INTERVIEW: In ‘Mar Vista,’ Yehuda Hyman is in search of his mother’s love life

Photo: The Mar Vista finds playwright and choreographer Yehuda Hyman searching for his mother’s love life. Photo courtesy of MurphyMade / Provided by Press Play with permission.

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Yehuda Hyman, the playwright/choreographer, has a new piece of theater and dance called The Mar Vista: In Search of My Mother’s Love Life, which continues at the Ford Foundation Studio Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center in Midtown Manhattan through March 23.

In the production, six performers, including Hyman, trace the ins and outs of his mother’s life, from her upbringing in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to living in the memorable 1960s in Hollywood, California.

The show’s original inspiration was a psychic session Hyman had in Jerusalem 25 years ago.

“I was taken to see a psychic by a Hasidic man,” Hyman said in a recent phone interview. “She was reading cards. It was in a salon, and she picked my card from a tray. And it was the Sphinx, and she said, ‘You need to stop running away from the woman. You must embrace the woman.’ She didn’t say anything more. I immediately thought, she’s talking about my mother, so that began this very long, complicated journey into making a piece about my mother because she was a fascinating woman with a lot of secrets that were revealed beginning with my childhood but into my adulthood and toward the end of her life.”

Originally, Hyman, who is artistic director of the Mystical Feet Company, started to write a straight play, but he said the early drafts simply didn’t work. But then, years later, he tried his hand at the project again, this time expanding the medium to include dance.

“I found the only way I could write it was through the body, through dance,” he said. “She loved to dance. I was a professional dancer for a long period of my life, and then I stopped. But I came back to the dance about nine years ago, and through being able to express the story through dance and through my body, it became alive. So the body holds all those memories. It holds all those feelings and emotions. … It’s painful. It’s wonderful. It’s healing. It’s a raw wound. It’s all of that.”

Hyman, whose other plays include The Mad Dancers and Center of the Star, takes the journey with the actors each night The Mar Vista is performed. This means he is unable to see the play from the audience’s perspective, but he does have a unique vantage point for experiencing the show’s impact.

“I’m swimming in it, so I’m experiencing it,” he said. “My seeing it is through the reception of the audience, through the viewers, and that’s wonderful. Most of the time I feel like they’re really feeling it and responding, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. That’s how I see it.”

The environs of the studio theater are mostly bare. There’s no set, except for the floor and walls, and the production begins with a scene about making this very production. In other words, The Mar Vista is prime meta-theater.

“I start to move, and things transform pretty quickly,” Hyman said. “And we go all the way back to my mother being 5 years old in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and having to escape with her mother because her father deserts the Russian army, so it goes from there to a big part of my mother’s life was her growing up in Istanbul and falling in love for the first time in Istanbul. So we go to Istanbul in the 1930s in wartime, and then we time travel.”

Next up on the journey, after Istanbul, is a stop in Cincinnati in 1951, a time when Hyman’s mother is about to lose her work visa and go back to Europe.

“She really doesn’t want leave the United States, and that’s where she meets my father on an arranged date,” he said. “And then from there we go to Hollywood, to Los Angeles in the ’60s where I grew up.”

One of the other actors on stage actually plays Hyman as an 8-year-old, and two other actors portray his parents. The playwright stands nearby and watches the action. That makes The Mar Vista a deeply personal, almost vicarious experience for its creator.

“I had all this past and all these losses and loves and adventures,” he said of the source material. “It’s about me experiencing that as a child … and then we go to 2008, which is when my mother died and [her] asking me to cremate her. Then we go to Istanbul when I went to Istanbul for the first time, and I have this mystical encounter on an island off the coast of Istanbul with what feels like a reincarnation, a call from the beyond with my mother.”

Hyman now has the chance to share the stories of his mother and invite audiences on this decades-long journey, all within the comforts of a Midtown theater.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The Mar Vista: In Search of My Mother’s Love Life plays through March 23 at the Ford Foundation Studio Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.