Celebrating the Life of Saul Elkin

He made history as he lived it

As Buffalo prepares to gather on Monday, August 4th at Shea's to remember and celebrate the life of Saul Elkin, much has been written about the many facets of his legacy, especially his contributions as a teacher and his founding of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, now celebrating its 50th season, and his co-founding of Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York.

In this context, many have emphasized the mentorship of Joe Papp, famed founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, who urged Saul to start a Shakespeare Festival of his own in Buffalo. In an article that I wrote for Spree Magazine, back in 2003, Saul reminded us of his equally important tutelage under the legendary Maurice Schwartz, founder of the Yiddish Art Theatre.

I want to share the piece again as a reflection on not only what he built, but the spirit that animated his work, a spirit that shaped Buffalo’s cultural life and so many of us who were lucky enough to know him.

I met Saul in 1981, when I was 22 years old and working as the assistant stage manager on a play he directed. It was the beginning of a friendship that enriched my life for more than four decades. Later, as a graduate student, I had the privilege of working with him on an independent study. Over the years, I grew close with his family and came to admire, even more deeply, Saul’s intellect, warmth, and quiet generosity as an artist, mentor, and friend.

Let’s revisit a moment with Saul from twenty-two years ago.

Buffalo's New Jewish Repertory Theatre

Spree Magazine, November 2003

By Anthony Chase

Saul Elkin thinks he might be becoming more sentimental as the years go by. His life has seen changes. About ten years ago, he lost his mother, and with her, his connection to his first language, Yiddish. In addition, this summer he directed his daughter, Rebecca, in the Shakespeare in Delaware Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream before sending her off to Syracuse University to study acting. The comely ingénue passed on the University at Buffalo, not wanting to be in the shadow of her legendary father, the founder of Buffalo’s twenty-eight-year-old summer Shakespeare festival and longtime chair of UB’s department of Theatre and Dance. With only one child left at home, and while beginning to look at the next stage of his career, Saul found himself thinking of its beginnings.

This sentimental mood certainly influenced his decision to found a Jewish Repertory Theatre in Buffalo, in conjunction with the Jewish Community Center. The new theater company will debut in December with a stage adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel, The Chosen at the Irish Classical Theatre Company’s Andrews Theatre. This will be followed by a spring production of Jeff Baron’s play, Visiting Mr. Green, across the street at Buffalo United Artists’ Main Street Cabaret. Elkin serves as the artistic director; David Bunis is the chair/producer; and Marcie Frankel is the managing director of the new company.When Elkin was seven years old, the great Maurice Schwartz, founder of the famed Yiddish Art Theatre in New York City, cast him in a leading role.

The child of Jewish immigrants, a Russian mother and a Romanian father, Elkin had grown up speaking Yiddish, his parents’ common language. From an early age, his father had sent him to study at a children’s theater school for Jewish children run by a Russian woman who was a friend of the family. Elkin suspects that his father sent him to the program as a kindness to the woman, who was struggling financially. Nonetheless, at this school, Elkin would learn a love of the theater and a respect for acting that would stay with him his whole life long. Meeting Maurice Schwartz sealed his fate.

Schwartz had founded the Yiddish Art Theatre in 1918 at the Irving Place Theatre in New York City. The company later moved to 2nd Avenue, the location remembered by Elkin. His company built its reputation on fine ensemble acting. Early success came with a repertoire of tales of idyllic village life— including Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye der milkhiger” (“Tevye the Milkman”), which would serve as the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. The play in which Saul Elkin first appeared was the story of a boy in a Russian village who finds a gold coin in the cemetery, fueling the local legend that Napoleon had buried a fortune in the town during his retreat. The dilemma of the play is whether to dig up hallowed ground for the sake of a fortune.

The Yiddish Art Theatre continued into the late 1930s making stars of such luminaries of the Yiddish stage as Bertha Gerstein, Ludwig Satz, and Muni Weisenfreund (who would make it big in the movies as Paul Muni). Schwartz also made a star of Celia Adler who came from a theater family that included her parents Jacob and Sara, and six of their seven children, including Luther, Charles, Jay, Julia, and the great Stella Adler.

Elkin has vivid memories of many of these theatrical greats.

“At first, Maurice Schwartz scared the hell out of me!” he confides. “He was an imposing figure with European elegance. He coached me in the role, as he coached all the children. He acted it out exactly as he wanted it done, including the vocal inflections. You had to do it just the way he told you. Eventually, I became quite close to him. I would be dropped off at the theater after school and would stay until 9 o’clock at night, so he became a kind of surrogate father.

