Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (21 page)

Studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater and then in the design program at the Yale Drama School, Rosenthal entered the profession just as the Depression began. At age twenty-one, she became the technician in charge of the Federal Theater Project’s wagon theaters playing in the city’s parks. As she worked her way through Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater and onto Broadway, she was self-conscious about the closed male world she was entering. She “used courtesy” and “cultivated a careful impersonality,” but mainly “my only real weapon … in the battle for acceptance was knowledge. I did know my stuff, and I knew that the technicians knew theirs.” More than that, she had an artistic vision. “Dancers live in light as fish live in water,” she’d say by way of explaining the role of the designer in creating their “aquarium.” And with dramas, “the play—the playwright’s play—comes first.”

The industry’s burly stage electricians, who towered over her, famously adored Rosenthal—and without any condescension. They respected her great technical skill. Aronson, who resented her at first, ended up refusing to do a show without her if he could help it. He saw in her a unique and inspiring combination of “technician and dreamer.”

“Bring six to half, darling,” she’d quietly command, requesting that a particular light dimmer be set at a certain intensity. “Thank you, honey.” When others would start storming and stomping with frustration during the long technical rehearsals that are the lighting designer’s special hell, she’d stay calm and cheerful. And while she loved the give and take with directors or choreographers over the look they wanted to achieve, she held her ground when she was asked to make a change that she considered wrong. She fought to serve the work, not to butt egos, so she had no trouble standing up to Robbins. And he was as besotted with her as the tech guys were. He lined her up on September 12.

For costumes, he tapped Patricia Zipprodt, who had been designing for Broadway since the late 1950s. Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1925, Zipprodt came to New York after graduating from Wellesley, filled with Beat Generation dreams of a bohemian career as a painter. Waitressing and ushering to cover the rent on her fifth-floor walkup and the fees for some art classes and wearing “all black and my hair in a bun,” she was “doing the 50s bit” to a T. Even the “floundering around and wondering what to do with myself” seemed to fit the ambition. Then she had a conversion experience. On the spot, at a performance of the New York City Ballet, she determined she’d devote herself to the stage: Karinska’s bejeweled costumes for Balanchine’s
La Valse
overwhelmed her with their sculptural use of tulle, the light glinting off beads, the shimmer of the overlapping hues. “I saw them as pure painting with fabric,” she said later. “It wasn’t like I was seeing yellow and green and red. It was very layered, color upon color, air and light filtering through it.” The effect “swept me away.” She talked her way into a scholarship at the Fashion Institute of Technology (which wasn’t inclined even to admit a student who already had a BA—Zipprodt’s was in sociology), and there she learned sewing and draping. She took a job making samples in the garment district.

Then one day she stopped in her tracks on Fifth Avenue to gape at the “architecture” of camel-hair coats by the couturier Charles James on display in the windows of Lord & Taylor. She all but hounded James into letting her work for him, barraging him with letters and phone calls until he let her start at the bottom, picking up pins. Watching James for a year, she learned “how to create the structure for anything.”

Zipprodt wanted to study design formally but couldn’t afford the programs she looked into at Yale and Carnegie Mellon. Borrowing just enough money to take time off from working to spend a year in the public library, she gave herself an intensive tutorial in the history of costume, from ancient Egyptian tunics to Balenciaga’s tunic dresses, so that she could pass the exam for the United Scenic Union, the requisite ticket into the profession. With a union card in hand, Zipprodt took jobs as an assistant for various Broadway designers and passed up her first offer of a show of her own to assist the legendary Irene Sharaff (
The King and I
,
West Side Story
) on
Happy Hunting
(1956), a vacuous marriage comedy and comeback vehicle for Ethel Merman.

Like Jean Rosenthal, Zipprodt had heeded a theatrical calling and methodically set out to learn her craft, without taking any shortcuts or expecting special favors. Such absolute resolve and such a scrupulous work ethic not only enabled both designers to fulfill their talents at a time when women had to prove their excellence simply to be considered acceptable, even in the relatively open realm of the theater, but also made both of them fitting collaborators for the exhaustive taskmaster Jerry Robbins. It didn’t take much to push them to give their all, and then some more—but he couldn’t push them around.

