Kaddish (or The Key in the Window)

Performing poetry on stage is a tricky proposition. The images and ruminations don't always mesh with the action-oriented demands of the theater. A play needs characters moving toward an objective and overcoming the conflicts in their path. Poetry is usually more internal and contemplative, thus better suited to the page than the stage.

Hats off then to Donnie Mather for a valiant attempt at combining the two forms. The actor has founded a new company, the Adaptations Project, with the mission of adapting "new forms of storytelling to create new works for a new century." His current effort is a solo stage version of Allen Ginsberg's long autobiographical poem "Kaddish" (1961), in which the author relives his tortured relationship with his mentally ill mother, Naomi, after she has died.

The work does contain stageworthy elements. Naomi's long history of schizophrenia and paranoia leads to several concrete scenes of conflict, with Allen and his mother battling over her confinement to various mental hospitals. Mather plays all the characters in Ginsberg's rambling epic of guilt, anger, and love and includes images of Naomi's Russian background, her communist politics, and the Jewish-American experience in New York. The play is most expressive when Mather enacts the mother-son fights, at one point donning Naomi's clothes and then making a sock puppet out of a stocking and giving it her nasal, anguished voice. During these moments and at the conclusion, when Ginsberg has made peace with his mother's departed spirit, Mather is almost unbearably moving. You can see the warring emotions of rage and tenderness in his eyes as he bids her goodbye. But there are also interminable, repetitive passages that Mather fails to enliven.  

Fortunately, director Kim Weild gives Mather plenty of movement and stage business, and C. Andrew Bauer's projections lend a lively visual context to the story. Bauer does, however, make the mistake of projecting an extended scene from the film version of "A Streetcar Named Desire"—the one with Vivien Leigh as Blanche getting carted off to the funny farm, which parallels Naomi's situation. This distracts from Mather, and by displaying a few minutes from one of the greatest film performances of all time, it calls attention to the play's shortcomings.

Presented by the Adaptations Project at the 4th Street Theatre, 83 E. Fourth St., NYC. Sept. 30 –Oct. 9; Tue.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 3 p.m. (800) 838-3006 or www.adaptationsproject.org.