Books Food Visual Arts Culture
ARTS & LIVING
NOVEMBER 10, 2022
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Long Island Books
‘Everything Is Copy’ By Jim Lader et me tell you about the very creative and successful. They are different from you and me. They may struggle, at the beginning of their careers, to find their metier or their voice, but once success arrives, subsequent endeavors can fall into place more easily for them. That is because of the other successful, influential people who enter their sphere. At the same time, the creative and successful work incredibly hard, knowing that the next triumph is never guaranteed. Those are the overarching impressions one takes from Kristin Marguerite Doidge’s recent work, “Nora Ephron: A Biography,” which provides a highly readable portrait of Ephron, the prolific novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker whose death, in 2012, brought to an abrupt end a career that had shown no signs of slowing down. The baby girl born on May 19, 1941, in New York was blessed with a fair measure of good luck. She did not have to overcome great odds or adversity in order to grow up to be Nora Ephron. The eldest of four daughters whose parents were established playwrights and screenwriters, Nora was raised in Beverly Hills, where she graduated from high school before going on to Wellesley College. Her first job was in the Kennedy White House, on the staff of Pierre Salinger, the press secretary. Having always aspired to be a writer, she worked for five years as a reporter for The New York Post and for nearly two decades as an esteemed columnist and associate editor at Esquire. In what feels like short order and a logical progression, she came to write books, plays, and screenplays, which in turn led to her being a successful director and producer of movies. Her prolific output includes such highly acclaimed films as “Silkwood,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “You’ve Got Mail,” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” along with many other easily recognized titles. In addition, Ephron was almost disarmingly smart and clever (not the same thing), widely admired by legions of fans, and genuinely loved by a wide circle of notable friends. Who wouldn’t love someone who declares, “You can never have too much butter, that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it”?
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With her singular interpretations of the folk and Roma songs of her childhood in Romania, Sanda Weigl has performed worldwide, including at Joe’s Pub in New York and alongside Nina Hagen in Berlin. Next week, she’ll perform at The Church in Sag Harbor. Judy D’Mello
Communism, the Musical By Judy D’Mello was born in Romania in 1950. My bio is, of course, a little different,” Sanda Weigl said, her Eastern European accent undimmed after 30 years in America. “Let’s put it like this, because my father was German Jewish and my mother Romanian Jewish . . .” And so began Ms. Weigl’s extraordinary story of growing up in the midst of Communism and racist politics, persecution, antisemitism, of people desperately hiding something in order to survive, of Bertolt Brecht, Gypsies, labor camps, an East German rock band, and, finally, freedom — really, it’s the stuff of Hollywood biopics. But she found a different medium to tell her story: Singing Roma — Gypsy is largely considered a slur now — music that she heard on the streets of Romania as a child. Her show, “The Little Commie Girl: One Story, 15 Songs,” will be at The Church in Sag Harbor on Friday, Nov. 18, and Nov. 19 at 6 p.m. Two weeks ago, on a crisp, autumnal day, Ms. Weigl was seated in the quiet garden of The Church, having agreed to share her epically existential story. Soft-spoken, of diminutive stature — “I think I’m 4 feet 11 inches” — with chic, closely cropped hair, she announced: “But I cannot tell you too much about my story because that’s what I’m going to be performing in the show.” Okay then, how about just the highlights? Her father was a “very left-wing” psychiatrist and intellectual who emigrated from Germany to Romania in the 1930s right after Hitler came into power. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, a fascist government took over in Romania, instituting a policy of harsh, persecutory antisemitism. Her father was thrown in jail along with other Jews, Gypsies, and enemies of the
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Sel Rrose in Montauk looks like it’s been here forever and that it’s here to stay. Jane Bimson
East End Eats
Sel Rrose Is a Winner By Kurt Wenzel pening in 2019, nearly in the very teeth of Covid, Montauk’s Sel Rrose restaurant hasn’t had an easy beginning. However, with good food, a sophisticated cocktail and wine list, and three years already under its belt, it looks like a winner that’s here to stay. Located just off Montauk Highway, Sel Rrose somehow seems like it’s been here forever. The East End location is the restaurant’s second iteration, with the owner, Kristen Vincent’s, original version on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The decor is not easy to define, but lands somewhere between beachy Hamptons and nouveau French country. The barn-style dining room is framed in brass grid fixtures and sports a large mural by Candice Kaye Designs. In summer there is outdoor seating as well, but
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fascist state. He survived and after his release became a professor in Bucharest, Romania’s capital. Ms. Weigl’s mother was his student, and the pair married — “Back then it was not a problem; today, we can’t do that,” she said, laughing. Ms. Weigl was born two years after the Romanian Communist regime was formalized, and her father was persecuted once more — this time for being a psychiatrist, a profession considered too bourgeois. He lost his university job, and his wife wasn’t allowed to work either, so the family had to find ways to scrape together a living, Ms. Weigl said. “In all the Communist countries, the politics and the system was racist and antisemitic. So, this was something my parents really tried to protect me from, and they went so far that they didn’t even tell me that I’m Jewish,” she continued. “But of course, it came out.” She was about 10 when she found out about her Jewish heritage, and she was angry at the discovery because it made her different. “I didn’t want to be different than the other children. I kept asking myself, ‘What do I have that’s different? Why am I not like you?’ So that’s why I was angry. At first, I was in total denial. I said this myself: ‘My father is Jewish but my mother is not Jewish, because my mother is Romanian,’ “ she explained. She took to walking the streets alone, as a way to exercise and think. “But I was singing, singing, singing all the time,” she said. Near her family’s house was a police station where Gypsies were often held. “I learned all the songs because there were all the Gypsies around me on the streets. That’s how I learned their songs. On the street.” In 1963, age 13, she moved with her family to East Berlin, to join her father’s first cousin Helene Weigel,
