THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN ACTORS SEASON 1 EPISODE 3 - Evelyn Finkel/Winona Ryder

Aside from accusations of anti-Semitism, Philip Roth has also been accused of misogyny.  Google him on these topics; you'll find a long list of critics accusing him, if not of one, then the other of these repulsive characteristics. I've extrapolated his description of Evelyn Finkel from The Plot Against America.  

The following is all the writer/director and actor had to go on:  

 "Alvin was the renegade on my father's side, Evelyn was the maverick on my mother's, a substitute elementary school teacher in the Newark system who'd been active several years earlier in founding the left-wing, largely Jewish Newark Teachers Union, whose few hundred members were competing with a more staid, apolitical teachers' association to negotiate contracts with the city.  Evelyn was just thirty in 1941, and until two years before, when my maternal grandmother died of heart failure after a decade as a coronary invalid, it was Evelyn who'd cared for her in the tiny top-floor apartment ...and when Evelyn went to New York to see a play with her intellectual friends on a Saturday night...Many nights Aunt Evelyn never made it home from New York - even when she'd planned to return before midnight...And then there were the afternoons Evelyn didn't get back until hours after school was over, because of a long-standing off-and-on love affair with a substitute teacher from North Newark, like Evelyn a forceful union advocate, and unlike Evelyn married, Italian and the parent of three children. --- Her large nose didn't prevent people from calling Aunt Evelyn "striking," and it was true, as my mother observed, that when tiny Evelyn walked into a room -- a vivacious brunette with a perfect, if miniaturized womanly silhouette, enormous dark eyes...crimson lipstick guaranteed to dazzle -- everyone turned to look, the women as well as the men.  Her hair was lacquered to a metallic luster...and when she went off to sub, she donned a brightly colored skirt with matching high-heeled shoes and a broad white belt and a semisheer, pastel-colored blouse.  My father considered her apparel in poor taste for a schoolteacher, and so did the principal at Hawthorne...my mother....was incapable of judging her sister's boldness harshly, even when Evelyn resigned from teaching, quit the union, and seemingly without a qualm, abandoned her political loyalties to work for Rabbi Bengelsdorf in Lindbergh's OAA.

It would be several months before it occurred to my parents that Aunt Evelyn was the rabbi's mistress and had been ever since he met her at a reception..."

These introductory scenes are what they came up with:

In a few pages Roth described a woman that any actor should be thrilled to create:  A bold, sexually active woman who's aware of her physical attributes, knows that men and women find her attractive, and dresses accordingly.  A maverick, independent, who manages to care for her ill mother, teach, organize a "left-wing" opposition teachers' union that might ostracize her or cause her to lose her job; who's interested in the theatre (BTW, I mentioned Clifford Odets in my first post on this character; she might very well have gone to a production of one of his plays at the Group Theatre!).  She took risks having affairs with colleagues, and had a "long-standing, off-and-on" love affair with a married "forceful union advocate".  Can't you just see this like-minded pair?  Sure, you might decide that he's "taking advantage," lying,  promising marriage; how's that for an original idea?  But couldn't you also justify, given the description, a woman who loves a man and allows him his freedom as she takes hers?  After all, the affair was "off-and-on".  And then!  Inexplicably, she quits her job, her "left-wing" labor ideals and "political loyalties" and takes up with a right-wing sixty-year-old rabbi from the segregationist South!  How delicious can you get?!  Maybe it was her Italian lover who sat there on the bed like a weepy weed when she called it quits!  Instead, "I finally have somebody," is the line written for her in the scene with her sister.  What does that reduce her to and how does it line up with Roth's description of Evelyn?

Did Ms. Ryder consider these discrepancies when she read the novel?  Clearly, the spine of Evelyn's actions in the arc of the drama is focused on the abandonment of one political point of view for its polar opposite.  What drives a person to do that?  Whenever it's observed, it's curiously mysterious except for obvious reasons like ambition or conformity or something -- Mussolini comes to mind.  But still...it's puzzling, isn't it?  What a splendidly complex person Evelyn is, what a gift Philip Roth gave some future actor lucky enough to bring her to life.   Misogynist?   Who's the misogynist in this scenario?

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN ACTORS SEASON 1 EPISODE 2 - Actor's Responsibility

Please refer to interviews with Philip Roth on YouTube for more information on his approach to his work.  I've posted this one about another novel because it's short and gives us a glimpse into his writing process.  He wrote a page a day and often struggled with just one sentence.  Regardless of how long writers spend on the stories they create, once the actor is challenged to perform the character created by the writer, it's the actor's obligation to understand that they're collaborating with the writer; that they bring their life experience to the to the life experience of the writer and that the character on the page becomes the third entity between them in performance.  The challenge for the actor is to make each written word from the writer sacred in the process of building the portrait of the character. 

From the novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA:   "It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion.  Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends.  The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher butcher....hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent.  By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs."

What was the purpose of the following scene that depicts the family's observance of the Sabbath and explicitly indicates that it was observed every Friday night?  Aside from making Philip's lack of knowledge about the orthodox men who came to the door asking for donations nonsensical, it directly contradicted the novel's description of the family's secular lifestyle, and made Evelyn's remark to Rabbi Bengelsdorf (discussed in the Episode 1 post) puzzling regarding how non-observant her family was.  It may seem minor to some, but please note the facile decision to speak in a cliche semblance of a New York twang instead of the accent clearly defined by Roth.  One need only listen to his accent above, even after living many years in London, and notice that over a lifetime it remained the same -- in case one didn't know how American English was spoken in Altoona in 1940!  The accents in performance weren't consistent, but the affect on the creation of character resulted in cliches that often lead to caricatures, to stereotypes, particularly by the women.  Funny; from the beginning of his career,  Roth was often accused of being anti-Semitic; a "self-hating Jew."  I'm not an avid reader of Roth; I've read a few of his novels, some I enjoyed; others not so much even though I admired his talent.  It seemed to me that he created complex, neurotic men and women who were products of, and in conflict with, their social environment -- that is, their central conflict was with the society, the particular social context in which they lived.  If an adaptation of his work doesn't rigorously adhere to it, even down to the way his characters pronounce words, then it runs the risk of expressing the anti-Semitism of which Roth was so unfairly accused.

Did the cast notice omissions and contradictions in the script from the novel; details that were painstakingly crafted by Roth to depict the social environment?  Did they consider the result of omissions and contradictions that would affect their ability to create the characters in the novel?  If they did, what did they do about it?