from Cindy Gold (Bessie Berger, Awake and Sing!)

Playing someone outside my personal comfort zone, like Bessie Berger, is exciting.  In this case, Bessie is so LOUD.  Amy [Morton, director] keeps telling me to have a megaphone at ALL times.  Bessie needs to be seen by everyone, and she’s loud.  It’s hard playing someone not too likeable.  I’m used to playing smaller, charactery, funny ladies who the audience finds “cute”.   So this is challenging.

Though Bessie is a “Jewish mother,” I don’t want to be stereotypical or general.  But I think I know these people well, having grown up around family who went through the depression and WWII – and were/are Jewish.  My grandfather, Irving Ozer, was a doctor in Philadelphia during that time.  He was one of the few in his family who was bringing in money, so he supported a lot of his family and various relatives lived in the house along with himself and my grandmother, Ray, and my Mom, Betty.  Must have been chaotic, but loving, I think.

Another interesting challenge has been to find the realism in such foreign-sounding language.  But it’s like doing Shakespeare, or any heightened text.  You figure out what the meaning is, and what you WANT, and play with it until it feels right. Tricky.  But Amy is genius at teasing out meaning.