Winterport players shine in ‘A Shayna Maidel’> Community troupe delivers demanding drama with grace

“A Shayna Maidel,” which Winterport Open Stage performed over the weekend, is a reunification story of two sisters. Rose, who left Poland with her father before World War II, is entirely Americanized with a good job, pretty dresses, a Manhattan apartment and a bubble bath at the end of the day.

Lusia, on the other hand, had taken ill and was prevented from leaving with her sister and father. So she stayed with her mother in Poland and waited for the father to send for them. Time passed — and rather happily for a while. She married, had a child, was content. Then the Nazis rose to power and the world — her world — fell apart.

By the time playwright Barbara Lebow introduces the Weiss sisters, it is 1946. Lusia has just arrived from Poland accompanied by only a doll and the ghosts of murdered family members. She has come to be with her father and sister. But reintegration does not come smoothly for anyone in the Weiss family, and their drama is one of with many layers to uncover.

As with the hit movie “Sophie’s Choice,” which involves both the Holocaust and the tyranny that war brings to family life, “A Shayna Maidel” forces us into an more intimate view of the war. This is not a news reel. There are no hard-edged descriptions of atrocities. There are simply memories and family, and that’s quite enough for creating a poignant drama that exposes something quite universal about loss and pain and inheritance.

It takes guts for an artistic director of a community theater to present a play as grim and as demanding as this one is. But Reed Farrar had seen “A Shayna Maidel” a dozen years ago and knew he wanted to direct it someday. Now, as Winterport Open Stage has established itself as a mature sibling in the local community theater family, Farrar thought it was time to take on the challenge.

And he was right. That’s not to say that there aren’t glitches in this production. The lines are delivered with painful slowness at times and scene changes can be awkward.

But, truly, this is a tour de force for this young company. Although the community actors can occasionally be a bit too hand-wringing, they generally handle their tasks with a straight-forward elegance. The most devastating scene takes place when Lusia, played with emotional clarity and honesty by Anne Tatgenhorst, reads a list of murdered relatives. On opening night, this shattered the audience into haunting silence.

Crystal Vaccaro, as Rose, has moxie. James Richardson, as Mordechai, gives a stern father some humanity. Robyn DesLauriers, as Lusia’s good-spirited childhood friend, and Julie Cashwell and Cheri Stacy, who open the play with a staggering birth scene, help round out the show’s impact.

The play takes place in 1946 and in a series of flashbacks, to which Rose Sweeney (as Mama) and Daniel Clark (as Lusia’s missing husband) add much warmth and sweetness. Robert DesLauriers’ lights make effective and untroublesome transitions between Poland and Rose’s apartment.

Unquestionably, “A Shayna Maidel,” which means “a pretty girl” in Yiddish, is an investment of time and energy. But Farrar and the cast show real courage in this production, which cuts close to the bone both as an artistic statement and as a political warning.

Winterport Open Stage will present “A Shayna Maidel” 7:30 p.m. April 16 and 17 at the Samuel L. Wagner School on Moutain View Drive in Winterport. For information, call 223-2501.