“Hairspray” workshop for Girl Scouts at the Y

We have seen the Shoah treated as somber tragedy, as adventure story, as cartoon, and as farce. Now, in the new play “Eavesdropping on Dreams” by Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg, we have the Shoah as soap opera. The production by the Barefoot Theatre Company directed by Ronald Cohen at the Cherry Lane Theatre unfortunately mistakes histrionics for emotion, and manages to present a two-hour play about arguably the greatest tragedy experienced by a people without a moment of believable feeling in it.

“Eavesdropping on Dreams” focuses on the relationship between three women: Rosa or Raizel (Lynn Cohen) who survived four years in the Lodz ghetto, working as a hatmaker; her neonatalogist daughter Renee (Stephanie Roth Haberle) who devotes herself to saving babies and playing sex games; and Renee’s daughter Shaina (Aidan Koehler), a young woman who dropped out of medical school, broke up with her boyfriend, went on March of the Living to Lodz, and has just returned home transformed. Rosa is also visited periodically by the ghosts of her brother Yakov and Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “king of the Jews,” who turned the ghetto into a workshop in order to convince the Nazis that the residents were too valuable to kill, at least right away.