Yenta: Straight From the Mouth
Annie Korzen’s hit, Yenta Unplugged has covered a lot of ground, from Los Angeles to Copenhagen via New York and London and back, since its premiere at the West Coast Ensemble. Now she’s turned up with a sequel in Yenta: Straight From the Mouth. Korzen’s style would fit comfortably among good friends in one’s living room, so it’s apropos that it is performed on a living room set at the West Coast Ensemble’s new home around the corner from Paramount.
It is not often that one can partake of a comedic treatise on the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, but Korzen manages to take existential philosophy and make it the basis of humor … or at least, humorous free will. With Kierkegaard as her basis, she leads us through the twists and turns of her son’s journey toward his ethnic heritage. Her take on Jewish culture seems to have been skewed in part, by her marriage to Benni Korzen, who apparently wouldn’t know from a knish from a bagel. She must have been a helpless bystander as he negotiated himself closer and closer to his Jewish identity despite her resolutely secular child-rearing techniques.
As with any one-person show, Korzen draws on her tiniest experiences, resulting in such wonderful bon mots as “Loehman’s is a form of meditation,” or “Idleness is the only true good” (Did Kierkegaard really say that? I’ll have to look it up). Along the way, her storytelling is spell-binding, and her nods toward Yiddish culture with the rendition of the lullaby, “Raisins and Almonds” afford us a nostalgic return to childhood no matter what our ethnic background.
On the day that I caught the show, Korzen was still shaking out the details of the admittedly minimalist production. “Run that back, will you?” she cautioned after one botched sound cue, bringing our happy few into a complicity of creation that only endeared her. As comfortable as an old sweater, as witty as a dorm room all-nighter, and as heartwarming as one’s best family gab-fest, Annie Korzen’s latest show will renew your faith in human nature at a time when we need all the reassurance we can get.
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Theater: West Coast Ensemble at the El Centro Theatre, 800 N. El Centro, Hollywood.
Web Site: http://www.westcoastensemble.org/
Tickets: (323) 460-4443
Dates: through March 22, 2009 - Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM and Sunday at 7:00 PM