Can a 30-year-old single Italian-American art curator and a 32-year-old divorced Orthodox Jewish knish maker find love in the urban oasis that is New York City? If you’ve ever seen a Nora Ephron movie, you know the answer.
Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl, now at off-Broadway’s 59E59, might be predictable, but it’s still satisfying—think of it as comfort-food romantic comedy. (Incidentally, comforting foods appear all throughout the show: knishes, peppers and eggs, Ritz crackers, Corn Flakes.)
The aforementioned odd couple meet cute when Seth (Jeremy Rishe) needs assistance turning on his air conditioner on the Sabbath. (As an Orthodox Jew, he can’t operate the A/C himself, but he can drop hints to a gentile in hopes that he/she will offer to help.) When he knocks on the door of his neighbor, Mr. Lee, he finds instead Angie (Lauren Annunziata) drinking wine and flipping through portfolios. Yes, she actually opened the door to a complete stranger. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do, but the entire plot does hinge on it, so we’ll let it slide.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★ review here.]
Of course, there are obstacles: Seth’s sister, Rachel (Lauren Singerman), his partner in the knish biz, wants to set him up with a nice Jewish girl. “You’ve still got marketable assets,” says Rachel. “You’ve got a good knish business and, and an adorably flustered charm.” That’s…sweet? Angie is distracted by Blake (Ty Molbak), a pretentious portraitist from Iowa with a girlfriend named Indiana who he met in St-Tropez. Initially she’s trying to snag Blake’s show for her gallery—he is the “Hot Young Thing” (and yes, he actually says that)—and her pitch is perfect: She tells him his work “magically” combines “the old and the new. The classical and the modern.” She compares him to Rembrandt. “You peer into people’s souls—into the anxiety of what it means to be alive in the 21st century. I mean, I look at your paintings and I feel like you’ve seen into my soul.” Once he offers to paint her, things between the pair progress beyond the professional—though it turns out he’s far less insightful and provocative than his artwork.
Just as Seth has Rachel to confide in, Angie has her nonna Sophia (Angelina Fiordellisi), who sways around Angie’s Upper West Side one-bedroom—that Chelsea gallery must be really successful—dropping clichés such as “We all need someone to dance through life with.” Not surprisingly, grandma is rooting for “the knish man,” who at one point she calls “the pickle man” (a sweet nod to Crossing Delancey). But Rachel is dead-set against Angie. When Seth tells her essentially to lighten up, “it’s 2020,” she retorts with: “Not for us it’s not! For us it’s 5780! That’s almost six thousand years of tradition, from Moses to Joe Lieberman!”
Surely it’s no accident that The Sabbath Girl opened on Valentine’s Day weekend. What better time for a lighthearted 90-minute rom-com? Though the play does raise a very important New York City question: Where is the best knish in the city? Discuss.
The Sabbath Girl opened Feb. 16, 2020, and runs through March 8 at 59E59. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
