People in the Picture got its formal start when Bette Midler called Dart and asked her to write a script for a singer. But it’s a powerful force, as well, as the drama shows.

Talent, as the program notes say, is sometimes all artists have left. I felt I had to write about a woman who was a Yiddish actress and singer and what does she think about when she’s in the Warsaw ghetto, when she’s in the camps.” The films were from the period right before WWII, 1935-1939, and despite the darkness of the coming war, “these composers were making musical comedies. “One day I discovered a catalog of Yiddish films from pre-War Europe and watched them,” she explained. “If you don’t do it,” Dart said, “it ceases to exist.” She was determined to not just preserve, but to expand the awareness of this remarkable cultural treasure. Yiddish Theater, once a vibrant part of European and North American culture, was devastated by the Holocaust and is today little-known by the wider culture. “Memory is a legacy,” Dart said, “passing on what I know to make sure it’s not forgotten.” But she never forgot where she came from. It was the Yiddish culture-it was so joyous.”ĭart went on to undisputed success as a TV script writer for That Girl, Love American Style and the Cher Show and cemented her success with the novel Beaches, subsequently made into a film. “We were poor, but I never thought of myself as being deprived because we always laughed.

“I grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household,” said Dart. Dart spoke about how she came to write The People in the Picture, and the meaning of the show.

Last month, the Guggenheims had a conversation with Dart and some of the actors in the production. The “people in this picture” of the title are “The Warsaw Gang,” a troupe of Yiddish theater actors continuing against all odds to create brightness despite the horror of the Nazi occupation, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and even in the hells of concentration camps. It’s the story of three generations: Raisel Rabinowitz (Susan Gundunas) a former star of the Yiddish theatre in pre-WWII and wartime Poland, now living in New York: her daughter Red (Julia Wade) who tries to shut out the past and Raisel’s granddaughter, Jenny (Natalie Schoreder) who opens her heart to it.Ī second layer of the story is historical. At the individual level it’s a family story set in the 1970s. The show tells a multi-layered story that is both historical and individual.

Beaches by iris rainer dart