Entertainment

A feast in all senses

By the time you take your seat, the cast of “Not by Bread Alone” is already onstage, kneading dough and splitting it into loaves at long tables. So begins a process — and a show — that ends 80 minutes later, when the bread is pulled out of ovens at the back of the stage, and you’re invited to come up and taste the freshly baked goods.

This isn’t a traditional way to approach theater, but then, this isn’t a traditional cast, either: The 11 members of Israel’s Nalaga’at company, based near Tel Aviv, are, to varying degrees, both deaf and blind.

And what they’re presenting isn’t so much a play as a collection of autobiographical vignettes, skits and anecdotes. Together, they give us insights into the various ways — sometimes emotional, sometimes funny — in which the actors experience the world, as when Shoshana Segal explains, “What I find important is that whoever I meet shakes my hand, because this way, I know he exists.”

Conceived and directed by Adina Tal, the show has been running at the company’s own complex, which also includes a cafe and a restaurant (see below), since its premiere, in 2007.

Now it’s come to the NYU Skirball Center, with multiple translations: Subtitles of the Hebrew text are projected on screens, supplemented by sign-language interpreters. The latter also supply cues by banging on drums, whose vibrations the cast can feel, and they guide the actors about the stage as they go from scene to scene.

Some of those are heartbreakingly intimate, as when Genia Shatsky remembers realizing that going blind meant she would never know what her nephew looks like.

Other scenes are more elaborate. In one, the actors twirl umbrellas in unison — reminder: They can’t see. In others, they re-enact a trip to Italy, a joyous wedding and a mosaic of daily moments: Someone’s eating ice cream, someone’s going back and forth on a swing, a couple slow-dances.

It would be lying to say that the show flows so smoothly that we forget these actors can’t see or hear. On the contrary, we’re always reminded of it.

The point is that the members of Nalaga’at aren’t like most people, and yet of course they also are, with the same dreams of love, friendship and independence. And they bake some damn good bread.