A jarring addition to the kosher canon

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This article was published 16/06/2023 (1152 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Doris Rubenstein (Debbie Maslowsky) is a woman on a mission, one that seems strange fodder for a solo stage performance: she’s searching for the perfect pickle recipe to enter into competition at the Minnesota State Fair.

Doris’s ideal pickles are made the old-fashioned way, soaked in salty water with garlic and pickling spice, left to ferment in a cloud-filled jar until they’re ready. They might look different than the kind on the grocery-store shelf, Doris says, but the result is the epitome of what a kosher dill should be.

But the judges at the state fair wouldn’t know from pickles. Although she believes she’s finally nailed the process — which includes throwing fresh cucumbers into her washing machine — Doris’s pickles are disqualified on the spot for two years running. Nobody even had the courtesy to taste them.

Something’s not exactly kosher, Doris presumes, as she readies herself to confront a jarring truth and go on a crusade into the briny deeps of xenophobia.

That’s the setup for American playwright Deborah Yarchun’s A Pickle, an inviting, funny and somewhat confounding show now running at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre to close the company’s 2022-23 season.

Based on a true story, A Pickle is the latest entry into the Jewish pickle cultural canon.

The tangy snack played a central role in the 1980s comedy Crossing Delancey, in which a single woman meets her match in a Lower East Side pickle-maker. More recently, Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter) revisited the pickle-seller trope in her 2015 film Maggie’s Plan. And in 2020’s An American Pickle, Seth Rogen falls into a vat of brine and pickles himself, awakening 100 years later in modern-day Brooklyn.

There’s a reason writers keep dipping their pens into the brine: pickles are a divisive food group, loved by those with taste and abhorred by those without it. Pickles provoke conversation and disagreement, and they are also a tasty euphemism for an untenable conundrum.

Maslowsky, who has lived on Winnipeg stages since making her Rainbow Stage debut in the 1970s, is a warm, endearing performer, oozing charisma, undeniable zest and familiar charm.

She earns sincere laughs, especially as she chomps on pickles the judges — and the state department of agriculture — have deemed potentially lethal.

A Pickle is ultimately a storytelling show, with Doris addressing the audience as old friends for just over an hour’s runtime. And while Maslowsky capably and skilfully fills the role of raconteur, Yarchun’s writing of the character leaves something to be desired.

This can likely be attributed to the fact Doris is a contemporary person, not a fictitious creation, which places Yarchun, who got to know the real Rubenstein in writing this show, in uncomfortable territory: the role of Doris would have been strengthened by a greater willingness to explore personality traits — namely loneliness — that are only hinted at sporadically.

However, with the material they were given, Maslowsky and director Katie German have done an admirable job, clearly leaving the audience in high spirits and thinking more critically about their own preferences and tastes.

In the end, A Pickle is a light, snappy treat that will leave a good taste in your mouth, but it probably could use a little more time to ferment in the brine.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com