pace, Columbia Poetry Review, and Yale Review. He lives in San Francisco with his partner Doug Powell. Religion Reaffirming Theater Charles Marowitz Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America Stefan Kanfer Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 324 pages; cloth, $26.95; paper, $15.95 At the turn of the last century, Boris Thomashevsky was arguably the most popular actor in the Yiddish theatre; a haughty mien, a shock of perfectly groomed brushed-back hair, and, allegedly, the best looking requiring tights (frequently exhibited in classic productions requiring tights). His sister Emma, who acted with the ensemble at the Thalia Theatre, was an attractive adolescent who had won the hearts of many of the young men in Thomashevsky's company. Her illustrious brother knew that she was silently admired and assumed that, like all wellbrought up Jewish girls, she would one day find a proper fiancée, and perpetuate the Thomashevsky dynasty. As it turned out, Emma became enamored with Morris Finkel, a middle-aged Romanian émigré, who had been brought in as a director with the company. When Thomashevsky discovered the liaison, he was outraged and forcefully tried to sever the relationship . But Emma was young and flighty and not to be trusted, and so, at a packed performance at which 2,700 playgoers were present, he asked the audience to remain in their seats after the show ended as there was going to be a shvier: a ritual at which "lifechanging vows were to be taken in public before a minyan, a gathering of at least ten Jews." Once the play finished, the curtain rose again revealing Thomashevsky with his sister in tow. "Do you swear," he thundered in a voice accustomed to the bombast required of Yiddish drama, "that before this audience, and before God, do you swear that you will never go out with the man named Morris Finkel ?" Tremblingly, the girl repeated the invocation. "Or ever see him or have any dealings with him again as long as you live," Thomashevsky added. Emma solemnly...