Relatively false
By Ed Rampell
The Lifetime of A. Einstein. What is one to make of that title? Of course, I assumed it was a play about Albert Einstein, but it’s not. Rather, it’s a one-woman show about the physicist’s secretary and housekeeper portrayed by Kres Mersky. This play is also written by one Kres Mersky. She portrays Ellen Schoenhammer (based, I guess, on Einstein’s actual secretary/housekeeper Helen Dukas), who migrated from Nazi Germany to Princeton, N.J., and served the Einsteins for a third of a century. Some may believe this gives the Einstein saga a feminist twist by making a woman the primary (actually, only) character and storyteller, but I disagree. It is telling that Mersky’s TV credits include Charlie’s Angels, a pseudo-feminist TV series. Those eponymous angelic detectives were subject to the orders of their boss, Charlie (voiced by the recently deceased John Forsythe), just as Ellen’s entire life revolves around the scientist, who she was smitten with. Ellen’s unrequited love is played for laughs in this play, as audiences are once again expected to be tickled pink by the notion that women over a certain age can be sexual (to wit ABC’s current TV sitcom, Cougar Town, that finds endless mirth in the notion that 40-plus-year-old women might be sexually active).
Mersky is fine and witty as Ellen, but I felt gypped by the title of the play as a sort of false advertising. It reminded me of that otherwise forgettable Billy Crystal/ Debra Winger 1995 comedy, Forget Paris, which I’d gone to see in Hawaii hankering to feast my eyes again on the City of Lights. However, as I recall the eponymous city appeared in only an opening sequence and the rest of the dreary movie took place in the USA. But the studio had cleverly marketed its boring film by using a well established brand name others had created (i.e., Paris), just as Mersky appears to have done. I don’t think many people would buy tickets to see a one-woman show called The Life and Times of E. Schoenhammer -– a far less marketable, sellable title. I was also disappointed that while the play touched upon Einstein’s pacifism, it did not mention his socialist leanings. During the HUAC/Blacklist era, Einstein courageously wrote a piece called “Why Socialism?” in the very first issue of the venerable Monthly Review in 1949, and audiences need to be reminded that the greatest genius of all time chose to be a socialist.
The Life and Times of A. Einstein runs through May 16 on Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. at Theatre West, 333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, L.A., CA 90068. For more info: 323/851-7977; http://www.theatrewest.org/.
