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SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco’s unusual and innovative Word for Word theater company takes classic and contemporary works of fiction – not drama – and performs them on stage as theater pieces. 

The group’s device is to stay exactly with the precise text of a piece of fiction in performance, but to find new power in a story from the immediacy of its characters on stage, and from the speaking of non-dialogue narrative by characters in the story. 

This approach works very well. 

Word for Word’s latest effort is a world premiere co-production with A Traveling Jewish Theater’s (ATJT) of two short stories by American Jewish writers – “Goodbye and Good Luck” by Grace Paley, and “The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud. This very successful collaboration opened Monday at ATJT’s theater space at Project Artaud in San Francisco. 

Paley’s funny and ironic 1930’s New York story “Goodbye and Good Luck” is an unusual take on love and marriage. Unmarried Rose Leiber (Patricia Silver), describing herself as “fat and fifty” and “lonesome in bed,” chats with her niece (Sheila Balter), and gives an elder’s advice. 

Rose looks back on her life, and tells of the choices she made in romance. Her youthful job as a box office cashier at a Jewish Russian theater on Second Avenue led to a romance with the theater’s married leading man (Corey Fischer), and a life in which Rose sacrificed her own conjugal fulfillment to be “the other woman” in someone else’s life. 

This funny and delightful story ends with a happy and unexpected twist. 

Director Wendy Radford’s crisp and vigorous production manages to get the smooth, humorous and quick-paced feel of a 1930s screwball comedy. It is well performed by a cast of four, two of whom play multiple roles. Fisher stands out as the arrogant, charming, philandering, smooth-taking Yiddish theater actor. 

In Malamud’s sweet, funny, magical story “The Jewbird,” a scraggly-looking crow (Corey Fischer) flies in the window of the Cohen family’s Lower East Side apartment, talking Jewish, and claiming to be a “jewbird,” who is fleeing anti-Semites. 

The mother (Jeri Lynn Cohen) and her son (Sheila Balter) love the creature and his unexpected arrival, but frozen food salesman father (Albert Greenberg) hates the bird. 

When the jewbird, who says his name is Schwartz, tutors the son, the son’s grades in school improve. But the bird is fussy about his food, and conflict in the household grows. 

Under David Dower’s direction, Fischer again finds a wonderfully funny and melancholy performance as Schwartz the bird, effectively capturing the abrupt, comic movements of a crow. 

“The Jewbird” seems to be about how individuals have larger connections to the world than they may realize and, conversely, how things that appear alien in the world may be closer to us than we think. 

Malamud is the author of the surreal baseball novel “The Natural,” which Robert Redford made into a movie. “The Jewbird” contains some of the same effective mix of reality and supernatural. 

Set designer Melpomene Katakolos deserves a mention. Her vivid New York kitchen, which could define either the 1930s or the 1950s, and which serves as a background for most of the action in both plays, is a strong contributor to the evening’s wonderful feel – almost a character in its own right. 

Although Word for Word maintains a perfect fidelity to a fiction author’s written text, the directors of these plays find all sorts of insights, humor, irony, conflict, or perspective by the by the way the lines are assigned to different actors, and how the actors play off each other. 

This technique brings a powerful new life to the art of story telling. 

“Goodbye and Good Luck” and “The Jewbird” play Thursday through Sunday, through June 4, at A Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St. (at 17th Street), San Francisco. For tickets or information, call 415-399-1809.