Well, yes. "Windows and Mirrors" is, in fact, a beautifully new, evocative show. It not only returns to the humor of Malamud and Paley in three brief stories spanning two generations of Jews in Manhattan, but also introduces the writer Maxim Biller in the longer tale "Finkelstein's Fingers," which explores a third generation of Jewishness and carries TJT into sardonic postmodern territory.
Biller writes a sharp-tongued column in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper and grew up under the sometimes misguided radical legacy of "'68ers," or Vietnam protesters. Hip Germans classify him as a "puppy" -- half punk, half hippie -- and he writes from the tortured perspective of a Jew in Germany born a generation after World War II. "Finkelstein's Fingers" is his strange neo-noir tale about a scribe like himself visiting Manhattan in the late '90s. In a coffee shop, under the shadow of the World Trade Center, the character meets a German lady struggling to finish an assignment for a creative-writing class under the eminent Finkelstein, a conventional Jewish author born in the United States. The woman, Anita, is full of dark ennui, lust, and caustic opinions. "Finkelstein is small potatoes in America," she mutters. "He only got his teaching position because of his race." But she can't complete her piece, and asks the young visitor to write it instead. She turns in his version, and the glib, patronizing criticism of the story tapped out by the professor's fingers reads like a review of Biller himself from old-guard liberals.
David Dower directs "Finkelstein" in a cold, film noir style, with sinister costumes by Annie Kunjappy and witty music assembled by Joshua Raoul Brody. Characters hunch over coffee and smoke furtive cigarettes; no one looks especially happy. The über-cool tone is satirical, but it also lets Biller navigate long reefs of postwar German politics without sentiment. He gives no quarter to Germans like Anita who lounge on criticisms of "the Jews" without facing their own past, any more than he romanticizes Jews like Finkelstein who find moral comfort in victimhood.
"Finkelstein's Fingers" does have the aftereffect of a great newspaper column rather than a great piece of fiction; a story focused exclusively on criticizing cultural attitudes is bound to ring a bit hollow. But all the actors -- Michael Smith as the young writer, Corey Fischer as Finkelstein, Naomi Newman as Anita -- find the right half-serious gravity to make Biller's bitter humor work, and in the process widen Traveling Jewish Theatre's repertoire of pieces about the Holocaust.
Grace Paley's "Conversations With My Father" is also fiction about writing fiction, but set a generation earlier than "Finkelstein." The narrator's dying father sits on a bed, breathing oxygen from a tank. He asks for an old-fashioned story in the style of Maupassant or Turgenev. Something simple. "Like, 'There was a woman,'" he says, "-- followed by plot." The Paley-esque narrator gives him "an unadorned and miserable tale" about a couple of modern New York teenagers who lose themselves in anti-Vietnam hippie culture and end up addicted to smack. Her father wants more detail, and they fill out the story together. Fischer plays the dying man with a pitch-perfect blend of cantankerousness and affection, while Newman (who can look like Grace Paley when she wants to) plays the writer with a hoarse and soulful voice.
The strongest piece of the evening is also the oldest -- Malamud's "Spring Rain." Set on the Upper West Side during the 1940s, it follows a Jewish man named George who finds reasons to disapprove of both his daughter and his wife. He's an aging, complaining, sentimental guy, until he goes on a walk in the rain with a promising young lawyer named Paul. It seems Paul is more interested in George's daughter than anyone knew, and George comes home full of an urge to tell. Because it's 1942, however, he also feels too inhibited for that sort of exuberance, and the story ends in a minor key. Karine Koret does excellent work as the shy daughter, Florence, and Fischer is terrific as usual as the put-upon George.
The Paley and Malamud stories are directed by JoAnne Winter, who throws in a funny but disposable curtain-raiser by Paley called "Wants," also set during Vietnam. Fischer, Newman, and Koret play it in a large, overwrought style, as if they're performing for a bigger room.
A "Word for Word collaboration" like "Windows and Mirrors" implies that all stories are played verbatim, with no edits or adaptation. To the uninitiated that may sound tedious, like a staged reading. It's not. Word for Word has honed this technique for more than 10 years, and the repeating, reflecting themes in "Windows and Mirrors" amount to new evidence of how much art can go into the act of putting good fiction onstage.
