Hello Susanna

Reviewed by Maureen Lee Lenker
Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre
Through June 23^rd

One person shows are courageous: An actor stands onstage tasked with holding an audience’s attention for anything upwards of a half hour. The task only becomes more daunting when the actor is telling a personal autobiographical story. Hello Susanna, by writer/performer Susanna Leonard, neatly fits in this category, but falls short of grabbing audiences.  

The show tells the tale of the titular Susanna who seeks to understand her identity through stories of her ancestors, relayed  in an imagined conversation with her maternal great-great-grandmother, Anna Ruth.

The ghost of Anna Ruth appears  in the wake of Susanna’s divorce from her Israeli husband, after she’s been isolated from her non-Jewish family and has returned to America seeking to understand herself, justify her choices, and preserve her identity.

Leonard does an admirable job of bringing these two distinctly different women to life, deftly switching between the hunched-over Anna Ruth, with her pronounced Yiddish dialect, and the perfectly postured, American-born  Susanna. Anna Ruth does sometimes veer towards a babushka-like caricature (a holdover from Leonard’s background in improv), but overall you feel as though you are watching two entirely different human beings on the stage.

But Leonard’s crafting of these characters, and the emotional and personal connection to the story that throbs in her voice throughout, are not enough to elevate the writing. The narrative feels more like a description of a family history you might find outlined in a background essay on Ancestry.com than a piece of theatre. Anna Ruth riddles through a list of names (with accompanying photo slides behind her), birth dates and death dates, with a few sentences thrown in about their accomplishments, their personality traits and their often tragic ends. After the first few people, these accounts begin to blur together, barely distinguishable from one grainy black-and-white image to the next.

Anna Ruth wants to make the story of her family vital enough for Susanna to connect her to her roots and impel her to carry on the torch of their story. There are threads of compelling tales here — family members lost to pogroms and concentration camps, a relative whose incendiary paintings got across time — but for now the narrative gets mired in its own morass of details.

Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre @ SFS Theatre Mainstage, 5636 Melrose Ave; https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/3245. Running time minutes: 50 minutes