Sarah Bernhardt in "Phedre" Hearst Theatre (LOC)

Because some of these immigrants had never seen a stage production and were influenced by Tolstoy and Turgenev after just arriving off the boat, the audiences only really understood literal situations and jokes. The Yiddish audience enjoyed humorous and exaggerated theatre instead of realism.  The Jewish performers understood that their audience members spent their whole day in the depression and darkness of a sweatshop and, therefore, didn’t want to spend their time at the theatre watching their own lives being played back to them.  The audience, especially the women, craved the glamour in the theatre that they didn’t have in the Lower East Side.  The players understood this and morphed their performances around these desires, creating a theatre of shrewdness, vulgarity, with a pinch of innocence to please the crowd, which became a staple for Yiddish theatre in its later days.  As Howe says, “They loved a glimpse of something that might trascend the wretchedness of the weak”  (Howe 467).  The audience liked it when they “brought a touch of the Sabbath, even if it was debased and vulgarized Sabbath”.  For an example of the audience’s reaction to realism and their literal view on the performances, one woman said, “They should remember that their enemies on stage are not real romans and there is no need for vengeance” (Howe) when watching a fighting scene in an early Yiddish performance.

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