Jackie Hoffman Shows Off Her Range in Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)

Fruma-Sarah’s slim premise isn’t quite sturdy enough to allow its more substantial aspirations to take flight.

Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings)
Photo: Hunter Canning

“Theater people are best encountered one at a time,” deadpans Ariana, the outcast of the New Jersey community theater circuit at the center of Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings). The actress has been cast in the miniscule role of Fruma-Sarah in the Roselle Park Theatrical Society’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, and even though there are two characters in Fruma-Sarah, the play is such an intense, head-on collision with the ever-prattling Ariana (Jackie Hoffman) that it feels a lot like a one-woman show.

For those who need to brush up their Sholem Aleichem, Fruma-Sarah appears for only a couple of minutes in Fiddler’s dream sequence, soaring in from beyond the grave to warn Tevye not to let his daughter marry Lazer Wolf, Fruma-Sarah’s widowed husband. Ariana, it seems, has been cast as Fruma-Sarah largely to keep her literally tied down backstage: She’s strapped into a harness for the duration of Fiddler’s first act as she awaits her entrance. (For extra measure, the director of the revival added a flying curtain call to get her out of the way for act two.)

This is all because Ariana’s a lot to deal with, as she’s especially known for hurling objects at her colleagues’ heads and hitting the bourbon before (and after) the curtain goes up. At this particular performance, appointed as Ariana’s guard dog is substitute fly operator Margo (Kelly Kinsella), experienced and wry but no match for Ariana’s maelstrom of complaints and ripostes. (Ariana’s quips about the vapidity of avant-garde community theater productions—the Fiddler production is set during the Trump administration with the Russians in MAGA hats—are pretty funny.) It’s often transparent that the play, by E. Dale Smith, began as showcase for a single blazing talent, and Kinsella’s sympathetic performance can’t entirely make up for Margo’s insubstantiveness or the lack of real conflict between the two women.

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Fruma Sarah is also somewhat burdened by its fidelity to taking place in real time during the first act of Fiddler. Yes, that conceit is the play’s greatest and goofiest selling point, but it also forces Smith to fill out his dialogue in ways that often feel meandering while allowing the audience, at least the Fiddler fans in the crowd, to play timekeeper: What are they going to talk about during “Matchmaker”? Are we at “Sunrise, Sunset” yet? It’s perhaps not desirable that the playwright should seem as confined as his heroine.

Despite the structural rigidity and the spinning of the wheels that stem from it, Hoffman and director Braden M. Burns nicely coax Ariana into focus, even as she drinks herself into blurry despondency. Casting Hoffman, who plays Ariana with an acerbic, desperate zeal, in a role that seems at first like typecasting—crotchety and crass is her specialty—lays a trap for a bit of a surprise as Ariana deepens and darkens: The Second City veteran, it turns out, has range. If only Fruma Sarah showed the same flexibility as its star, because the play’s slim premise isn’t quite sturdy enough to allow its more substantial aspirations to take flight.

Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings) is now running at the Cell Theatre.

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Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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