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No one would rank this 1994 play among the finest of Arthur Miller’s works but right now its discussion of what it means to be Jewish in a hostile world, and its creeping sense of dread, are meeting a moment. It’s set in Brooklyn in 1938 where Sylvia Gellburg loses the use of her legs after obsessively reading about Nazi assaults on Jews in Berlin on Kristallnacht.
Self-loathing and Freudian sexual unease haunt the story along with the thinly veiled antisemitism of gentile American society. It’s a peculiar, intense, talky brew with the yadda-yadda energy (and the gender attitudes) of a 1930s movie. Jordan Fein’s production leans stylistically into the play’s strangeness but features terrifically naturalistic performances, especially from Pearl Chanda as the off-centre Sylvia.
