I was about two or three when I first realized that my mother was deaf.
It was when the doorbell rang and she didn't respond. I ran to her, yelling, "The door, the door!"
There were many other cries like that as I grew older: "The phone, the phone!" "The egg lady's outside, asking for you." "Aunt Mag called and wants to know when you want to meet tomorrow." And so on.
All through childhood I was my mother's ears, a responsibility that seemed quite natural and unremarkable. It was a fact of life, like having to go to school or sharing a small bedroom with my Uncle Louie.
The time was the mid-1930s, the place a 3 1/2 room apartment in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. My mother, Henriette, was in her early thirties then. She had been born with good hearing, as had her older sister, Marion. Both of them, however, were stricken with otosclerosis in their early twenties. The disease left them with almost no hearing in one ear, just a little in the other.
Of the two sisters, Marion had the better hearing. In those pre-hearing-aid days, they compensated for their hearing loss by lip reading their way through life. This was another thing I took for granted as a kid: that I should always face my mother directly and manipulate my mouth and face as emphatically as I could so that she could "read" my words. It was only much later that I came to realize that my mother had been bullied into lip reading by her sister.
Henriette, backed up by my Uncle Louie, had favored studying sign-language, if only because it was indeed a complete language, one which would have provided them with the tools to communicate fully-- not only with each other but the world at large. Aunt Mag shot this argument down, on the grounds that ASL, with its gestures and grimaces, was a dead giveaway that you were deaf -- a handicapped and inferior person, according to her.
This bitter conflict lies at the heart of my new play, Just a Song at Twilight, which opens in Hollywood at the Write Act Repertory Theater, on Jan. 14, 2010 for a seven-week world-premiere run.
The work is personal and autobiographical. I waited to write it until most of the key characters -- my mother and father, Uncle Louie, Aunt Mag and her husband Carl -- were safely dead. With them not around to take issue with -- or possibly feel hurt by -- the way I've portrayed them, I've had the freedom and license to write about them as honestly and fully as I can.
Since the basis of all drama is conflict, in addition to the speech-reading vs. ASL battle which opens the play, I added another family clash to the mix, one which occurred later, in the 1940s, when both sisters were given the opportunity to undergo a new and radical operation aimed at curing their illness.
The operation was the brainchild of Dr. Julius Lempert, who introduced the One Step Fenestration operation for otosclerosis. Previously, surgeons operated behind the patient's ear, an approach which left an ugly scar and did not insure that all the infected areas were reached and removed. Dr. Lempert invented an endaural technique (through the ear) to treat otosclerosis. I have fictionalized him here, making him a stern, imposing but not unsympathetic character called Dr. Julius Hempel. My mother, by nature a timid and fearful person (though brave in the way she coped with deafness), recoiled from the idea of going under the knife.
In this, she was backed by my father, Isidore. Born in a Russian shtetl, his character was shaped by the horrors he had endured as a young boy, watching family-members and fellow-Jews being beaten and even murdered by drunken, anti-Semitic mobs of peasants and Cossacks.
Fleeing at the age of thirteen to the USA, he was put on a train that took him -- unescorted, speaking only a few words of English -- all the way across the country to Butte, Montana, where a friend of his father's awaited him. This landsmann, who was the only Jew in Butte at the time -- fixed him up with a horse and buggy. Every day my father filled the buggy with jugs of whiskey and rode up into the hills ringing Butte, selling his wares to the men who worked in the copper mines there.
At the time, Butte was a Wild West town -- filled with bars and honkytonks, home to the largest red-light district in the country. Rough and tough as it was, it was still better than the Russian hellhole he had left behind him.
My father thrived in Butte; he not only learned to speak excellent English but came to take on many of the traits of the copper miners -- pride, toughness, class-consciousness.
From that time on, Isidore mistrusted authority, disliked the rich, the establishment. This included men like Dr. Hempel. "You just want to make a guinea pig out of my wife," he tells him in the play, bluntly and combatively. Despite such opposition, my Aunt Mag (Janne Hall) and her husband Carl (Darin Dahms) prevailed. The two operations were performed.
How did they come to hold such power over my mother and father (and to a lesser extent my Uncle Louie)? To answer that question requires some back story.
The Lewine sisters, Henriette and Marion, grew up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in a middleclass, assimilated German-Jewish family. Their mother Jennie was a remarkable woman, the family breadwinner (her husband, like many Orthodox Jewish men, spent most of his time in the synagogue, studying Torah and doing good works). Jennie, though, was a go-getter, a trailblazer. She not only owned a thriving millinery shop but was the first woman in New Brunswick to drive a car. She also opened the town's first movie house.