Zipprodt was beginning to come into her own as a designer when Robbins saw her mix of urban duds, stark white masks, and flashy, power-flaunting court attire in
The Blacks
, Genet’s “clown show” of racial construction and illusion, which opened Off-Broadway in 1961 (and ran for more than three years). He hired her to design
Oh Dad, Poor Dad
and her costumes hit just the right skew between reality and absurdity, featuring such elements as arm-length black gloves for a mother in a peculiar state of mourning and a white safari suit for her lover. Just as important, Zipprodt was not cowed by Robbins. Not too much, anyway. For
Oh Dad
, she had made a big black evening dress for Jo Van Fleet to wear, with red flowers sewed onto its partition—very expensive inset roses for which she and Robbins had “gone over eight thousand reds to figure out one that would be right.” When Van Fleet put it on for dress rehearsal and suggested “it should have a little more blue in it,” Robbins, to Zipprodt’s astonishment, instantly acquiesced. Zipprodt confronted him on the way out of rehearsal and “shook him until his hat fell off. ‘How could you do this! We picked this! We spent hours!’” Robbins sent her a big box of tulips the next day by way of apology. She knew exactly what she was getting into when she agreed to join
Tevye
that fall.

*   *   *

Except when it came to subject matter. The Pale was entirely foreign to the tall Episcopalian from the Midwest and, like a college thesis adviser, Robbins quickly sent her into a deep review of the literature. She was to read the Sholem-Aleichem stories, look at production shots of his works by the ARTEF, spend time in the archives at YIVO, and contact some experts who could show her historical photos—for starters. Robbins also expected her to watch films with him.

Aronson, too, was summoned to Robbins’s home for screenings of rented 16mm movies. Despite Aronson’s expertise on Chagall and Jewish modernism, the Kiev native knew as much about the shtetl as a New Yorker knows about Appalachia. (Rosenthal, too, knew close to nothing about Eastern European Jewish life at the turn of the twentieth century—her parents, Jews who had come from Romania in the 1880s, were both secular doctors. She, however, was excused from the research assignments, since lighting would not in itself represent the world of the play. And she was too busy with other productions.)

Along with Robbins and his assistant, Tommy Abbott, Aronson and Zipprodt gathered at Robbins’s home on East Seventy-fourth Street to watch obscure films meant to give them historical and, more important, visual information about the Pale in 1905. One,
Ghetto Pillow
, features a camera panning across Impressionist watercolors of the shtetl Balagoris, “deep in the woodlands and marshes of White Russia,” painted by Samuel Rothbort—scenes of townsfolk traipsing through deep mud in the rainy season, women bringing gifts of sugar to a new mother, men receiving back massages in the bathhouse, boys playing cards, women feather dusting before the Sabbath. The film takes its title from an image toward its end: women ticking and stuffing goose-feather pillows to hand down to daughters embarking on married life, as if Rothbort’s paintings were a new way of passing along an heirloom. (“Ghetto” was a peculiar but common translation of “shtetl” in English-language discourse; usage slowly shifted toward “shtetl” in the post–World War II years. The film itself is a telling example: made in 1961, it was reissued in 1989 under a changed title,
Memories of the Shtetl
.)

Rothbort had traveled through the shtetls and cities of White Russia as a boy soprano with touring cantors in the 1890s and later as a yeshiva student. (He arrived in the United States in 1904.) In his “memory paintings,” created in the 1930s and 1940s and exhibited beginning in the early 1960s, Rothbort depicts a diverse, if isolated, modernizing community: men both with long beards and with clean-shaven chins, families arranging marriage dowries and young men proposing, scenes of Yom Kippur lashes meted out in synagogue and scenes of American émigrés returning for visits. With dabs of brown, black, and bright color, masterfully highlighted with thick brushstrokes of white, the paintings showed the
Tevye
designers one wistful way of seeing a world in transition.

