There’s something about Stewart Figa–maybe it’s his deep, rich baritone voice or his robust energy–that lands him roles demanding overdrawn characterizations, wild costumes, and lots of eye rolling. One of his first roles out of school–Northwestern University’s Theater Department–was as Macbeth in Wisdom Bridge’s long-running Kabuki Macbeth: he had to move and rumble like a Japanese warlord on megadoses of steroids. When Figa relocated to New York to seek his fortune, he ended up not with Method soul mates from the Actors Studio but with the clowns and melodramatists of a local Yiddish theater troupe, cast as a clumsy dimwit in a checkered suit.
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“It sounds strange, but actually there were a lot of similarities between Kabuki and Yiddish theater,” Figa says. “Both are very much larger than life, with a lot of spectacle.” He didn’t spend much time with Kabuki, but Figa found much to love in New York’s Yiddish theater. His parents are both Jewish immigrants from Poland, and growing up in Skokie he heard them speak Yiddish to each other. “My parents would speak English to the kids, but when they spoke to each other it was in Yiddish.” As a kid he had little interest in learning the language, and his parents never tried to push it on him. “My connection to it was mostly through my grandfather. He was a terrific storyteller–animated, lively, and funny. You could hear the Yiddish behind his English.”
Yiddish theater piqued Figa’s interest in Jewish culture, and he returned to Chicago in 1990 to begin work as a cantor at a Hoffman Estates synagogue. Though Yiddish theater once thrived in Chicago, it’s virtually nonexistent today, so Figa keeps up his interest by singing with local klezmer bands and working with other performers. Last year he was invited to sing a classic Yiddish song, “Rumania, Rumania,” on the television series Brooklyn Bridge.