Slender, beautiful and vivacious, she possessed a lovely singing voice and was much in demand at parties and fraternal affairs. She tried to pass on her musical gifts to her daughters but was successful only with my mother (played by Lene Pedersen, a former Miss Norway who has become one of Los Angeles' finest young theater actors).
Henriette learned not only to sing but to appreciate all kinds of music. Above all, though, she loved to sing duets with Jennie -- especially the songs of the Irish lyric tenor, John McCormack. He was the most popular singer of the day, one whose astonishing range encompassed opera, lieder, folk and pop music. His pure, luminous tones could work magic with any kind of ditty, and I have commandeered one of them -- "Just A Song at Twilight" -- for the title of my play.
The song runs through the play like a refrain. It's John McCormack my mother is listening to (on the radio) when the story opens, only to experience shock and bewilderment when the otosclerosis strikes, and McCormack's voice fades into silence, leaving her with the realization that she will never fully experience the majesty and beauty of music again.
Music bonded my mother and Jennie in a special way. Henriette was definitely Jennie's favorite. My aunt resented this and it was out of sibling jealousy that she willed herself to become more successful and powerful than my mother. Marrying my Uncle Carl -- full name Carlton Sachs -- was part of her plan. Carl also came from good German-Jewish stock. Not only that, he was tall (six-foot-four) and handsome. So handsome that my father called him The Sheik (after Rudolph Valentino).
Carl was also clever and polished enough in business to become sales manager of a large American company whose owners were Gentile, not Jewish. Carl not only worked for Gentiles, but mixed with them, was at ease with them -- unlike my father, who couldn't help but see a Cossack in most Christians. (Isidore is played by the powerful Russian-American actor, Ilia Volok).
I've laid bare the play's essential warring elements. On one side are Carl and Mag: wealthy, social, upwardly mobile, true believers in the American Dream. On the other side, my parents: lower middleclass (Isidore was a customer peddler), unworldly, Leftist. Another big difference: Uncle Carl loved golf; my father hated sports of all kinds.
That brings me to the last piece in the dramaturgical chess game: the pawn known as myself. I go by the name of Ben in the play. I'm seventeen when the story unfolds, on the verge of being drafted by the army in 1944. Ben (Michael Hampton) has a girlfriend, Carol Kelbick (Julie Bersani) -- smart and beautiful of course; playwright's prerogative. I've also magnified my athletic abilities, not out of vanity, but to intensify the conflict between father and son. Ben is a good baseball player -- good enough to have been invited by the New York Giants to try out for one of its farm teams. It's a big chance for him, one he's waited for all his young life. If he does well at the tryout, he'll be able to play a year of minor-league ball before going in the army.
His athletic efforts have always been supported by his Uncle Louie (Sam Aarons), a pretty fair amateur ballplayer in his time (and a would-be songwriter). Louie (who brings comic relief to the play) lives vicariously through Ben; not so Isidore, who holds that baseball is nothing but utter foolishness, a complete waste of time.
Isidore wants Ben to give up the game and help him out in his business. His need has been made urgent by Uncle Louis' decision to quit working for him and volunteer for the army (at the age of 42!) This act of rebellion doesn't go down well with Isidore. Angrily, he begins to lash out at all those around him. He even curses God for having robbed his wife of her hearing.
Some plays have a complex, hard-driving story; not so Song, which is essentially a character-driven work. This poses a unique challenge to the actors. They must (with director John Di Fusco's help) find a way to make their characters compelling and sympathetic enough to hold an audience's interest over the course of the evening.
The characters of Henriette, Isidore, Marion and Carl are the heart and soul of the play. If it is to succeed, they must be believable as a unit, must work together with strength and fidelity, must touch the audience deeply, move it to tears and laughter.
There are only two invented characters on stage: Ira Casey, Henriette's oddball lip reading teacher (played by Bryan Kimmel; and Dr. Julius Hempel (Charles Anteby). Everyone else has been written from life, from memory. As writer, I've tried to help the actors as best I can. Though my play is a drama, it contains moments of levity and laughter. There are no villains. Although Mag and Carl dominate Henriette and Isidore, they don't do it out of hate or evil. They are simply misguided when it comes to the
lip reading vs. ASL issue. Like many people (even today), they believed it was better to hide and deny being deaf. Society's age-old misperceptions of deaf people are to blame for that, not my aunt and uncle.
The deeper theme of Just a Song at Twilight is the role of fate or luck in life. Why should my mother and her sister have been suddenly stricken with otosclerosis? And why should an operation meant to cure them work for one sister and not the other? How did these things happen? Why did they happen?
I don't have these answers. Some things that happen in life are unfathomable. My challenge has been to try and bring my mother and aunt to life again, write about them with all the love and compassion I can muster. My play is a tribute to those two courageous and remarkable women -- and to every other deaf person who has walked in their shoes.
