Saratoga Jewish Cultural Festival, with a generous grant from the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York and co-sponsored by Skidmore Jewish Student Life, Congregation Beth Shalom, and Temple Sinai, presents a one woman show called Underneath the Lintel on August 28, at 3 PM and 7 PM at the Skidmore College Chapel.
Underneath the Lintel, a 2001 work by playwright Glen Berger, is a truly funny and at the same time incredibly serious play on the universality of human experience. It transitions seamlessly and remarkably from a curious, narrowly focused detective story to an exploration of the most fundamental questions about life. The basic plot of the play is simple. A librarian, played by Dianne O’Neil, frequent Director at HMT and other community sites, comes upon a book, returned in a book slot, that is 123 years overdue. Thus begins a challenge to discover who had it, who now must pay the overdue charges, and where to find this individual.
But what starts out as a self-important attempt to impose the fine of a lifetime delves slowly and methodically into a manic pursuit of the truth behind a supernatural legend, and finally to an empirical exploration of the meager, yet unique, impact one lonely life can have on a universe large beyond our comprehension. The librarian is transformed from a neat, properly dressed overbearing bureaucrat to a visibly sweaty and completely disheveled wanderer yearning for impossible answers to life’s basic questions.
The story, while on the surface seems silly and without consequence, becomes linked to the 700 plus year myth of the Wandering Jew. This wandering Jew tale, regarded by many as an anti-Semitic legend (and by some as pro Zionist and even others as anti-Christian) has taken on an existential relevance in more recent centuries. A film, The Wandering Jew, made in Yiddish by Jews in the early 1930s was made to warn a generally ignorant world of the growing Nazi menace. In the film, the wandering Jew is depicted as a noble figure, bearing witness to history.
But none of this seems to reflect the message that seems to jump out of the performance. Might it be about not wasting our time here and finding the way to
leave a mark of our fleeting existence on the vast, unfathomable depths of time and space? “Or,” says Phyllis Wang, Coordinator of Saratoga Jewish Cultural Festival, “ in more simple words, may it be about the wonders of human relationships that often seem ordinary and are generally undervalued, especially in hindsight?”
Underneath the Lintel will be performed at Skidmore College Chapel on August 28, 2022, at 3 PM and 7 PM. Tickets are $10.00 Registration requested: sjca.sjcf@gmail.com.
Presented by the 2022 Saratoga Jewish Cultural Festival -- Bringing community together!
Open to the public; Registration required for all programs; Vaccination and/or masks required for onsite.
For further information, please visit www.saratogajewishculturalfestival.org, email sjca.sjcf@gmail.com.