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Sometimes life imitates art. Sometimes art imitates life. Sometimes you
can't tell the difference.
Take, for instance, Annie Korzen. Since mid-June, theatergoers have been
able to catch Korzen's one-woman musical autobiography one night a week
at the Soho Playhouse in downtown Manhattan. This upbeat cri de coeur
is generally solipsistic as Korzen hustles the audience along on her tour
of self-discovery from the Bronx to Beverly Hills.
Annie Korzen has been an actress a good deal of her adult life, and because
her features are what they are, type-casting has been her ticket. Her
hair is dark, her complexion olive, her hips undulant and her face proboscisly
endowed - in short, a poster girl for ethnic stereotyping.
Embellishing a real-life experience a bit for the stage, she describes
a rather Freudian-sounding incident on a flight: "The man sitting next
to me is dressed in lederhosen and a green hat with a feather in it. 'Entschuldig,
Fräulein,' he says, 'aber you are a JEWISH woman, isn't it not?'"
Annie, terrified, nods assent.
"You have been to Israel?"
"Not yet," Annie confesses.
"Vot!" the Teutonic gentleman explodes. "Shame on you! And you
call yourself ein Jude!"
At a party, she was asked, "Annie, when is Tisha Be'av this year?"
When she allowed that she didn't have a clue, her inquisitor said, "Well,
if you don't know, who does, the Pope?"
The truth is, Korzen is Judaically challenged. "I was not brought
up in a religious home. My parents were lefty-union-labor-atheist-socialists.
They belonged to any organization that had a 'W' in it: the ILGWU, the
IWO, the Workmen's Circle. On Yom Kippur, we used to sneak downtown to
see a musical because it was the easiest day of the year to get tickets."
If Korzen inherited a ladleful of identity confusion from her Eastern-European
immigrant parents, she also was heir to an ear for music and a flair for
performance.
"My mother, Sonia, was agoraphobic. She almost never left the house.
She made me study the piano so that when I grew up, I could give piano
lessons at home and not have to go out into the world to earn a living.
She'd get very upset whenever I went to Manhattan. 'Be careful,' she'd
say, 'it's not a Jewish neighborhood."
Annie's father had a little tailor shop in the Mosholu Parkway section
of the Bronx where Annie grew up. Tailoring was Abie Drazen's livelihood,
but his passion was performing. His instrument was a slide whistle - which
he fastened himself out of corset stays, bottle caps and other bits of
junk. His stage was the street, where he would toot such rhapsodies as
"Besame Mucho" and "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen."
"I was so embarrassed when my friends would tell me that they saw
my father playing in the zoo."
Abie's minstrelsy led to appearances on TV with the "Tonight Show,"
and with Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin and Steve Allen, less for his artistry
than for the chuckles he provided as a naif with a Yiddish accent. "Abie
didn't mind being the butt of jokes. I don't think he even noticed them,"
recalls Benni Korzen, Annie's Danish-born husband. "If someone in the
neighborhood said, 'Hey Abie, I saw you on TV last night and you were
great,' it meant more to him than all the money in the world."
But the piano lessons, and the apparently genetic infusion of performance
gusto, bore fruit. Annie got into the High School of Music and Art in
Manhattan and then was awarded a music scholarship to Bard College, a
small liberal-arts school in the Hudson Valley (where this writer first
encountered her and where we discovered that we were both veterans of
Public School 94 and that my grandfather, a tailor, and her father were
buddies).
Fast forward. February, 1964. Annie Drazen is teaching piano. Michael
Maslansky, a Bard friend who is already making a name for himself as a
theatrical publicist and a guy who worked and played very hard, calls
to set Annie up on a blind date with an aspiring young Danish film producer.
By April, Annie is married to Benni Korzen.
"Well, he needed a green card in a hurry. My friends said he was only
marrying me for the card and that the marriage would never last. That
was 34 years ago."
