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Di Komedyantn (The Sunshine Boys)
by Neil Simon
A rollicking comedy about a former vaudeville duo - who haven't spoken for a decade!
Presented in Yiddish with English supertitles.
Sam Stein and Aron Gonshor in 2012’s On Second Avenue (credit Andrée Lanthier)
The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre opens its 2012-13 season with the Yiddish staged reading of Di Komedyantn, Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, starring DWYT favourites Sam Stein and Aron Gonshor!
Directed by DWYT Honorary Artistic Director Bryna Wasserman, the play was masterfully translated by playwright Miriam Hoffman, a Columbia University Yiddish professor. By sprinkling the dialogue with idiomatic and syntactic Yiddish, Hoffman provides the two estranged vaudevillians, Fayvish and Anshl - who had not spoken for more than a decade - with such lush verbiage that the audience will be in mameloshn* heaven.
Anshl’s nephew, Hershl (Ben Gonshor), an actor’s agent, fights an uphill battle to reunite the comic couple in a comeback of their famed “doctor” skit, which they hadn’t performed for over 40 years. As Stein and Gonshor thrust and parry, scabs of past hurts are laid open, and cardiac overreaction to such vaudeville shtick as the “finger stab,” and the “Enter!” (“Kum Arayn!”) discrepancy threaten the skit’s revival. It’s a hoot!
Don’t miss the opportunity to see one of Neil Simon’s most beloved plays (the 1975 film version starred Walter Matthau and George Burns), brought to life by two stalwarts of the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre.
*Mother tongue, meaning the Yiddish language
The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre (DWYT) continues to celebrate and preserve Yiddish theatre, language and culture through a year-long program of staged readings, a mini film screening, concerts of treasured music, and sing-a-longs that are sure to please lovers of Yiddish of all ages.