Bertolt Brecht’s widow, who was then the director of the Berliner Ensemble. “I think we were the only case in the history of Communism to move from one Communist country to another — deliberately. And Romania was actually selling the Jews at the time. They were getting money from relatives abroad who wanted to reconnect with their families.” A rich relative in New York had offered to pay for Ms. Weigl’s family to be transported to the United States, but her father decided to move them instead to Berlin, then a restrictive society behind the Iron Curtain, the most famous frontier of the Cold War. By 17, her passion for Roma music had won her a gold medal at Dresden’s International Song Festival, but the next year, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, she joined a subversive student group to protest the occupation. She was arrested and jailed, but her sentence was eventually reduced to forced labor in a pharmaceutical factory. “I wanted to sing, of course, but I couldn’t perform in public, I couldn’t record or anything. But there were other musicians who were also in this situation.” She joined a rock band, which performed in underground venues for several years and even enjoyed a number-one hit. But in 1977, at the age of 27, she was declared an enemy of the state and expelled from the Eastern Bloc. Landing in West Berlin, she found work as a singer at the Schiller Theater, where she collaborated with the celebrated playwright and actor Klaus Pohl, whom she ended up marrying. The couple, who have two adult daughters, moved to New York in the 1990s, after stints in London and other European cities. They live part of the year in Sag Harbor. Continued on C4
Opinion
The Life of a Supreme By Kurt Wenzel
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ll Things Equal: The Life and Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” written by Rupert Holmes, runs now through Nov. 27 at Bay Street Theater. It is a bonanza for R.B.G. fans, playing as a summation of her extraordinary career. It is, above all else, a celebration. Others, looking for more nuanced theater, may find it wanting. It is less a play than an exercise in performance as autobiography, and, at times, less autobiography than hagiography. The play is set exclusively in Bader Ginsburg’s chambers at the Supreme Court. Though they are never seen, the justice is apparently speaking to a small group of young women, telling them her life story in hopes of inspiring them. And the story is indeed inspiring. Strikingly similar to last year’s single-woman play at Bay Street, “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” “All Things Equal” follows the trajectory of a pixie-sized but highly determined Jewish woman as she battles male prejudice and antisemitism, and who triumphs through sheer moxie and intelligence.
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Michelle Azar stars as Bader Ginsburg, and gives a very good performance, replicating her subject’s unique voice octave and quiet confidence. Speaking directly to the audience, the justice tells us that she was born in Brooklyn in 1933, a precocious and highly talented student. Her mother died before she graduated from high school, and Ruth did not deliver a valedictory speech in order to stay home and console her grieving father. It was a manifestation of moral character that would follow her her entire life. Her mother, the play tells us, squirreled away $4,000 for Ruth’s college fund — a considerable sum at the time. She attends law school at Harvard and Columbia, graduating first in her class. This success puts the world directly at her feet, of course. . . . Um, actually, no. Bader Ginsburg cannot seem to find a job. This is the late 1950s and the big law firms — almost any law firms — are still not hiring women. She works as a law clerk, and later as a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she is not paid the same as her male colleagues, because, she is told, “your husband has a very good job.” She moves on to the A.C.L.U., arguing six cases of female discrimination before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1975, winning five of them. It’s this section of Mr. Holmes’s play that becomes a bit monochromatic, as Bader Ginsburg begins a lengthy enumeration of her many legal victories. There are some helpful audio and visual aids that try to bring life to these cases — but as happens with law, they often hang on matters of legal minutia. After a while, the play becomes simply a laundry list of success, and there is a self-satisfied air both to the text and Ms. Azar’s performance of Bader Ginsburg, who eventually refers to herself as the GOAT (greatest of all time). This, to my understanding, runs counter to the justice’s notorious humility. Eventually we move on, watching on video as President Clinton appoints her to the Supreme Court, where she moves the needle on justice for women and other minorities, and becomes “notorious” for her fiercely argued decisions. But we knew all this anyway, didn’t we? Never in “All Things Equal” does the playwright try to show us a multidimensional person. A blemish or two would have colored the picture a bit. Was there no price for all this hard work and
Michelle Azar speaks to the audience directly as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “All Things Equal” at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. Courtesy of Bay Street Theater extraordinary achievement? Was she the perfect mother? Perfect wife? Friend? Any regrets, R.B.G.? And what of her refusal to retire? In “All Things Equal,” the justice reminds us how she endured a decade-long struggle with cancer at the end of her career. Many of us remember how frail and weak she would seem during public appearances, and how insistent the whispers that she retire became during President Obama’s second term. Instead she hung on, passing away during President
Trump’s administration. Her seat was quickly filled by Amy Coney Barrett, which paved the way for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Naturally the playwright completely lets Bader Ginsburg off the hook. “I swore to fight for justice till my last dying breath,” she states here as a defense, then weakly offers, “I thought Hillary would win.” A better play would have raised the question how Bader Ginsburg, who dedicated her life to women’s issues, could let Continued on C4