Actor/playwright Deborah Lubar resurrects Rose Solomon to reflect on today's refugee crises

Reviewed by Chris Rohmann

"Rose Solomon at Ellis Island," Theatre 14, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., Jan. 28-29, and on tour

"I've always been fascinated by pain and beauty together, tears and joy mixed in the same moment." Deborah Lubar is talking about her latest one-woman play, but this alloy is the touchstone of her art. All of her work balances on that sweet, sharp edge where everything that is human intersects. Lubar is the only artist whose performances always make me laugh out loud, always make me cry and always make me glad to be alive.

Using the tools of a born storyteller and a gifted actress, she creates full-bodied characters who grapple gamely with life's chaotic mix of joys and calamities. Some are fictional, others based on real women she has interviewed, as in Naming the Days, about Bosnian women in the aftermath of the Serb onslaught, and Blood and Stones, depicting the shared fears and hopes of Israeli and Palestinian women.

Rose Solomon at Ellis Island resurrects a character Lubar conceived for her 1996 piece A Story's a Story. That tour de force introduced us to two fictional immigrant women of the early 20th century, one a Polish Jew, the other an Italian Catholic, both escaping poverty and religious intolerance.

In that show, Rose explained that she's dead but comes down from Heaven now and then to share some of her stories "and do a little shopping." And here she is again, a dumpy, rouged matron with a flowered hat, ropes of artificial pearls and a thick Yiddish accent, telling us about the day she arrived in America. With sharp-tongued humor, she recounts the discomforts and indignities of the immigration process at the intake center on Ellis Island—the endless lines, the Babel of languages, the humiliating examinations designed to weed out the physically, mentally or socially undesirable.

Because she walks with a limp from a congenitally twisted leg, Rose is placed on the "questionable" list and held overnight in a large room with other new arrivals, fellow refugees from all over Europe carrying a few modest possessions and keepsakes. "When you leave your land, your animals, your riverbank and the smell of your nights," Rose muses, "a piece from your soul, maybe the size of a bird song, is always traded away for your freedom and left behind as ransom." There is a magic-realist moment when memories of the lives they've left behind materialize, conjured up by a Palestinian song that later turns out to resonate with that people's contemporary experience.

Lubar has brought Rose back because of her own reflections on the world's historical and present-day refugee crises. She was deeply moved by a visit to the museum at Ellis Island, "where my own great-grandparents came through," and horrified by the knowledge that "we have now on earth more refugees than ever in history. It is astounding, breathtaking, the hundreds of millions of peoples having to leave home for all manner of dreadful reasons—sometimes for years, sometimes forever."

The piece was partly sparked by Americans' reactions to the terrible events of 9/11. "One would think that our country's pain might have opened our hearts to the mass misery of peoples all around the world whose unjust suffering has been longer, deeper and more horrific than ours was," Lubar explains. "Maybe we would have become more sensitive both to giving more to those others and, for heaven's sake, to learning more from them about how to survive catastrophe with your humanity intact. Alas, the opposite is what happened."

Although Rose Solomon at Ellis Island is structured around the immigrant experience of the last century, it reflects indirectly—and in one case directly—on today's refugees from political brutality, religious persecution and "ethnic cleansing." The piece is pointed, but not angry. It ends with a song, but in each performance Lubar chooses between two alternative options, a sprightly dance and a poignant lullaby, "depending on the kind of day it is in the world."

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