Taken individually, the new Off Broadway shows “Hannah Senesh,” “Jewish Plot” and “Playing Shylock” are frustrating, sometimes perplexingly so, pieces of theater. But taken together they offer a composite look at concerns over Jewish identity and issues of stereotyping and art.
The most straightforward production is David Schechter’s “Hannah Senesh,” which is presented in English by National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene (at Theater Row through Nov. 9). This hagiographic solo show retraces the real-life story of a young Jewish poet and resistance fighter who was executed during World War II — Jennifer Apple portrays the title character from the age of 13, when Hannah started writing the diary that largely inspired the script, until her death at 23, in 1944.
A heroine for many Jews — a Brooklyn school is named after her, for example — Hannah showed determination early on: “I would rather be an unusual person than just average,” she wrote in her midteens. She became a Zionist, and at 18 moved on her own from her home in Budapest to Palestine. The play — which Schechter developed with Lori Wilner, who originally played Hannah over four decades ago — is structured around a series of inspirational tableaus: Hannah as a student in Hungary, Hannah on a kibbutz, Hannah parachuting into occupied Yugoslavia as part of a British unit, Hannah captured and imprisoned. The show does not really dwell on whether she had second thoughts or doubts, we are not told.
In real life, Hannah’s jailers tried to use her mother, Catherine, as leverage to get information from her — a gripping episode that Schechter does not dramatize, even though Catherine (also portrayed by Apple) bookends his play. The decision to emphasize the heroic aspects of Hannah’s life is understandable as a way to combat the trope of Jews being passive victims in the face of annihilation. But the complexity of human nature and the thorny reasons people do what they do is exactly what a play can and should explore.
Which leads us to one of theater’s most fraught creations: Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” This character is at the heart of another solo production, Mark Leiren-Young’s “Playing Shylock” (at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, through Dec. 7).
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