Ghetto Pillow
’s score of symphonic music, cantorial prayers, and a Yiddish lullaby, along with narration in the detached, bemused voice of an ethnographic filmstrip, also go a long way toward lodging the movie within the post-Holocaust project of fond remembrance advanced by so many of the books on Robbins’s research syllabus. That’s why Robbins especially wanted the designers to see the other reel he rented,
Skvoz Slezy
(
Through Tears
—or, as it’s often called in English,
Laughter through Tears
), a pre-Holocaust feature film that might push them in a harsher direction. As a Soviet production made by the official All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration in 1928, the film joined a handful of works in Yiddish whose primary purpose was to depict the backwardness and impoverishment of Jewish life before the revolution gusted through, bringing, as the film needed only to imply, the light and abundance of emancipation in its wake. Based loosely on pieces of Sholem-Aleichem’s “Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son” and “The Enchanted Tailor” (the story that was tamed and folklorized in Arnold Perl’s
World of Sholom Aleichem
), it served Robbins’s agenda, too. “Don’t romanticize the characters,” he told Zipprodt. “We are not to see them through the misty nostalgia of a time past, but thru the every day hard struggle to keep alive and keep their beliefs.”

The Soviet film was certainly less generous toward those beliefs—in one scene a toddler makes a doll out of a prayer shawl and phylacteries, in another the local rabbi is depicted as out of touch with reality and dismissive of the local folk. One of the several main characters, the tailor of the original short story, falls sick from the innkeeper’s prank of changing a billy goat for his nanny goat because he remains fixed in a benighted religious mind-set and imagines that some demonic force must be at work. Little surprise that the film blames the innkeeper’s petit bourgeois contempt for the poor tailor and his ilk and emphasizes class conflict more generally, contrasting czarist officers’ lush life of tea service and gramophones with the shoeless, starving Jews they enjoy harassing.

Where Soviets depicted hapless, destitute folk stifled by czarist antisemitism, lack of access to land and livelihood, and their own superstitions, Robbins saw “the guts and toughness of the people” treading onward despite their hostile environment. The film helped him show the designers how the world of
Tevye
should be “a rural unsophisticated area … it is poverty stricken. Everyone just about ekes out an existence. The honey mists of time do not make life beautiful for them.”

The opening shot reveals a line of crooked houses with crumbling wooden shingles on their sloping, sagging roofs—a look that Aronson would capture with a fanciful overlay on his painted backdrop of a ring of shtetl homes. He knew his set would have to “combine elements of fantasy and reality”—elements, that is, drawn from both Chagall and
Through Tears
; the Soviet film was deliberately shot to look like a documentary. Robbins hired a professional photographer to take high-quality stills from the film for the designers to scrutinize. Aronson took dozens of them to his studio. He adapted their details—cubbylike shelves built into homes for storing clay pots, lopsided wooden fences, rough-hewn plank benches, zigzagging laundry lines—to ground Anatevka in the gritty reality Robbins demanded, while a swirling moon or somersaulting houses painted along the proscenium lofted it toward the mythic.

The movie offered models for costumes, too: the women’s printed blouses and mismatched skirts, the innkeeper’s rolled-up shirtsleeves under a woven vest, the tailor’s simpler vest buttoned up tight over his tallis
katan
with its stripes and fringes dangling from his waist and the tape measure draped over his shoulder. Archival research was not enough, however. Robbins also wanted his designers to see—and was eager to see himself—the way such clothing was worn and how customs were lived in the flesh. Lining up fieldwork in Orthodox and Hasidic communities was one of the first efforts he put in motion when he agreed to work on the show.

Since the early 1950s, Hasidic sects had been rebuilding their bases in Brooklyn after their centers had been decimated, and groups from Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were scattered throughout the borough. Non-Hasidic Orthodox communities had been in the area, of course, since the migrations of Sholem-Aleichem’s day. While together they made up less than 10 percent of American Jewry, which was filling the ranks of the Reform denomination as it was suburbanizing, they were consciously claiming themselves as America’s most “authentic” Jews. At its inception in the eighteenth century, Hasidism represented a radical challenge to rabbinic Judaism; now it asserted itself as the most conservative element in Jewish life, the keeper of the flame—whose imagistic torch
Fiddler
would help to carry. Over the following months, a woman named Dvora Lapson became the
Tevye
company’s guide into this closed world otherwise beyond their reach.