“I remember Celia Adler,” Elkin continues. “She is the only one of the Adlers I recall. And I remember Ludwig Satz,” he adds, evoking the name of the actor billed as “the man who makes you laugh with tears and cry with a smile,” the leading comic star of the company from 1918 until his death in 1944, celebrated for his characterizations and his gift for improvisation. “He was a wonderful clown,” recalls Elkin, “He made me laugh as a kid.”

During his time as a child actor, Elkin heard first-hand conversations about Paul Muni and Molly Picon. He remembers a Yiddish production of Moliere’s A Physician In Spite of Himself, and a powerful Yiddish adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice featuring a scene in a synagogue in which rabbis try to dissuade Shylock from his dangerous path.

Though it was, by far, the most celebrated Jewish theater in America, The Yiddish Art Theatre was not the only one by any means. Between 1890 and 1940, there were as many as a dozen Yiddish theater companies performing in the Jewish neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Nearly 200 Jewish theater companies toured to cities and towns across the country.

The plays served to reflect immigrant life, especially the conflict between traditional values and the aspirations of younger Jews in America, and to help working class Jews participate in high culture. Yiddish versions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen were frequently featured in the repertoire.Jewish Theatre would inspire great change in American drama.

There is a direct line between the ensemble acting at The Yiddish Art Theatre and the introduction of the acting technique founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and espoused in this country by members of the group theater, including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and her husband Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, John Garfield (who was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle), Luther Adler, and Clifford Odets.Like Elkin, many of these pioneers of the American Theatre had their theatrical beginnings in Yiddish Theatre. The acting style is characterized by simplicity and naturalness; the productions were noted for a stylistic unity in which actors in small roles were rehearsed as meticulously as the leads. Its proponents include Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Shelley Winters, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and the generation after them. Today, virtually every American actor is trained in some variation of the technique.

In this regard, Jewish and specifically Yiddish theater remains the single most influential ethnic theater in America up to the present day. Not to mention, of course, the influence of Jewish theater on the American musical, whose proponents begin with Richard Rodgers and go on and on and on, including Oscar Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Kurt Weill (the son of a cantor), Irving Berlin (another cantor’s son), Leonard Bernstein, Harold Arlen (a cantor’s son from Buffalo), Frank Loesser, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and Jule Stein.Interestingly, though many actors employed by Maurice Schwartz later went on to Hollywood stardom and spectacular wealth, the great man himself remained devoted to his theater. He did make a few Yiddish films, which included his performance as Tevye the milkman, but when he went to Hollywood, his strong accent relegated him to character parts.

“I remember him playing a Hawaiian chieftain,” Elkin recalls. “And I felt very sad for him. I knew he was taking roles because he needed the money.”Still, one hopes that Schwartz took satisfaction in the enormity of his influence and in the devoted gratitude of his protégés. Himself inspired by Schwartz, Elkin’s founding of the Jewish Repertory Theatre could be seen as a tribute to him, and as the continuation of a legacy.

Today, Jewish theater is thoroughly a part of the American theater. Neil Simon, David Mamet, Alfred Uhry, Wendy Wasserstein are all part of the evolution of Jewish theater, and they appeal to a broad range of audiences—Jewish and non-Jewish alike. This is important, for Buffalo’s Jewish Repertory Theatre will need to attract more than a Jewish audience in order to succeed.

The Chosen is the story of two boys from two very different Jewish communities in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the 1940s. Aaron Posner worked with novelist Potok on the adaptation, says Elkin, and the stage version maintains the language and depth of the original, while giving it theatricality. Elkin will be featured in the cast.

Visiting Mr. Green tells the story of a young and self-absorbed corporate executive who is sentenced by a judge to pay weekly visits to cantankerous Mr. Green, after nearly running the old man down with his car. Jewish Repertory will produce the play in conjunction with Buffalo United Artists, which produced a very successful run of the play a few years ago with beloved Buffalo actor/playwright Manny Fried in the title role. This time, Saul Elkin will play Mr. Green and BUA company member Christopher Kelly will reprise his performance as the young executive.

Elkin has great hopes for the future of the Jewish Repertory Theatre, and his background for the task is impeccable. There is no denying that this man continues to make history while he lives it.