This is the one about the Orthodox Jewish boy from Riverdale who meets the dynamic artsy Italian girl-next-door from Jersey and brings her a sweet potato knish, with spicy mustard, in the hopes that she will lay down, roll over, and—when his faith begins to waver—actually go so far as to light his candles. Literally.
Whether this is an actual Orthodox male fantasy we don’t know, and don’t care to. Cary Gitter, though, has wrangled it into The Sabbath Girl, a production from Penguin Rep (of Stony Point, Rockland County), now ensconced at 59E59. Penguin artistic director Joe Brancato directs.
The Sabbath girl of the title is not Jewish, mind you; Angie (Lauren Annunziata) is what they used to call (or still call?) the Shabbos goy, being someone who comes in on the day of rest when the Orthodox—like Seth (Jeremy Rishe)—aren’t permitted to lift a finger and turn on the air conditioner. The playbill tells us that both Colin Powell and Elvis Presley, in their far-flung youth, served as Sabbath goys. I suppose this is the first time and the first place where anyone ever managed to cram Colin Powell and Elvis Presley into the same sentence. So that, at least, is a notable accomplishment.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
Angie has a fairy godmother, or grandmother, as matchmaker. Nonna (Angelina Fiordellisi) floats through the play dancing to “I Can’t Get Started”; it seems she met grandpa Nonno one enchanted evening at Roseland and went home—as they say in A Chorus Line—with her shoes on her hand. Nonna encourages Angie to expand her horizons, as it were, past the typical art-world jerks she is used to, such as a visionary fraud of a painter with rose-colored sunglasses named Blake (Ty Molbak).
Wait! Haven’t we seen this all before? The culturally aspiring liberated gal and the no-frills old world religious guy from the Lower East Side who despite everything are meant for each other? Not a knish man, no; he was a pickle man, from down by Orchard Street. Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey was a hit back in 1988, likely before Mr. Gitter was even born. But the dramatic skeleton and the flavor are more than similar. The Sabbath Girl also offers a distant whiff of Abie’s Irish Rose, although that is surely coincidental.
The play is cobbled together in sitcom style, with quick scenes and quite a few sitcom suitable yuks along the way. “For us it’s 5779. That’s almost six thousand years of tradition, from Moses to Joe Lieberman.” Audience guffaws.
Gitter and The Sabbath Girl are both fortunate in their choice of Sabbath girl. Annunziata keeps us engaged and entertained throughout, with charm and natural warmth enough to carry a far weaker play. Rishe, in his Orthodox man garb, does well enough given the strictures of the role. Sometimes you expect him to step out and proclaim—as they do in Fiddler on the Roof—something along the line of, Even a poor knish man is entitled to happiness.
Fiordellisi and Molbak handily play the abundant clichés they are handed, she with her dancing and he with his sunglasses. Molbak has a very good scene late in the play, though, when he drops his shades. Lauren Singerman plays the hero’s way-too-judgmental sister, who is written to be so self-righteously bigoted against the world outside that she draws gasps and hisses like a black-cloaked villain.
East is East and West is West and all that, and never the twain shall meet. Except it does here, at which point Seth goes so far as to remove his little hat before kissing. Community ties sunder the lovers apart, but they get back together with the help of knishes and bagels.
Ultimately, though, we suppose the relationship’ll never quite work. Neither, alas, does the play.
The Sabbath Girl opened February 16, 2020, at 59E59 and runs through March 8. Tickets and information: 59E59.org
