PETER FELDMAN
Friday night Shabbos with the family can be hell for people who aren’t Jewish – they can be loud, alien and frankly distressing if you aren’t part of the fold.
Actress Chantal Stanfield is very familiar with this experience and many more, having fallen in love with a Jewish singer. She has cleverly turned her own experiences into a delightfully funny one-woman show.
She is a coloured woman from the Cape Flats who fell in love with RJ Benjamin. The monologue depicts how their lives panned out. Both come from diversely different backgrounds and cultures, but the thread to their wellbeing is the thing called love and if you have enough of it in your heart, you can overcome most obstacles.
Everything that occurs in this narrative that she so painstakingly recounts on stage, actually took place (with some poetic licence tossed into the mix, no doubt) and to hold the attention of an audience as a solo performer for an hour is no mean feat.
That she does that with some aplomb, speaks measures of her ability to connect on a universal level about life and how enriching it can be if you just unshackle your heart and your mind and expose it to endless possibilities.
Adroitly directed by Megan Furniss, the show starts at the beginning of the relationship where Stanfield is on a theatrical assignment in Turkey and connects on the Internet with a Capetonian singer with similar tastes and interests.
The fact that he is Jewish and she is not, does not seem to perturb the couple unduly as they pursue their relationship with vigour. In doing so, Stanfield’s story holds up a mirror to traditional Judaism and her unique perspective of it.
She explains in minute detail her first Shabbos with his family and her reaction to the rituals. Over a period of time she learns a great deal about the Jewish faith and its people, navigating a tightrope between her own upbringing and religion (she was Baptist) and that of her new-found family.
It’s a uniquely South African story punctuated with humour and insight. She also adds new words to her vocabulary such as goy, faribels, bris…
Stanfield also questions her own identity during her discourse and the effects her marriage will have on their offspring.
During her journey of discovery she also morphs into a variety of characters in her life which include her mother, her gay best friend and a rabbi.
All in all, “From Koe’siestes to Kneidlach” is a fun night out and an entertaining theatrical diversion.
