Robert D. Lohbauer (l) and Jonathan Epstein in “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music.”

Review by Gail M. Burns and Larry Murray

Gail Burns: I didn’t know quite what to expect from “The Jewish Jester: A Fable With Music,” but with Jonathan Epstein in the leading role, how can you go wrong…

Larry Murray: He may be the lowly servant of the king in this play, but he’s also its star. Between Epstein and Robert Lohbauer, his co-star, it’s a pretty dynamic duo on stage, making a great evening entertainment out of a bit of a mushy play. Its advance publicity pointed out that it is a combination of Elizabethan English and Yiddish, but that is only the tip of the Word Play iceberg. It’s also puns, physical comedy and role reversals.

Gail: I was confused as the dialogue is sometimes Elizabethan, sometimes modern, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. I wanted to get my hands on a script to clarify playwright Daniel Klein’s rhyme and reason, but that is one of those perks the press can access that the average ticket-buyer can’t. No one should have waste time in the theater trying to figure out what the playwright is up to structurally.

Larry: As to the play itself, it’s like a sweet tsholnt, a Jewish stew that has been simmering for a long time. Some meshuggener (slightly crazy guy) named Daniel Klein put this concoction together. He’s the guy who wrote (with Thomas Cathcart) “Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar.” It takes a creative imagination to come up with a nudnik Jewish Jester and condemned King sharing the same jail cell, yet the whole megillah comes together at the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge.

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Jayne Atkinson and Jack Gilpin as Edith and Woodrow Wilson. (photo: Christy Wright)

by Gail Burns and Larry Murray. For the Berkshire-Capital region’s most comprehensive listing of theatre offerings visit GailSez.org.

Larry Murray: Finally, a totally satisfying play about marriage and politics. And it had no compromises. Edith is a new play by Kelly Masterson, and it gets a first class production under the steady hand of director Michael Sexton. Its cast of eight is uniformly wonderful, but it is Jayne Atkinson who rules the stage in the title role of Edith, the second wife of Woodrow Wilson.

Gail Burns: Avid Berkshire theatre-goers may remember this play from the Berkshire Playwright’s Lab reading last summer at the Mahaiwe which also featured Atkinson and Jack Gilpin who returns to play President Wilson.

Larry: Atkinson’s Edith was, as the few books about her life tell us, flamboyant, fashionable and confident of her political and management abilities. Yet she was an elegant and controlled “First Lady,” a title she abhorred, preferring to be called Mrs. Woodrow Wilson during the war years.

Gail: Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) was our 28th President serving two terms in office from 1913 to 1921. His first wife, Ellen, died in 1914. Nine months later his personal physician Cary Grayson (played by Stephen Skybell) introduced him to the widow Edith Bolling Galt (1872-1961) and they were married later that year, a mere 16 months after his first wife passed away.

Needless to say, this didn’t sit too well with Wilson’s three 20-something daughters. The younger two were already married and raising small children, but Margaret (Samantha Soule), the eldest, who remained single and childless all her life, lived at the White House, and had acted a First Lady following her mother’s death, was especially distressed by the acquisition of an opiniated stepmother.

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Russell Posner as Nick, CJ Wilson as Uncle Murray and Rachel Bay Jones as the Social Worker/Psychologist who becomes part of the family. (photo by Chris Reis)

Larry Murray: The Fitzpatrick Main Stage in Stockbridge seems to be the preferred venue for comedies at the Berkshire Theatre Group, and with A Thousand Clowns they made that cranky old stage do a few new tricks, like a revolving set, changing from the New York apartment of Murray Burns (CJ Wilson) to the office of his brother, Arnold Burns (Andrew Polk). Last year we saw Sylvia on the same stage, with Rachel Bay Jones playing the dog in A.R. Gurney’s comedy. Here she plays Sandra Markowitz, the ditsy psychologist checking up on Murray, a comedy writer who has chosen to be unemployed rather than continue writing soul-sucking crap for the Chuckles the Chipmunk children’s TV show, and his young nephew Nick, played by Russell Posner.

What did you think of the cast, were they all reading from the same page, and did they mesh? I felt that they were all pretty individualistic, not completely blending together as a whole. And I think that might be just what the playwright Herb Gardner was trying to demonstrate, that you can be different and still get along.

Gail Burns: This is a play about individuals and individuality, so that didn’t bother me. I did wish that Wilson, Polk, and Posner, playing two brothers and their sister’s child, looked more plausibily like genetic relations.

But I thought it was not just the stage that was old here. I found A Thousand Clowns dated in both style and form. The fairly elderly audience we attended with got the laughs, but I think it would be inscrutably dull to a young crowd.

Larry: A Thousand Clowns ran on Broadway from April 1962 to April 1963. We were just leaving the beatnik era but were still a long way to the hippie days that were coming. Conformity was still in, and things like expressing non-mainstream thoughts were courting isolation, while divorce and one night stands were stuff of scandals and could even cost you your job. Of course all this went on, but in the dark, and whispers were the currency of gossip. Anyone born after the Eisenhower era (1953-1961) has no idea what a repressive, sexist, racist, homophobic nation we were when this play was on Broadway. The idea of an unemployed, free-thinking uncle raising his sister’s born-out-of wedlock-kid to think for himself was pretty scandalous. Keeping the times in which it was written in mind, this play was probably fairly revolutionary, and the way they introduced new ideas back then was to make people laugh first, the lesson followed.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.