STAGE REVIEWS : Surviving the Pain : A Family Shattered by the Nazis Struggles to Come Together Again in an Affecting ‘A Shayna Maidel’

With its current production of “A Shayna Maidel,” by Barbara Lebow, Rancho Santiago College’s Professional Actors Conservatory Theatre Company lives up to its name. Illuminated by fine performances under the sinewy direction of Sheryl Donchey, the play offers a moving glimpse into a family struggling to come together again after near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

The surviving members of the Weiss family--father Mordechai, younger sister Rose and elder sister Lusia--are reunited, after many years of separation and tragedy, in Rose’s apartment in New York City. Rose, who has grown up in America, escaped Poland with Mordechai when she was 4 years old, while Lusia and Mama Weiss were forced to remain behind. Lusia alone has come out of the death camps, and at the top of the play, her arrival in New York is awaited by Mordechai and Rose with intense and conflicting feelings.

Rose, a robust and thoroughly American girl, knows nothing about her European family and yearns to understand everything. Lusia knows too much. Excepting her dismal charity wardrobe, a doll, and the sustaining hope that she will someday find her Polish husband alive, her memories and her pain are all that she has brought with her.

Their father stands somewhere between the old world and the new, a European man in an American suit. He has not forgotten life as it was but is determined to make the best of life as it is.

These three strive to become a family again, to create bonds out of old photographs and untold stories, to defeat death, and to embrace each other over all the obstacles of guilt and violence and despair.

Director Donchey has a tender, judiciously unsentimental touch with this emotionally charged material. The scenes are fluid and unforced, even where passions are high and circumstances extraordinary. Particularly moving is a scene in which Lusia and her father catalogue the murdered relatives, he with a growing comprehension of the full weight of his daughter’s suffering, she with a barely contained rage fueled by love and loss.

As Lusia, Betsy Ferguson is outstanding. Playwright Lebow offers her myriad opportunities to reveal not only the shattered victim but also the laughing girl and the frightened child and even the shades of a hollow, defeated old woman. Ferguson finds these and many other dimensions in her lyrical performance.

Ralph Richmond plays Mordechai as a red-faced patriarch, staunchly proper and maddeningly accepting of “the will of God,” as he terms the many turns of fate that have robbed him of his ancestry. His strong, understated performance is wonderful in counterpoint to Ferguson. Both of them carry much more personal baggage than they openly declare.

Kristin H. Schnee’s Rose is shallow in comparison, and her hysterical pitch suffocates the comedy latent in the scenes between the sisters. In scenes that depict ghosts and dreams brought to life by Lusia’s imagination, William Mengle plays Duvid, Lusia’s husband, with the flawless charm of a cherished memory; Candice Livengood makes a lusty Hanna, Lusia’s girlhood friend, and Alice Ensor carries her age very convincingly as Mama Weiss, although her characterization is more symbolic than personal.

Rose’s apartment, as designed by E. Scott Shaffer, is handsome and luxurious-looking, though apparently windowless, an odd sort of symbolism for a world of hope and rebirth. Laura E. Deremer’s costumes feel absolutely right. The sound effects are sometimes indecipherable, overlapping each other over a limited speaker system, and often the music, though evocative, is too loud. One hates to miss a single word of this affecting production.

‘A Shayna Maidel’

A Rancho Santiago College Professional Actors Conservatory Theatre Company production of the play by Barbara Lebow. Directed by Sheryl Donchey. Scenic design by E. Scott Shaffer. Lighting design by Monique L’Heureux. Costume design by Laura E. Deremer. Sound design and original music by Darrin J. Degenhardt. With Kristin H. Schnee, Ralph Richmond, Betsy Ferguson, William Mengle, Candice Livengood, and Alice Ensor. Continues Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Phillips Hall Theatre at Rancho Santiago College, 1530 W. 17 St., Santa Ana. Tickets: $8 general, $6 for students, seniors and children under 12. Box office: (714) 564-5661.