There are certain things that I'm willing to accept from books that I struggle with on the stage. That's why for me, stage adaptations don't always work. (Okay, so I love Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera, but they're more guilty pleasures than anything else. And while the Arden's done some pretty good adaptations this season, believe me when I say that I've seen some pretty rough books-as-plays over the years.) I have never read the Isaac Bashevis Singer novel that was adapted for Enemies, A Love Story, the Wilma Theater's contribution to the Philadelphia New Play Festival, but I am familiar with Singer's writing, and here's the thing to keep in mind: although you're reading in English, what's happening isn't actually in English. (It's like when you had to read the Iliad in high school—you knew they were all speaking Greek, even if you weren't reading Greek.)

Although Enemies, A Love Story is produced entirely in English, there are at least three languages being "spoken" onstage. Actors speak English fluently when they are speaking in their native "language," and speak with thick accents when they are not. It's a conceit that works to a certain extent, except that all of the "fluent" accents need to be normalized. Presuming that, for instance, all of the actors in a scene are supposed to be speaking Yiddish, it would follow from the conceit that they should all be speaking similar English dialects. Instead, you have one actor speaking Middle-American English, an actress who sounds like she's been living in Brooklyn her whole life, and another whose accent was quite reminiscent of Marlene Deitrich's. It didn't make any sense to me. And it was complicated by the fact that some characters bounced back and forth between different languages in scenes: if a character was fluent in both, he didn't change his accent, and you had to pick up on the fact that he was no longer speaking the original language, according to what the other actors said or did.

It is the accent problem that ultimately distracted me from what actually had the makings of a great play. The cast performed with great aplomb: Morgan Spector deserves special recognition for his portrayal of Herman, as he was never off the stage for longer than twenty seconds, and Tom Teti was funny and familiar as the Rabbi/television repairman. The rest of the cast, rounded out by Bob Ari, Kati Brazda, Laura Flanagan, Elizabeth Rich, and Barbara Spiegel, were more than competent. The set, by David P. Gordon, was gorgeous and conveyed setting perfectly (the scenes taking place in Herman's Coney Island apartment, for instance, were under the Cyclone rollercoaster). Its design facilitated the flow of movement between locations, and Jerold R. Forsyth's lighting design ensured that the audience's focus remained with the action onstage, and not in the darkened-but-still-interesting, unoccupied areas of the set. But despite all of this—the great acting and beautiful set and Janus Stefanowicz's excellent period costumes—I just couldn't get past my ultimate problem with the use of accents in the show, and I don't know whether to place the blame with playwright Sarah Schulman, director Jiri Zizka, dialect coach Sharon Freed, or perhaps just my own closed-mindedness.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the show, or appreciate it. I did. I just wouldn't rank it as high as the other shows I've seen at the Wilma this season.

Tom Teti as The Rabbi and Morgan Spector as Herman Broder in Enemies, A Love Story at The Wilma Theater, through March 11th. Photo by Jim Roese.