blowing my own horn to the cows in the corn
Singer And ‘Sin’
F. Murray Abraham is part of a star-studded reading of “Sin,” based on I.B. Singer’s “The Unseen.”
by Ted Merwin
‘Sin,” wrote Andre Gide, “is whatever obscures the soul.” In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, “The Unseen,” a prosperous, middle-aged Jewish man named Nathan is tempted by Satan to leave his loving wife and run off with his lusty housekeeper. He ends up broke, living on an upper floor of a dilapidated guesthouse at the rear of his own former property, dependent on his ex-wife’s continued generosity and reduced to being a ghostly witness to the townspeople as they go back and forth to the synagogue for the High Holy Days. Now, just in time for Yom Kippur, comes Mark Altman’s theatrical adaptation of the story, entitled “Sin.”
Directed by Robert Kalfin, “Sin” will be presented this Sunday afternoon at the JCC in Manhattan
in a star-studded reading featuring F. Murray Abraham as Satan, Paul Hecht as the main character and Alvin Epstein as his wife’s second husband, Moshe Mecheles.
Time and again, in his many novels and stories, Singer created memorable male protagonists who gave themselves over to their passions — think of “Satan in Goray,” “The Magician of Lublin” and “Enemies, A Love Story.” But what struck Altman in particular about “The Unseen,” which he called “crushing and merciless,” was its exploration of the very idea of sin.
“I tried to question all of our concepts about sin,” Altman, who formerly worked with the Folksbiene and the New Worlds Theater Project, told The Jewish Week. “Our connection to God seems so tentative. But unless you have a real relationship with God, how can you sin against Him?” Altman pointed out that while “The Unseen” seems on the surface to refer to the protagonist, the title can also refer to God, who never appears or resists Satan in any way.
Abraham, who is not Jewish, is frequently drawn to playing Jewish characters. The Academy Award-winning actor appeared Off Broadway last year in Theater for a New Audience’s twin productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Jew of Malta.” But “Sin” brings him back to Singer; he starred in the Yiddish author’s “Teibele and Her Demon,” which ran briefly on Broadway in the late 1970s.
“Satan is the ever-present evil in each of us,” Abraham said in an e-mail message.
“And yet we do indeed make our own demons.” This is why, he recalled, he was “so carried away” by playing Shylock. “I never thought of him as a demon, but as a proud man of great dignity who was trampled upon.” Abraham noted that “the greatest contribution of the theater is the collective experience of shared torments that each of us thought were shameful and personal.”
“Sin” will be read on Sunday, Oct. 5 at 3 p.m. at the JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th Street. For tickets, $10, call the box office at (646) 505-5708.
