Actor Corey Fischer calls it “parsing the story.”
That’s how he describes the process of converting a short story into a work for the stage. San Francisco theater company Word for Word has been practicing that form of alchemy for years.
Now, wrapping up a trilogy of joint productions, Word for Word and Corey’s own Traveling Jewish Theater present “Family Alchemy,” an adaptation of two short stories by prominent Jewish American writers Bernard Malamud and Grace Paley.
Perhaps “adaptation” is an imprecise term. Word for Word presents works of short fiction verbatim, including every last “he said” and “she said” in the narrative. It’s been a winning formula for the company over the last two decades, including two previous collaborations with the Traveling Jewish Theater since 2000.
Fischer costars in “Family Alchemy,” along with his friend and fellow TJT cofounder Naomi Newman. He says Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel,” from the 1956 National Book Award-winning collection, and Paley’s O. Henry Award winner “The Story Hearer” are both “so vivid, both so full of surprises, there’s an inherent theatricality to each of them.”
Paley’s “Story Hearer” tells the tale of a middle-aged Jewish woman (Newman) from New York’s Upper West Side trying to figure out “how to make the personal political and the political personal.”
Fischer plays the woman’s husband. “It’s a quirky story of her running into all these eccentric characters: an avant-garde theater person, a guy who worked for the Defense Department, the local produce man,” he says. “It’s about finding delight in difficult and challenging times. Her character and her husband are so recognizably Jewish in a cultural way.”
Set in New York City circa 1953, Malamud’s “Magic Barrel” is the story of a young rabbinical student who decides he had better marry because he knows that without a wife he’s not going to get far as a pulpit rabbi. “He’s a shy, repressed, studious young man,” says Fischer, “so he decides to try a matchmaker. He finds an ad in the Forward and calls her.”
The “parsing” comes in when the creative team reworks the stories into plays. “You have to make all these decisions of who says what,” notes Fischer. “It’s not always obvious who is going to say every line. You have to divide the narration in a way that feels organic.”
The fun of a Word for Word production comes in watching the actors play with the “attributives,” as Fischer calls the non-dialogue portions of the story, and make sure they don’t come across as “dead pieces of scaffolding. On top of that, there’s the challenge of what we call the hand-off, when one actor has the first half of a sentence and the other actor has the next.”
Fischer loves working with Word for Word (WFW veteran Joel Mullennix directs “Family Alchemy”) in part because he is a big fan of the genre, having written short stories himself. But he says not every writer is right for the stage.
“It’s hard to find stories that are right for the form. They have to be a certain length, with a certain number of characters and have inherent drama.”
Jewish writers have always been drawn to the short story, from Sholom Aleichem to I.B. Singer to Cynthia Ozick. Fischer explains it as a vestige of an immigrant folklore culture.
The new production also stars Word for Word regular Jeri Lynn Cohen and Bay Area theater newcomer Max Gordon Moore. “I love working with younger people,” says Fischer. “It’s very exciting to see how good someone like Max is. Jeri almost feels like a member of the company.”
As usual with a TJT production, the play will open for three weeks at the company’s home stage in San Francisco, then move on for a 10-day run at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage. Between now and then, Fischer and his colleagues will continue to mine the stories for as much theatrical gold as they can.
“As we put it on its feet, some things change,” he says. “You discover more and more about the stories.”
“Family Alchemy” plays 8 p.m Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 2-16, at the Traveling Jewish Theater, 470 Florida St., S.F. 8 p.m Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday, March 2-10, at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $10-$31. Information: (415) 522-0786 or online at www.atjt.com.