Shirley Gransberg Vitoff left St. Paul's West Side — "that I so miss" — for New York in 1958. Now 90, she remembers a life-altering moment in 1946 when "suddenly, my eyes were opened" to the magic of community theater.
"I grew up dumb and, at 16, knew zero, nothing about anything," Vitoff said by phone from her apartment on Long Island. "I aspired to nothing."
That changed nearly 75 years ago when the teenager bumped into a left-leaning librarian named Donald Singerman, an acquaintance of her parents who coaxed her to join his community theater group, the Grotto Players. The troupe had been staging quality amateur plays, edgy and political, since the early 1930s at the Jewish Education Building at Holly and Grotto in St. Paul — known today as the Jewish Community Center in Highland Park.
"Don became the first adult who respected me on an adult level, gave me confidence and introduced me to theater, ideas and character development," said Vitoff, who between ages 16 and 28 acted in eight Singerman-directed plays. "He was an intellect who showed me a bigger world, absolutely the most important person leading me on to my next phase."
A mother of four at 28, Shirley left St. Paul with her family for Long Island because of her husband's job. "But theater had become my life," she said, acting and directing her own company for years on Long Island. "And I owe that all to Don."
The son of a Romanian-born cigar maker who emigrated in 1900, Singerman was born in Minneapolis in 1907. He worked as a librarian at the James J. Hill Reference Library in downtown St. Paul, organized the library at Mount Zion Temple and lived only four blocks from the Jewish center. He also spent time in Chicago's theater scene, according to a new book about the history of Minnesota Jewish theater called "Setting the Stage." It's available from the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest (http://www.jhsum.org/shop/).
Using Maxim Mann as his theater name, Singerman was "a small, witty, dedicated and enormously talented man [who] turned the Grotto Players into what we believe was one of the best nonprofessional theater groups in the community and on a par with the best groups in the nation," the late civil rights attorney Ken Tilsen told the book's authors, Doris Rubenstein and Natalie Madgy.
In the book, they say "the period from 1933 to 1939 was one of social protest and criticism" that eventually sent Singerman packing. He was set to stage playwright Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing!" — a 1935 play about a Jewish family in the Bronx, with one character calling on working people to overthrow capitalist overlords.
