TONY STEW.(The Talk of the Town)(It's an Undoing World or Why Should It Be Easy When It Can Be Hard?)(Theater Review)

The Jewish Museum--what an excellent place to see a play! First of all, a basement cafe (with a Zagat recommendation, no less) serving kosher Turkey Peking wrap sandwiches and gravlax on pumpernickel. Next, plenty of bathrooms on multiple floors, and an elevator to reach them. A motorized coat check, so you don't have to squeeze your outerwear as well as yourself into your seat. Best of all, a museum store to browse in while you're waiting for the auditorium to open because you've arrived nice and early, and where you can pick up anything from a new Haggadah to a box of Jewish fortune cookies (sample fortune: "Eat! Eat! You need strength to worry!") and a baseball printed with the word "Mensch."

And--the other night, at least--Tony Kushner! The Jewish Museum celebrates its centennial this year, and as a highlight of the festivities it presented an all-star reading of "It's an Undoing World or Why Should It Be Easy When It Can Be Hard?" This is a work in progress--or, as a character in the play has it, "a work in egress, a work in regress"--that centers on the character of Sarah, a cantankerous, possibly fabulist grandmother who bears more than a family resemblance to Kushner's own grandmother Sarah Deutscher, who died, in 1988, at the Hebrew Home for the Aged, in the Bronx (the "Hot Hell," she punningly calls it in the play). Sarah, who was played on this occasion by Kathleen Chalfant, is quizzed, berated, and ultimately mourned by her Solemn Grandchild, played by Wendy Wasserstein, and her three daughters--Marian Seldes, Swoosie Kurtz, and Maria Tucci--all of whom have breast cancer and wear vivid jewel-colored scarves over their heads. (Kushner's mother and one of his aunts died of breast cancer; his remaining maternal aunt survived it.)

In the course of the play, which the actresses performed while sitting in a row of chairs onstage--great boots, Swoosie--Sarah goes over the salient events of her life, any or all of which may or may not have happened. She remembers meeting Emma Lazarus, even though Lazarus died before she was born; recalls another impossible encounter, with Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who makes an imposing, if fleeting, appearance, courtesy of Marian Seldes; and describes walking every day through the Polish snow to shul to say Kaddish ...