This Purim play features Henry Ford, Eastern Parkway tunnels and Marjorie Taylor Greene
Director David Herskovits talks ‘Remember This Trick,’ his new theater piece about antisemitism
(From L to R) Sarah Suzuki, Danny Bryck and Yehuda L. Hyman in a rehearsal for Target Margin’s Remember This Trick. Photo by Steven Pisano
By PJ Grisar February 16, 2024
David Herskovits began researching his play on Jews and antisemitism by reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was as boring as it was terrifying.
“I thought, ‘Oh, it’ll be juicy,’” said Herskovits, the Obie-winning artistic director of Target Margin Theater. “It’s sort of vivid and, in moments, offensive, but it’s also just kind of turgid.”
In other words, it wasn’t right to form the basis of a play. But like that infamous forgery, which is really a patchwork of multiple texts from different times and authors, Remember This Trick, which Herskovits will debut Feb. 17 at his company’s stage in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is a pastiche. It draws on the Megillah, Barbara Meyerhoff’s study on aging American Jews and, yes, The Protocols.
The script that was sent to a reporter was full of lacunae, speech hesitations taken from transcripts and shorthand meant for the people on the production. Herkovitz was apologetic, but the text is indicative of his process. His rehearsals look a bit like yeshiva, with the cast of five reading through sources and transmitting their version of them in their own words, a blend of the oral and written tradition baked into Judaism.
Herskovits’ company is known for works of shared authorship, like a nine-hour take on the 1,001 Nights (a famished audience was provided grape ceviche and was permitted to nap) and bold reimaginings of plays by Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein and Eugene O’Neill. He said that Remember This Trick is personal without being autobiographical.
Herskovits’ father escaped the Holocaust as a 10-year-old in 1940, leaving Slovakia for New York, but Herskovits didn’t want to make a Holocaust play. Witnessing the rise of antisemitism in the last few years, he was determined to tell a story about other Jewish stories.
“I’m interested in the way Jews adapt and respond to these things in different ways,” Herskovits said in a phone call, while on lunch break from rehearsals. “The history of antisemitism is a part of that, but really it’s the context of the stories that we’re bringing.”
The piece is structured around the story of Esther — the “oldest story that we remember about Jews surviving” — but often leaps from the gardens of Shushan to Venice, California or into social media posts about the tunnel under 770 Eastern Parkway in a way that Herskovits hopes is seamless.
At one moment, Haman, goading king Ahasuerus to let him eliminate Jews from Persia, readily quotes from Henry Ford’s The International Jew. The title, Remember This Trick, was inspired by the story of Werner Reich, a survivor who learned a card trick in Auschwitz and practiced it as a way to keep his mind occupied.
Billing the play as an “artistically-layered Purimspiel,” Herskovits, whose company has put on plays about the Jewish heretic Uriel Da Costa and a series inspired by Yiddish theater, says that, in working on the piece for the past year, he’s realized just how Jewish his process is.
“The name of this company is Target Margin, and that’s because I’m interested in the thing that you’re focusing on, and all of the marginal stuff around it and the relationship between those two,” Herkovits said. “Now, picture a page of Talmud.”
But while the text is diverse, gleaning its material from anthropology, the Hebrew Bible, X, an arguably antisemitic Irving Berlin song and the writings of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Herskovits is quick to say what it isn’t about: the war in Gaza.
“I’m trying to acknowledge the reality of our context and the urgency of it, but also not get turned into making a work that’s about that,” said Herskovits.
He hopes the play will awaken audiences — and not just Jews — to some of the bigotry that has been on the upswing in America and have them consider how, like Esther, they might play an active role in that complicated narrative.
Speaking a little over a week from the play’s premiere, Herskovits was still fine-tuning the script.
“Two days ago, I dropped in one more story — a Jewish story — into a later part of the play,” he said. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I want to hear that too.’ There’s another bit of Jewish history in there.”
,The play Remember This Trick debuts Feb. 17 and runs through March 17. Tickets and more information can be found on Target Margin’s website.
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