The newlyweds settled down on Manhattan's West Side, where they raised
their son Jonathan, now an editor on an Internet project. They shuttled
back and forth to Europe while Benni's independent outfit, Panorama Films,
produced art-house comedies with titles like I Could Never Have Sex
with a Man Who Has Such Little Respect for My Husband and All the
President's Women. In 1998, a Panorama production of a different ilk,
Babette's Feast, won the Oscar for best foreign film. Annie's first
acting gig outside of college was in one of Benni's early films in Denmark.
"I've got to be the only Jewish girl from the Bronx who speaks Danish."
Though Annie had begun to land minor film roles in the 80s in such films
as Tootsie and Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, she was
convinced that more regular work would only come with relocation to the
West Coast. So, in 1990, Annie persuaded Benni to leave his beloved West
Side for Los Angeles, "where the jobs are." And the jobs did start
to materialize, with parts on Coach, Mad about You, L.
A. Law, and, most memorably, Seinfeld, where she played the Florida
condo harridan, Doris Klompus, tormentor of Jerry's father.
But there was a worm in this modest success. "I have spent most of
my professional life playing abrasive, obnoxious Jewish women. Once, I
played a distinguished psychiatrist on 'L. A. Law' and my old Bronx boyfriend
called to tell me how he particularly liked that I wasn't too Jewish in
the part, meaning that I wasn't abrasive and obnoxious. I was feeding
into these stereotypes and I wasn't very happy about it."
Five years ago, in a somber confluence of showbiz and reality, Korzen
discovered a key to dealing with her identity quandary. The occasion was
the untimely death of Michael Maslansky and the venue was the Hollywood
cemetery.
Maslansky left behind two young sons and a French-born wife who asked
Annie to deliver the final eulogy. "You knew us best," she said
to her. "I want you to be funny and dignified and say what you know
about us as a family and Michael as a person." "I took the assignment
very seriously. I worked very hard on the speech. At first I was shaky
in front of all those important Hollywood people in the chapel, but then
I discovered I could make them laugh and I could make them cry. I think
it was then that I decided to do my own show. In these tragic circumstances,
it was Michael's last gift to me."
Since then, Korzen has been kneading and tweaking Yenta Unplugged into
shape and has performed it in theaters in Florida, Los Angeles and Martha's
Vineyard to enthusiastic reviews. (The L. A. Times called it "as life-affirming
as it is gently entertaining.") Next January she'll take the show
to Durham, North Carolina, where it will be the lone live act in that
city's first Jewish American Film Festival.
The show is fun: Korzen has a big cabaret voice, she plays the piano
with insouciance and her body language can be provocative (there's a delicious
little spoof of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel). And it is impossible
not to believe that the Annie Korzen on stage playing the real Annie Korzen
is not in fact the real Annie Korzen learning to love the good Yenta inside
her, which is in turn yearning to breathe free and dominate everybody
around her for their own good. At the same time that she confronts her
own stereotyping as a yenta, Korzen comes to the conclusion that if a
yenta is a person who wants good things for family and mankind in general,
the she can be a proud member of the "Yenta Brigade."
This motif is most striking in her account of Benni Korzen's story.
In October of 1943, the Jews of Denmark learned that the Nazis had decided
to round them all up for expulsion which would, ultimately, of course,
have ended in extinction. Within weeks, virtually the entire community
of 7,000 people was evacuated by an improvised Danish underground to neutral
Sweden, thanks to a supportive citizenry and, most crucially, the fishermen
who made the perilous nighttime crossings with their human cargo.
Benni was 5 years old then, and for five weeks he was sheltered by a
Christian family before he could be smuggled to Sweden, to which his parents
had already escaped. In 1962, Benni participated in a CBS-TV documentary
on the rescue of Denmark's Jews, but as he grew older he grew less inclined
to revisit that frightening period of his life. Annie, unabashedly playing
the Good Yenta, hounded Benni into locating and thanking his Christian
saviors.
At the very end of Yenta Unplugged, Annie exultantly quotes Benni toasting
"all the women who nag the men they love to do the right thing."
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