In the delightful Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I've Played, Broadway powerhouse Tovah Feldshuh writes about the best part she ever had: that of the daughter of Lillian Kaplan Feldshuh, "my Olympian of common sense, my wise stone mountain." But that appreciation took a while to dawn.
Growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., in the 1950s and '60s, Feldshuh fell in love with performing. Her lawyer father, Sidney, was supportive, but Lily, an educated, depressed housewife who was born in 1911 and was never encouraged to have a career, was aghast that her daughter wanted to pursue work as impractical as acting ("Why don't you just go into the kitchen, get my challah knife, stick it into my heart, and twist it!"). It wasn't Feldshuh's success that eventually led to Lily's mellowing; it was the death of her beloved Sidney, in 1996. Writes Feldshuh: "Before Dad's death, what I had witnessed were decades of Lily's silent courage and unexpressed feelings. When he died, and it pains me to say this, she bloomed." Lily bloomed to age 103.
A mother-daughter love story, a paean to Jewish identity and a lamentation over the limited horizons for women of Lily's generation, Lilyville is presented as a theater piece in three acts, with 16 highly entertaining scenes and two droll intermissions. The production is sprinkled with cameos (Barbra Streisand, Patti LuPone) and spiked with repartee worthy of the stage (Lily: "You are not going to a trade school"; Feldshuh: "But, Ma, it's Juilliard!"). --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer