Susan Edsall on Noam Osband

Dear Noam,

Thank you for your wildly funny and wholeheartedly optimistic story. I had no idea what to expect when I walked into a yoga studio to see a show about, um, circumcision? I grew up in rural Montana. Let’s leave it at that.

You had me in the palm of your hand when you came out of the gate like a grenade, launching into goofball, true stories–bags of cash? blow the chauffeur?–without ever making your father a caricature or the butt of the joke. From the beginning, when you described him as creating a life for his children filled with miracles and magic I felt at ease: there would be no casualties in this show. Plenty of comedic shows leave the comic’s family eviscerated. Your show didn’t have an ounce of that energy. And still, the story you tell is crazy and true.

Throughout the show I experienced your deep love for your father as he aimed to circumscribe a proper life for you, and as you broke through every boundary not out of spite, but because of who you were.

Your oddball details lifted the story out of generic joke-land: your use of Yiddish, not as a cheap laugh, but as a window into the world of your family; the folded, worn letter your dad wrote you at camp; the page from your diary while in Russia; the photos.

The stories about the three inadequate men you tried to bring into your life as a placetaker for your dad were at once hilarious, doomed, and dear. I felt your yearning and the star-crossed nature of your choices.

At one point I scribbled in my notebook “imprint on my heart.” I now can’t remember where that came in the show, but it feels like the play’s operating instructions: Circumscribed details not just the imprint your father made on your own heart, but the imprint you want him to make on the hearts of your children.

This is exactly the kind of theater I long to see–honest without being cruel, rooted in our common humanity without being sappy, a story of what we are capable of as imperfect humans in imperfect families.

I love the title of the show and it’s near-triple entendre: restrict something (Noam) within limits; enclose something  by drawing a circle around it (deliberately wanting your children to be surrounded by the love and life of your father); and then the nearness of the word circumscribed to circumcised.

This show was at every moment about love. That it ends as it began, with the poetic line about miracles and magic, and that the last word of the play is “love” (said by your son while you’re “crossing swords” in a filthy restroom on the train) is only one example of the perfection of this piece.

Thank you. I was left tearful at what, in this world of so much nastiness, humans are capable of.

With deep regard,

Susan Edsall

Noam Osband’s Circumscribed runs Sept 5 – 28th at Studio 34.

Susan Edsall’s Buen Camino runs Sept 4- 10th at the Yellow Bicycle.